It’s difficult to feel sorry for people who get to spend their workday at baseball games. Even so, it’s hard not to feel at least a little bit of sympathy for umpires. As the old saying goes, umpires are supposed to be perfect from day one and get better from there. Any failure to achieve perfection is met with calls of derision. Hey, ump, are you blind? How did you not see that?
As a lifelong fan of the Kansas City Royals, I’ll never forget the first-base umpire blowing a call late in game six of the 1985 World Series. (The call hurt the other team, the St. Louis Cardinals, so I for one found it easy to forgive.) Even people with perfectly good eyesight sometimes fail to see things that are right in front of them.
The contrast between sight and blindness is at the heart of the extended scene that plays out in John 9. It is the story of an unnamed man born blind who regains his sight, told in contrast to those who were born with sight and yet are unable to see what is right in front of them.
