His pronouncement of their blindness and deafness was in order to gain their attention and not to condemn them.  Jesus was using the analogy of blindness to highlight all the things that were being missed.  A blind person today has the opportunity to live a good life but there are simply beautiful things that will not be experienced without sight.  Jesus is saying in a figurative sense that tremendous things are being missed by those who don't use their ability to see what it is in front of them.

The most damaging thing about this kind of blindness is that it has a very willful element to it.  Jesus compared it to people who closed their eyes and put their hands over their ears.  It is a purposeful suppression of the capacity to see and hear.  Is it possible for people to live their lives in such a way as to be willfully blind?  I have a friend whose daughter was involved with drugs.  He and his wife were almost the last people in their circle of friends to come to this realization.  All the signs and warnings were there but it was not until there were police involved that this couple came to the stark realization of their daughter’s problem.  Every event was interpreted to a favorable cause.  Every deceit was rearranged as a possible truth.  All other causes were accepted before the real cause.  It was an undesired and distasteful truth and therefore kept as far as away as possible.

People are blind to the realities of life without Jesus because they want to be.  If Jesus is the only legitimate pathway to God then any suppression of this truth is contrary to sound teaching and damaging to legitimate hope.  Before a person humbles themselves before the mighty hand of God they don't want Christianity to be true.  They will do almost anything to make it not be true.  Thousands of people rubbed elbows with the Son of God and didn't recognize Him.  Many others found His teachings about reality so distasteful that they would not allow it to be true.  His message was so contrary to what they wanted that He has to be suppressed at any cost.  He even had to be killed so they didn't have to keep seeing what He made them see and hearing what He made them hear.  Both the ignorers and the haters were blind by choice.

There have been many things in my life that I really didn't want to be true.  My desire that they be true and the reality of their being true should not be connected but they often are.  I didn't want it to be true that I had a problem with being selfish so all I saw was the selfishness of other people.  I didn't want it to be true that I was too arrogant so all I saw were the people who were more arrogant than me.  I didn't want it to be true that other people were more diligent than me so all I saw were the workaholics.  I didn't want it to be true that I was self righteous so all I saw were the hypocrites.  I think you see what I am saying.

You may have given Jesus a good honest investigation without any predetermined desires as to the outcome and found it to be a series of fables.  You may have honestly lived a faithful Christian life for a while and found it to be without merit and moved on.  You may simply be interested in nothing but the truth and found a better way to live.  You may be living just the life you claim to be living and other people just won’t accept it.  But we all might want to see how close our hands are to our eyes.