The neighbors therefore, and they who before had seen him that he was blind, said, Is not this he that sat and begged?
All Commentaries on John 9:8 Go To John 9
Theophylact of Ochrid
AD 1107
Staggered by this extraordinary miracle, the neighbors still did not believe. Yet the blind man’s arriving at the Pool of Siloam, his eyes smeared with mud, was ordained by the Lord for the express purpose of drawing the attention of many onlookers, who later would be unable to deny that they knew the man. But they disbelieved nevertheless. The Evangelist does not simply remark in passing that the man was a beggar: he does so to show that the Lord’s love for mankind was so inexpressibly great that He condescended to help the most abject of men. With tender solicitude He healed beggars, teaching us to care for the least of our brethren. Unashamed of his former affliction, unafraid of the crowd, the blind man boldly confesses, I am he, and proclaims his benefactor: A man that is called Jesus…. He calls the Lord a man because he knows nothing about Him. But what he does know (of the circumstances of the healing), he confesses to all. How did he know that his healer was Jesus? He had heard the Lord conversing with His disciples. When the disciples asked about the blind man, Christ repeated what He often told them, such as, I must work the works of Him that sent Me (v. 4), and, I am the light of the world (v. 5), and so forth. These were things that no one except the Lord taught, and from them the blind man understood that this was Jesus. That Christ had made clay and anointed his eyes, the blind man knew by feeling; of the spittle, he said nothing because he did not yet know about it. What he did not know, he did not mention, so truthful a man was he.
