I’m buried under stacks of grading this week, so take missing persons reports with a grain of salt.

Reading through narrative analyses of John 9, I came across this gem from the conclusion to one paper:

In the field of organizational psychology, the term “organizational myopia” is used to describe what happens when people work within organizations without a clear understanding of the purpose of one’s work. Without clear understanding of one’s function within an organization, the mission of the organization begins to drift and functions, procedures, and roles become larger than the mission. In much the same way, the religious leaders functioned in ways that were spiritually myopic. The larger purpose of their faith tradition became lost in translation as they worked to maintain their ethnic-religious-political traditions. Throughout the text, this tension is played out over a series of interactions with the religious leaders. In these interactions “knowing God” takes on different meanings. There are those who know God in a traditional and theological sense while there are others who know God in an experiential sense. These ways of knowing God need not be pitted against one another as they mutually reinforce each other. However, in the Gospel of John, Jesus consistently points out the religious leaders’ lack of experience with Him and their inability to discern His presence that nullifies their intellectual and traditional knowledge of Him.