Butter, Play-Doh & Jesus
I want you to imagine a table with two things sitting on it.
A stick of butter. A lump of Play-Doh. Same table, same plate, same sun beating down on both of them.
After a while the butter has melted. It’s soft, spreadable, completely changed by the heat. The Play-Doh? It’s hard. Crusty on the outside. Starting to crack. If you try to use it now it’ll break apart in your hands.
Same light. Completely different reaction. I think that’s one of the most honest pictures of what happens when people encounter Jesus.
The Man Nobody Named
John 9 opens with a man sitting by the temple entrance. He’s been blind since birth. And he doesn’t even get a name in the story. John just calls him “the man born blind.”
I named him Bob. Bear with me.
So Bob is sitting there, and Jesus walks by, and the disciples immediately do the thing humans always do with suffering. They try to assign blame. “Jesus, is Bob blind because he sinned or because his parents sinned?”
In their framework, someone had to be at fault. Suffering doesn’t just happen. Someone caused it. Someone did something wrong.
Jesus says: neither. That’s not what’s going on here.
Sometimes things don’t happen because someone messed up. Sometimes they happen so that God can show what he’s capable of doing in a broken situation.
I think we ask the same question the disciples asked. We just phrase it differently. Why is my marriage falling apart, what did I do wrong? Why didn’t I get the promotion? Why are my kids so hard right now? Why is this diagnosis happening to me?
Sometimes there isn’t a clean answer to that. But sometimes the answer is that something bigger is happening than you can currently see.
The World’s Strangest Healing
Here’s what Jesus does next. And I’m going to say this plainly because the text is pretty direct about it.
He spits on the ground. Makes mud. And rubs it on Bob’s face.
Just take a second with that.
Bob can’t see what’s happening. He just hears some guy working something up, feels something being smeared on his face, and then the guy says go wash your face in the pool. So Bob gets up and goes.
And by the time he comes back, he can see. And Jesus is gone. Bob doesn’t even know what Jesus looks like. He’s never seen him. He just knows a guy named Jesus put mud on his face and now everything is different.
Jesus does things in unconventional ways to save people that we wouldn’t even give the time of day to.
That’s worth sitting with. The method was weird. The recipient was someone nobody was paying much attention to. And the result was sight. Jesus doesn’t always show up the way we expect. He shows up the way the situation actually needs.
The Slow Reveal
What happens next in John 9 is one of the more interesting progressions in the whole gospel.
Bob’s understanding of who Jesus is grows in stages. First he says: some man called Jesus did it. Then, after some pushback from the religious leaders: I think he must be a prophet. Then, after they throw him out of the temple entirely: when Jesus comes and finds him, Bob says Lord, I believe. And worships him.
He didn’t start with a full theological understanding of Jesus. He started with mud on his face and a name he’d heard. And over time, as his eyes stayed open, his understanding grew.
The longer his eyes were open, the more he could see the clarity of who Jesus actually was without even having met him face to face.
That’s usually how faith works. You don’t get the whole picture on day one. You start with what you know – something happened, it felt like God, I’m not sure what to call it yet. Then over time, as you stay in it, things get clearer.
The Wrong Lenses
The Pharisees in this story are the Play-Doh to Bob’s butter. Same light, completely different reaction.
They’re not bad people. They’re not irreligious. They’re the most devoted, Scripture-saturated people in their culture. But they’re looking at everything through one lens: the law. Does this fit our categories? Does this check our boxes? Does this line up with the way we’ve always done things?
When it doesn’t, they can’t see it. Even when what’s right in front of them is a man who was born blind and can now see.
There’s a movie called National Treasure. Nicholas Cage steals the Declaration of Independence, finds these special glasses that reveal a hidden map on the back when you look through them. But when he first puts them on, all the lenses are stacked on top of each other and everything is a blurry mess. It only starts to make sense when he moves the filters.
The Pharisees were looking through the wrong filters. Bob had no filters. The only lens he had was what Jesus had done for him.
And that turned out to be enough.
Jesus Went Looking
Here’s the part of this story I keep coming back to.
After the religious leaders throw Bob out of the temple, John records a very specific detail. “Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him…”
Jesus went looking for him. He didn’t wait for Bob to find his way back. He didn’t wait for Bob to clean himself up or figure out the right things to say. He heard Bob was out in the cold and went to find him.
Bob didn’t earn that. He didn’t ask for it. He was just sitting by the temple begging, and Jesus showed up and changed everything. And then when the world kicked him out, Jesus showed up again.
Jesus doesn’t stop playing hide and seek until every one of his kids is found.
That’s for whoever is reading this and feeling like they’ve been on the outside for a while. Like the door got shut and nobody’s coming to open it. Like you wandered too far or waited too long or messed up too many times.
The same Jesus who went looking for Bob is the same Jesus walking around right now. And he hasn’t stopped looking.
Be like Bob. Start with what you know. Let your eyes open slowly. And when Jesus shows up even if it’s in an unconventional way, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if it involves a little mud let yourself soften in his presence.
Same light. Your reaction is up to you.