Once they knew who he was, the neighbours wanted to know what had happened. A man they had seen sitting and begging now walked among them with open eyes (John 9:8-9). Gill says they might well ask, "since such a thing was never known before, that one born blind received his sight." Nothing in the text suggests hostility yet. This is the plain "how" of people facing something they cannot explain. The harder questions come later, from the Pharisees (John 9:15).

He answered simply: "A man that is called Jesus made clay, and anointed mine eyes, and said unto me, Go to the pool of Siloam, and wash: and I went and washed, and I received sight" (John 9:11). He told only what he knew and had experienced. At this point he knew Jesus only as "a man that is called Jesus." The neighbours then asked, "Where is he?" (John 9:12), and brought him to the Pharisees (John 9:13).

Blindness from birth was rare, and this man was well known. Barnes observes that "the number of persons totally blind in any community is very small," so this case was "one where there could be no imposture." John gives the meaning of Siloam, the pool where the man washed: "Sent" (John 9:7). The healing also happened on "the sabbath day" (John 9:14), a detail that soon turns the neighbours' wonder into an official inquiry.

Before the healing, Jesus told His disciples the man was born blind "that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:3). The neighbours' question is the first sign of that: God's work was now on display in a man everyone knew. Matthew Henry says those whose eyes are opened by grace "live as monuments to the Redeemer's glory."

The question "how" opens a chapter full of questions. Neighbours and Pharisees ask how this happened, and the parents are pressed for an answer. Only at the end does the man learn who his healer truly is, when Jesus Himself reveals it (John 9:35-37).