Physical blindness is used as a metaphor in the New Testament to understand the reality of spiritual blindness. In today’s Gospel we meet a man who was born blind. Jesus had taken clay, spit on it, and rubbed the man’s eyes with the mud. He then told him to go and to wash in the Pool of Siloam. Having done so, he was able to see.
The Pharisees asked the man born blind how it was that he could now see. He responded that the man, Jesus, had rubbed mud on his eyes, sent him to wash, and now he could see. Three times he had to explain how he could see, but the Pharisees could not accept this. They could see physically, but they were blind spiritually. This recalls the words from the song Amazing Grace, in which we hear, “I was blind but now I see.”