"As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”3 Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 Having said these things, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva. Then he anointed the man's eyes with the mud 7 and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing."
John 9:1-7
Irenaeus, one of the early Fathers, sees in the reference to clay and spittle in 6 a connection with Genesis 2:7, where we are told that man was formed from the dust of the ground, and that the thought here is of recreation or new creation. If this is a valid interpretation, then our Lord's action constitutes a claim to be God the Creator, a deliberately chosen symbol for those who had eyes to see, that this that He was doing was a creative act, and that His work in the gospel was akin to that in creation; 'God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.' And this is the word of hope that these words bring: There is One who has been sent into the world by the Father, to help us, and He is the great Creator Himself who in the beginning said, Let there be light, and there was light. We should not be hesitant, either, to accept such an interpretation, for it is quite clear that Jesus could easily have healed the man with His word, as He had done on other occasions, and therefore there must have been a particular intention in Jesus' action. In any case, the healing did not take place when Jesus used the clay and spittle, but when the man went to Siloam, and thus it was another case in which the miracle took place without the actual presence of Jesus, but solely dependent on the word that He had spoken (cf 4:46ff).