John 9:19

The Jewish religious leaders begin to pepper the healed blind man’s parents with questions. “Is this fellow your son?” they begin the interrogation. John 9:19 EFP 

Try to imagine the setting. On the one side the religious elite: educated, proper, prim, and pretentiously pious. They have an agenda and it’s barely veiled at all. They intend to unmask the grifter from Galilee or the blind bamboozler who claims to have been healed from his life-long blindness. Or both!

On the other side we see the blind man from birth who now has miraculously obtained sight at the hands of a man yet to be identified but the identity of whom the interrogators have a strong suspicion, and his parents. They are probably as uneducated as their destitute son. They are simple, salt-of-the-earth type people who do not care that much for the religious types, but who are dependent on them for access to the temple and the God who they fear more than they care to admit.

Their first question seems to have an obvious answer. Perhaps it is simply a test question. “Is this your son?” they ask. Considering the fact they are the ones who ordered the parents of the blind man to be brought to witness, their question seems to fall short of expectations. I sense they are simply trying to set up the parents for the question to which they really want an answer.

They are either playing dumb, or being intentionally obtuse or calculating, hoping to secure an unflattering answer they can pin on Jesus or simply catching the parents in an inconsistency which could discredit the miracle and tarnish the Healer. I feel twangs of guilt when I recall all the times I have played dumb, intentionally or unintentionally, in order to get away with some choice or behavior that was clearly detrimental or damaging to me or someone else. God, deliver me from the Evil One.