John 9:1-41
Our gospel reading this morning is about difficult things like suffering, sin, and healing. It begins with a question from Jesus’ disciples. “Rabbi, who sinned?” they ask Jesus as they walk past a blind man on the street. “Was it this fellow who sinned or was it his parents’ sin that caused him to be blind like this?”
It is part of human nature that we look to assign blame where there is a problem. Often, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. We live in a cause and effect universe. If I do ‘x’, like driving while intoxicated, ‘y’ outcome, like getting into a crash and seriously injuring or killing myself or someone else, is very possible. It’s a tragedy, but it’s very natural and reasonable to assign blame to the person who got behind the wheel while drunk.
The blame game is a lot harder to play, though, when the situation is less clear cut. If someone gets sick, do we blame that person for getting sick? Maybe there is a connection if someone was a lifelong smoker and then developed lung cancer. But what about all of the other kinds of cancers and illnesses that don’t seem to have a cause? I wonder if that’s what the disciples were wrestling with when they passed by the blind man on the street and asked Jesus the question, “who sinned?”.
Who sinned? When someone gets sick too young or dies too early when they were otherwise healthy, how do we make sense of the biblical truth of reaping what we sow? Or, when a relationship falls apart without some clear cut reason, who’s to blame? Or take poverty. Is that always a cause and effect situation? Is it always the poor person’s fault that they are poor, or are there larger societal forces at work that tips the scales to push some people up faster and hold some people back?
There’s a professor at Duke Divinity School named Kate Bowler who writes about whether we can always find a reason for everything that happens. Dr. Bowler writes from personal experience. For months she experienced severe abdominal pain. She went from specialist to specialist describing her symptoms and submitting to test after test after test. But the doctors couldn’t find anything for certain that was causing her pain. Take Pepto Bismol, was the advice. It wasn’t until a gastro-intestinal surgeon reluctantly agreed to try removing her gallbladder as a Hail Mary measure that her doctors discovered she had stage IV cancer.
Because of the type of cancer she had, she was eligible for an experimental treatment study at Emory University in Atlanta. So she took part in it. Every week she’d fly from Raleigh to Atlanta to receive her cocktail of drugs. But her prognosis was month to month. No one was sure whether it would work. So, every month she did scans to see whether her cancer was spreading, stalling, or pulling back. If the scans came back okay, she would continue with the study and live for another scan, another month. If the scans came back with the devastating news that the cancer was spreading, she realized it was likely the beginning of the end for her.
Dr. Bowler writes about her experience in an autobiography of sorts titled Everything Happens For a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved1. There’s a scene in the book that gets at the humor and tragedy, and the awkwardness and the fear of living with incurable cancer. Dr. Bowler tells about how, when she was still in the hospital during the early days of her diagnosis, her husband was at their home trying to catch his breath and keep the house clean and in some kind of order for their toddler son when one of their neighbors stopped by with a casserole. It was one of those neighborly things to do, intended to be kind and thoughtful. But then the neighbor started telling Dr. Bowler’s husband, Toban, that everything happens for a reason.
Toban, who is apparently witty, said to the neighbor, “I’d love to hear it.”
“Pardon?” the neighbor said, startled.
“[I’d love to hear it], the reason my wife is dying.”
Why are we talking about the mystery of suffering and reaping what we sow? Let’s go back to the disciples’ original question. “Rabbi who sinned?” The disciples wanted a reason. They wanted an explanation. They wanted a cause to the effect. They wanted something to make sense of why this man had suffered. Don’t we want the same thing? Don’t we want everything to happen for a reason?
But, Jesus just doesn’t go there. Jesus doesn’t go down that cause-and-effect road with the disciples. There’s no reaping what you sow kind of language. He doesn’t even leave a little wiggle room to maybe assign some blame to the blind man or his parents for his disability. Instead, he goes in a totally different direction, “It wasn’t that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.”
If you’re a little confused as to what Jesus just said, you’re in good company. Here is how one translator put this passage into modern English: “You’re asking the wrong question,” Jesus said. “You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause and effect here. Look instead for what God can do. We need to be energetically at work for the One who sent me here, working while the sun shines. When night falls, the workday is over. For as long as I am in the world, there is plenty of light. I am the world’s Light.2”
Jesus seems to be suggesting to the disciples that not every circumstance of suffering and tragedy can be explained. If we really want to push the envelope of understanding, Jesus seems to be suggesting that this man’s blindness was destined to be an opportunity for God to demonstrate his power and glory to heal the man’s blindness. That opens a whole can of worms of questions. Like: why would God do that? How could God be gracious and merciful while also letting someone experience a severe hardship like blindness?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. But I do know there is an element of mystery in suffering that you recognize only after you’ve been through something terrible and hard. Some of the great spiritual writers in history sometimes describe such a time as a ‘thin space’ where heaven and earth seem to come very close together. What they mean by that is that it is not uncommon to hear someone say something like, “in spite of how awful and terrible things were in my life, I felt God’s presence in those dark times in a powerful and unique way that I didn’t feel when things were good for me.” It’s not that they’d want to relive their suffering or wish it on anyone, or that the story ended with sunshine and roses. It’s just that God was somehow uniquely present in the midst of their suffering. It was as if Jesus were suffering alongside them on the cross.
