Summary: When Jesus healed a blind man, it showed that the source of the blindness was not sin. Rather, the man's blindness was an opportunity for people to see the loving and healing nature of God. But if you make assumptions about why he was blind, you're likely to miss an opportunity to experience the presence of the divine.
Have you noticed how often we ask the wrong questions? Sometimes that's because we make assumptions about reality that are misguided or rooted in our prejudices, and you can see that happening in the Jesus story we read today in the Gospel of John.
Notice the questionable assumption Jesus' disciples made when they asked him this: "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
Yes, the idea that bad things happen to people because people have sinned and need punishment was still prevalent in that culture -- even though the whole point of the book of Job, written hundreds of years earlier, was to argue against the notion that Job was suffering because of some sin he had committed. Over and over, Job's alleged friends, people we might call the Three Stooges of the Bible, tell him all this is his fault because of some bad thing he had done.
What their assumption ignored was that at the very beginning of the story, even God declared Job to be a righteous man without sin. So the book of Job teaches that suffering is not necessarily a sign that you have sinned. And, yes, that was a countercultural position.
But all this time after Job was written, we still find people in Jesus' time who hadn't understood the message, so they ask who sinned to cause a man's blindness. Sort of makes you want to challenge some of your own assumptions, doesn't it?
Jesus, of course, is having none of it -- perhaps because he knows who he is, the divine child of God, and he understands that he himself will suffer at the end of his life but not because of any sin of his. Indeed, maybe one of the few times that it might be right to conclude that someone suffered because of sin is when we stand in front of the cross on Good Friday and ask forgiveness.
What theologians refer to as the "problem of evil" raises what they call the "theodicy question," which goes something like this: If God is good and powerful, how do we explain all the evil and suffering in the world? Doesn't God care? Is God not really either good or powerful?
I'm guessing each of you has asked something like that question at some point in your life. Maybe you will feel better knowing that no one yet has come up with an answer that fully satisfies everyone (which is why the problem of evil sometimes is called the open wound of religion).
In the case of the blind person in the Gospel reading today, what does Jesus say? He says this: "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him."
That translation from Greek to English offered by the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible may be accurate but its point is nowhere near as clear as the paraphrase of that passage in Eugene Peterson's version of the Bible called The Message. Here's how Peterson puts Jesus' answer: "Jesus said, 'You're asking the wrong question. You're looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do.'"1
It's good advice to look for what God can do, but often that can mean sitting back and doing nothing when we see troublesome things in the world. We say, "Let God fix this" instead of becoming the hands and feet and very heart of God on Earth and working with God to bring justice and wholeness to the world.
And speaking of wholeness, that's often what's needed instead of discovering who sinned. There's a Jesuit priest named Gregory Boyle, who, in his 2024 book, Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times, asks this question: "Is the God of love looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing?"2
As Boyle notes, "A bad diagnosis can't ever lead us to a good treatment plan."3 So he urges people to focus not so much on what's sinful in people but, rather, on what's broken and needs to be treated to restore the person to health and wholeness. When we see murder or mayhem, theft or thuggery, we certainly may be right to call it sin, but in Boyle's view it's much more helpful to say to ourselves that no one who is whole and healthy would do such a thing.
In response, our job is not to condemn the sinner and walk away but to look for ways to heal whoever committed this or that evil deed.
As the story we read today progresses, notice that the religious leaders are stuck in the box that insists that the one cause of trouble is sin. They said to the man who had been healed of blindness that they "know that this man [Jesus] is a sinner," which was further evidence that they didn't believe Jesus could have healed him.
Do you see what they are doing? They are twisting reality to make it fit their preconceptions. Thank goodness none of us does that today, right? Well, none of us except for most or all of us at some time or another.
The healed man's response to all of this is rich: John writes that "He answered, 'I do not know whether he [Jesus] is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.'" (You will be forgiven if you now feel like breaking into part of the great old hymn, "Amazing Grace," and the line "I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.")
The healed blind man refused to engage in the leaders' sin-based conspiracy theories or in their own refusal to see what was clearly happening in front of them. God was at work healing someone, not because someone had sinned but because God had mercy and gave grace to a man who wasn't well, wasn't happy, wasn't whole.
Friends in Christ, that same kind of grace is available to all of us. We need merely to acknowledge our need for it and ask for it.
Did you notice the way the healed man spoke to the religious leaders who seemed not to grasp what was happening? He told them that "if this man were not from God, he could do nothing." But the leaders responded this way: "'You were born entirely in sin, and are you trying to teach us?' And they drove him out."
Your job and my job, then, is to beware of clergy or other religious leaders who think they have all the answers even though it's clear they are asking the wrong questions and simply blaming sin for troubles when what they -- and all of us -- need to focus on is how to fix what or who is broken, how to help bring healing into an injured world.
If we can help accomplish that, maybe afterward we can gather up and ponder possible theological explanations for what has happened. But if we're so focused on explaining suffering and evil in the world that we do nothing to help alleviate it when we see it right in front of us, what good are we?
Let's help heal each other, not blame one another for bringing trouble on ourselves by committing this or that sin.
At the end of our reading today, Jesus says something that seems strange: "I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind."
Let's turn again to Peterson's paraphrase called The Message and see if it makes more sense the way he puts it: "I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all the distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a great pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind."
That seems clearer than what we get when we read the NRSV translation literally. A literal reading makes it sound as if Jesus is going to make some people blind. But Peterson's paraphrase makes it clear that Jesus simply intends to expose, to reveal the blindness that already exists in certain people.
There is much in this rich passage for us in our time, but I think we'd do well to focus on our own assumptions, our own miscalculations, our own blindnesses. And when we find how we have gotten it wrong, to repent and turn toward the light. Which light? Jesus himself answered that way back in verse 5 when he said, "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."
The good news for today, friends, is that the spirit of the risen Christ still is in the world, working to make us whole and healthy and blessed. We simply must look for where Christ's spirit is already at work and then, with our eyes open, go to work there, too. May that be so.