John 9:35–38

John 9:35 — Jesus Seeks the Outcast The verse opens with a remarkable reversal: it is Jesus who hears of the man's expulsion and goes finding him (Greek: heurōn auton). The passive construction "they had thrown him out" (Greek: exebalon auton) echoes the language of excommunication — the same verb used earlier in verse 22 for the threat against anyone who confessed Jesus. This man has now suffered precisely that fate, and his response was fidelity. John's narrative does not let us see the man wandering in confusion; instead, Christ moves immediately. The initiative is entirely divine. "Do you believe in the Son of God?" (some manuscripts read "Son of Man," the more Danielic title) is not a casual question — it is the culminating question of the entire chapter, indeed of the whole Gospel. Physical sight was given in chapter 9's first act; spiritual sight is the goal of the second. The question functions as both invitation and revelation: Jesus is asking the man to receive what has already, in a sense, been prepared for him.

John 9:36 — Humble Readiness The man's answer, "Who is he, Lord, that I may believe in him?", is not skepticism but humble, ardent readiness. He addresses Jesus as "Lord" (Greek: Kyrie), a term that in this Gospel can be a polite form of address but takes on fuller theological weight in context. Crucially, the man does not know he is already speaking with the one he seeks — the irony is rich. He has defended Jesus to the Pharisees, borne expulsion for his sake, and now asks to be shown the very one standing before him. His ignorance is not culpable; it is the condition of a soul open to further revelation. Augustine notes that the man's question is itself a form of faith — an implicit act of trust that Jesus can and will direct him to the truth (Tractates on the Gospel of John, 44.10).

John 9:37 — The Self-Revelation of Christ Jesus' answer is among the most direct self-disclosures in the Fourth Gospel: "You have both seen him, and it is he who speaks with you." Two verbs converge — heōrakas (you have seen) and lalōn (the one speaking). The man has been given eyes precisely so that he might see the Son of God. The healing is revealed here as teleological: the restoration of physical sight was ordered from the beginning toward the moment of spiritual recognition. John's Gospel presents sight and speech as twin modes of revelation; throughout the Gospel, Jesus both shows and tells who he is (cf. John 4:26, where he similarly discloses himself to the Samaritan woman: "I am he, the one speaking to you"). The parallelism is intentional — Jesus reveals himself as Messiah to the outcast, the marginalized, those thrust to the periphery of respectable religion.

John 9:38 — The Fullness of Faith as Worship The man's response, "Lord, I believe!" (Pisteuō, Kyrie), is the shortest and most complete profession of faith in the Fourth Gospel. It is immediately sealed by an act of worship: prosekynesin autō — "he worshiped him." This verb (proskyneō) is used in the Septuagint and throughout the New Testament for the worship due to God alone. In the immediate literary context, the Pharisees — who claim spiritual sight — are exposed as blind (v. 39–41), while this formerly blind man becomes the model disciple. Typologically, his journey from darkness to sight to worship recapitulates Israel's movement from slavery through the wilderness toward the presence of God. The man born blind is, in the deepest sense, an Everyman — every human soul, born into spiritual blindness, sought out by Christ, illumined by grace, and brought at last to its knees in adoration.

From a Catholic perspective, these four verses constitute a luminous theology of faith and its intrinsic relationship to worship. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines faith as "man's response to God who reveals himself and gives himself to man" (CCC 26), and here that definition is acted out with dramatic precision: God reveals himself ("it is he who speaks with you"), and the man gives himself entirely ("Lord, I believe!" and he worshiped him).

St. Augustine, in his Tractates on the Gospel of John (44), identifies the man born blind as a figure of the Church herself — humanity in its original blindness, healed through the waters of Baptism (the pool of Siloam), and brought progressively to the full confession of Christ's divinity. This patristic reading has deep liturgical roots: since at least the third century, John 9 has been one of the appointed Gospel readings for the scrutinies of adult catechumens preparing for Easter Baptism, a practice retained in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA/OCIA) today.

The act of proskyneō — worship — is theologically decisive. The Council of Nicaea I (325 AD) and the later Councils that defined the doctrine of Christ's full divinity give this verse polemical weight: the man's prostration is implicitly a confession of Christ's divine nature. To worship Jesus is to confess that he is not merely a prophet or healer but the eternal Son of the Father, consubstantial with the Father (cf. the Nicene Creed). Pope Benedict XVI, in Jesus of Nazareth, observes that the entire Gospel of John is structured around precisely these escalating confessions of faith, each deeper than the last, culminating in Thomas's "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28) — the same impulse already present in embryo in this man's worship.

St. Thomas Aquinas (Commentary on the Gospel of John, Lecture 7 on Ch. 9) notes that the man's faith moves through three stages: initial trust (going to wash), public confession, and finally explicit theological assent and adoration — a Thomistic ordo fidei that mirrors the three acts of the theological virtue of faith: believing God (credere Deo), believing in God (credere Deum), and moving toward God (credere in Deum).

The man born blind is expelled for telling the truth about his experience of Jesus, and Jesus responds by coming to find him. This sequence speaks directly to any Catholic who has suffered social, professional, or familial cost for fidelity to the faith — and has wondered whether the cost was worth it or whether Christ even noticed.

The passage offers a concrete spiritual discipline: the examined conscience of faith. The man's question — "Who is he, Lord, that I may believe in him?" — models what regular lectio divina, Eucharistic adoration, or a weekly examination of conscience can do. It is the practice of asking, openly and without pretense, to be shown more of Christ. Many Catholics inherit a nominal faith and never progress beyond it, not because they have rejected Christ, but because they have never, in a quiet moment, asked this question in earnest.

The culminating act of worship also invites reflection on how we approach Mass. The man's proskynesin autō was immediate, whole, and unreserved. The reverence with which we receive Communion, genuflect before the tabernacle, or observe a moment of silence after the Consecration are not empty gestures — they are, or can be, this same act: "Lord, I believe," embodied in posture and motion.