THE Gospel for this Sunday is epic. But pity the lectionary-compilers: how could it be reduced? It is still too short to begin where John begins, with Jesus’s baptism, or to take in the well in Samaria (ch. 4). It cannot prefigure the cross, as Jesus does when he teaches about living water that pours forth from the believer’s belly (not heart, as John 7.38 NRSV, which obliterates the foreshadowing of the Passion) during the feast of Tabernacles.

Water was a precious commodity in the holy city, and the pool of Siloam was famous for its living waters. “Living” in this context means running water rather than a standing pool. For the first Christians, it was important that baptism took place in “living” water — a practice that continues among some churches to this day. My Welsh mother and sister were both baptised in a river near Horeb chapel, in Maenclochog. Mercifully, the pool for my baptism was warm, and clean, and filled by a tap.

John 9 is a combat, but not in the usual way of heroic contests. This is a contest for the truth, against received wisdom, and determination to hold on to the past at the cost of the future. Jesus faces a series of characters: the disciples, the blind man, the Pharisees, the parents, “the Jews”. At stake is nothing less than truth, compassion, piety, and the will of God.

All the intervening interactions take place within a frame: Jesus begins with the needs of an individual (he heals a blind man), whose belief and worship at the end make the proper response to the Son of Man. Meanwhile, some Pharisees declare their own righteousness, thereby convicting themselves of the sin of being determined not to see spiritually.

One approach to John 9 — the way of the scholar — responds to our hunger for understanding. We try to make sense of the Gospel’s component parts, assessing the theology embedded in physically and spiritually impaired humanity, drawing conclusions about the admittedly difficult balance of competing religious observance (to heal, or to rest?). And we wrestle with the questions of theodicy which emerge from it all.

The other is the older way (I will not say “better”, because both are God-given, and, for the fullness of faith, we need both): to listen, as we would with any other story. Then, we can accept that the information that we get is the information that we need. There is no need to worry about whether there was ever such a thing as a kind and tolerant Pharisee, or a dependable and reliable disciple, or a self-doubting Jesus.

This approach, unlike the first, is something that we have been trained in from early childhood. We learn life principles from a conglomeration of such stories. People are not always what they seem (Beauty and the Beast; the suffering servant in Isaiah); poverty and inequality begin within families (Cinderella; the 12 sons of Jacob); the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong (the tortoise and the hare: Ecclesiastes 9.11). All of these stories, and their morals, have direct parallels in the life of King David (who appears in today’s Hebrew Bible/Old Testament lection), as well as in other Bible stories.

One reason that chapter 9 reminds me of the Passion is that it sets before the characters (and, by extension, us) a series of challenges. Repeatedly, people’s religious preconceptions, the rules that they have been taught, clash with something that sounds wrong but feels right. A detail jumps out at me as the questioning unfolds. When the man’s parents are questioned, they are afraid, because the answer that they are being pressed for is not one that they can honestly give. They fear a backlash (being expelled from the synagogue) for speaking the truth. They are us in the face of a Twitter mob.

So the parents tell their questioners to ask the man himself. But, when they find him, they do not ask him: they tell him. They must think that they have nothing to learn. The man’s response is worthy of Jesus himself, telling the truth while avoiding the tongue-trap: I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know: though I was blind, now I see.

Amazing grace was at work in that man, that day. And, if that cannot lighten our load on this Refreshment Sunday, nothing can.