After Jesus told the disciples they were asking the wrong question when they were asking who to blame for the man’s blindness, we’re told that he “spit on the ground, made some mud with his saliva” and then “anointed the man’s eyes with the mud” and told the man to go and wash in the pool named Siloam. The man did what Jesus told him to and we’re told he came back seeing and said “I was blind but now I see” (where the hymn Amazing Grace comes from).
At first glance, this is the definition of a miracle. The blind man now sees because of God’s power working through Jesus. But there are a few other things going on as well. Not only is this man’s sight restored, but his life is also blessed by God. You can imagine based on the disciples’ question itself that to have any sort of physical disability in Jesus’ day meant to be looked at funny, shunned, and perhaps even scapegoated and blamed for the various problems that plagued a family and a village.
This whole sequence of events is put into motion by the simple fact that Jesus sees the man. In the gospels, whenever Jesus ‘sees’ someone, it usually means more than just seeing with his eyes. When Jesus sees someone he looks with compassion and mercy on them. It means that Jesus takes notice of them, not for their problems or issues, but by the simple fact that they are a human being created in the image of God whom he loves.
Contrast that with how the neighbors, the Pharisees, and even the man’s parents respond to the man’s restored sight. The man’s neighbors gossip about him. The man’s parents try to play dumb about his healing – what was probably the single most important day in his life – because they were worried about offending the religious leaders. And the Pharisees question, demean, and ultimately kick him out of their religious community.
The irony in the whole story is that the people who should see the clearest – the religious elite, the well-connected church goers, the blind man’s closest friends haven’t the foggiest idea what is going on. They are blind to the Lord who is in their mist. Meanwhile, the blind man becomes one of the first gospel preachers. Of all the people, the blind man sees the clearest.
The story ends with Jesus and the formerly blind man having a conversation. Jesus asks him, “do you believe in the Son of Man?” The blind mean seems confused and not really sure what Jesus is talking about.
“And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him,” he asks.
“You’re looking at him,” Jesus tells him.
Then the formally blind man makes a declaration of faith and says a prayer at the same time. “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief,” he says, and we’re told that he worshipped Jesus.
What does it mean to believe in God? To be a Christian? Many things, but one of the things that this story brings up is that to be a Christian means to learn to see. Here is what I mean. Take suffering. From a wordly, non-Christian view of things, suffering is bad all of the time and there is nothing good that can come from it. So, the logic is that suffering should be avoided at all costs. In fact, not only should we avoid suffering at all costs, but we should seek pleasure and what makes us happy above everything else.
But, the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ, teaches us in the church to see things differently. Yes, suffering is not what we want, for anyone. We should do everything in our power to help those who are suffering. We can faithfully pray to God to take away our suffering like Jesus did in the Garden of Gesthamene, “Lord, if it be your will, take this cup from me, yet not what I want, but what you want.”
However, from God’s view, the gospel teaches us to see things differently because suffering can also be redemptive. Our model for this is Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. His crucifixion was horrible. He was executed for no good reason. It is one of the most brutal ways to die.
All of that is true, but we also believe that Jesus’ death on the cross was redemptive. Meaning, something good and lovely and beautiful came out of it. What humans intended for evil in crucifying the Son of God, God used for good.
That’s what redemption means – God using what was broken, ugly, or meant for evil and that couldn’t be fixed or solved on its own – and turning it into something lovely, good, and beautiful. It takes a different way of seeing things to believe that suffering can be redemptive.
We should be humble here. It’s not our place to tell others how their suffering and difficulties are redemptive for them. That is something personal to each of us. It also doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences for our decisions and actions.
But suffering can be redemptive. It can change us. It can draw us closer to God. It can change our thoughts and behaviors for the good. It can cause us to focus on things that actually matter – like faith, hope, and love – and not just our frustrations, resentments, and appetites.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” This is one way that it can look for suffering and hardship to be used by God to help, guide, and heal us. God’s power is to use what people intended for evil and use it for good. Amen.
1The following excerpt is taken from Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I Loved. Kate Bowler. Page 131
2Quoted from Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase, The Message.