Man Born Blind
Gary Hall
Seabury-Western
Septermber 4, 2007
The question posed to Jesus by his disciples this morning–“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”–is not, on the face of it, crazy. Those of you returning to school from a quarter of CPE no doubt heard some version of that question as you talked to patients and their families this summer. Despite our pastoral attempts to brush it off, the question “Why did God do this to me?” is not a bad question at all. If God is in charge of things, then why has God visited this thing on me? Though we want confidently to assert that suffering is not God’s punishment for moral failure, there are large parts of our scriptural tradition that would see things otherwise.
Yesterday
afternoon, I spent some time engaged in my favorite Labor Day activity–I
refer, of course, to watching the annual Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. It’s
not as much fun as it used to be, because as he gets older, Jerry Lewis seems
to be more in control of his emotions and so does not rant and rave against his
critics as he once did. But at least once in every annual broadcast he
engages is some speculations on theodicy, and this year’s was a beaut. And
I have it thanks to the miracle of digital video recording. Referring to
the disease Muscular Dystrophy, he said:
We
do so much when we help the clinicians in this country
come
up with an answer to one of the most frustrating and
vicious
things that God allowed to happen. I have to think
that
if we pray to Him hard enough he’ll look back in his file
and
he’ll see, “Yeah, I shouldn’t have done that.”
When he speculates this way, Jerry Lewis sounds like Jesus’s disciples: as terrible as we find things like congenital blindness and neuromuscular diseases to be, something in us naturally wants to ascribe their existence to God. Those of us engaged in ministry have pastoral and apologetic instincts which make us rush to God’s defense and declare those most comforting of 21st century words, “It’s not your fault.” And in that we have some support, today, from Jesus himself: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
Both the
author of the Fourth Gospel and Jesus himself see this blind man as an occasion
for the doing of God’s work in the world. For the author
of John’s Gospel, the opportunity to heal a blind man presents Jesus
with a chance to do the works of the One who sent him: “As long as I
am in the world, I am the light of the world.” For Jesus, the blind man
has a place in the economy of God’s creation: he comes onto Jesus’s
path at precisely this moment so that God’s love, justice, and mercy
might be revealed through him.
Those of
us who do the work of pastoral care in the church’s life know all too
well that the questions posed by disciples and comedians alike are the deep
questions posed by all of us human beings when we are up against it. When
we suffer (or see our friends or families or lovers suffer) we want to know
both “Who caused it?” and “What does it mean?” What
we have this morning from Jesus and John is a little bit of fudging about the
first question: well, yes, even if God caused it, God didn’t do so as
a punishment so you still must not be angry with God. But the second
question, “What does suffering mean?” is opened up for us in a
new way.
Of all God’s
attributes, the one which continues to surprise and delight me as both a reader
of scripture and liver of life is God’s ability to take bad things and
make them good. In the Joseph story, you’ll remember, Joseph finally
tells his brothers, “You meant all this for evil but God turned it to
good.” The biblical history of God’s dealings with us is
the history of God taking ill-intentioned human activity and transforming it
into something else. Slavery is turned into freedom. Exile is turned
into homecoming. Crucifixion is turned into resurrection. Of all
the mysteries at the heart of God’s being, the dearest one to me is God’s
ability, as an artist, to take pain and hatred and loss and turn them into
joy and love and wholeness. I’m sure God can do a lot of other
impressive things, but this is the one that, frankly, makes me a believer. I
not only believe it, I’ve seen it.
And so this
morning, when Jesus says that this man “was born blind so that God’s
works might be revealed in him” he’s not talking about some public
relations or marketing strategy. He is talking about suffering not as
judgment but as the opportunity for God to do what God does. Every human
life has in it some measure of suffering, grief, and loss. Like the disciples
when we ask “What does suffering mean?”, we need to be prepared
for Jesus’s answer: what suffering means is that God now has an occasion
to do what God does best, and that is to turn it into something else. It
is that transformative miracle which is the heart of the Christian Gospel.
We’re embarked on a new school year, a time when all of us in this community dedicate ourselves not only to engaging the texts and methods of Christian faith and practice but also to living together as a community of faith organized around the life and death and resurrection of Jesus and his ongoing risen presence with us as the Body of Christ in the World. As we turn now to reaffirm our Baptismal Covenant, let us remember that we are, all of us, women and children and men embarked on the journey of ministry as members of that body. As we step out on that journey, let’s remember that we will hear some version of the disciples’ question either from ourselves and others almost every step of the way. May we have the grace, with Jesus, to see the suffering we meet as God sees it, so that we may be instruments through which God’s redemptive and liberating work of blessing can be done. Amen.