Who is the sinner? That seems to be the question on everyone’s lips in this long passage from John’s Gospel. The disciples, always ready to say what everyone else is thinking, use a blind man as an object lesson. Who sinned? they ask—The man himself or his parents?
Neither, says Jesus, with the rather obvious subtext: You’re asking the wrong question.
Whether or not the disciples get it, John goes on to show just how much everyone else seems to have the same problem. If the disciples wanted to know who sinned to cause the blindness, the Pharisees want to know, in a weird sort of reversal, who sinned to heal it. Or rather, how it could be possible for an obviously sinful man to heal something that was so obviously caused by sin.
What’s going on here? Today, people still love finding someone to blame. though most of us probably find the language of “sinners” and guilt here strange. This is for both good and bad reasons. One good reason is that we have been formed by regular penitential acts in Christian practice, and so we’re intuitively opposed to the Pharisaic stance, which wants to label some people as “sinners” and others as righteous. Surely by now we know that we are all sinners. One bad reason, maybe, is that, despite the knowledge of universal sinfulness, we do not like to believe that our sins actually affect us. We prefer to think of sins purely in terms of disobedience, not in terms of physical and social consequence.
I say this is bad, but there is some good in it: unlike the disciples and the Pharisees, we are unlikely to look at someone’s pain or disability and immediately chalk it up to his sins, or his parents’ sins. Medical science is a great help in this regard, because it makes us aware of different kinds of corruption beyond our control. But we can take this too far by assuming that everything is reducible to physical causality. No doubt this is convenient, because it means we can never be blamed for anything. But we then fall into a kind of spiritual escapism, where we never have to deal with sin on anything but a theoretical basis.
Jesus gives us no easy way out in John. He does insist that the man’s blindness is not his fault, or his parents’ fault, but the reason he gives is maybe even more disturbing: he says the man was born blind so that the works of God might be made manifest.
What could this possibly mean? On the surface, it suggests that God made the man blind so that later God could heal him. That is why I call it disturbing, because it seems to make God the source of sickness.
And is God the source? Well, is God the source of all things? Certainly Scripture says that he is. Other religions prefer to separate sources: one divine being is the source of good, another of evil; one of light, another of darkness; and so on. Not a few Christians find themselves in this same category, sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident, by imagining an Old Testament God full of wrath and judgment and a New Testament God full of love and mercy. But the Bible does not leave us that option: there is only the one God, utterly transcendent, who is the source of all things.
Does this really mean, though, that God is, directly, the source of the man’s blindness? There is another stream running through Scripture and tradition, which speaks of human sin and the way that humanity, the apex of creation, caused corruption to enter nature (see Gen. 3, Rom. 8). In this stream, it is clear that God is not the source of sin and evil; we are. Or, more properly, our free will is. And so God is the source in that he created us and gave us free will, but evil is not something he made; it is something he allowed, as a consequence of how he created us.
This still doesn’t answer the question about the man born blind. What is the reason for his blindness? What is the cause?
I think the most honest immediate answer is, there is no reason. Evil is by nature contrary to reason. It is not reasonable that a man should be born blind through no fault of his own; it is not reasonable that bad things should happen to good people. This is what it means to say we live in a world of sin. Modern Christians like saying, “Everything happens for a reason,” but this can blithely obscure the way evil disrupts the rational order of things. We have to name evil for what it is.
But—and this is a crucial “but”—God can create out of nothing. God can impose rationality where there is no rationality. God can transform chaotic death and destruction into good. In Tolkien’s wonderful creation myth, Ainulindalë, the creator Ilúvatar says to Melkor, the figure of Satan, that his attempts to sow disorder in the cosmic music will not ultimately succeed: “For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.” And so Jesus can say, without making God the source of evil, that there is a reason for the man’s blindness where, in a world ruled by sin, there would be none. The reason is the glory of God.
This is a hard teaching; who can accept it? It is much easier to go around insisting that “everything happens for a reason.” That may seem an easy comfort to those on the outside, but it mostly seems to ring false to those nearest to loss and tragedy, unless perhaps they are very saintly indeed.
We have to look the darkness of evil in the face and acknowledge its unreason, its utter contempt for “why.” Only then does God answer with the creative reason that makes loss into meaning, that makes sickness into the opportunity for a yet more beautiful healing.
If we understand this—if we understand the mysterious nature of God’s response to evil—maybe we can better understand what Jesus was about in his earthly ministry of healing. We read these stories, and so much of the time, we get this picture of Jesus just walking around fixing everybody’s problems. And so then we wonder why God doesn’t just come and fix all our problems. Why doesn’t God heal that family member who’s sick? Why doesn’t Jesus heal me? Why doesn’t Jesus just fix the problems in our town, our state, our nation, our world?
But, as we see in today’s story, Jesus’ healing isn’t a walk in the park: the poor recipient is dragged all over the place and cross-examined. It wasn’t just a simple fix. And anyway, the point wasn’t to fix things; it was to show God’s glory.
Fixing things, in people with free will, is never as straightforward as we would like it to be. You see, God does want to heal us. But that healing is not a quick fix. It is not a painless twirl of the wand in which everything suddenly becomes okay. Like any real healing, it involves pain, and itching, and questions, and trust.
And so, when St. Paul instructs us to walk as children of the light, what he means is to live with the knowledge that God is in charge, even when it appears that the darkness is winning.
To believe that God is in charge is to say something radical like what Jesus says—to say that an inexplicable and irrational problem can have a purpose because God is creative enough to give it one. To walk as children of the light is to enter this strange hospital of sinners known as the Church, trusting that our doctor can transform even our deepest wounds into the glorious and life-giving scars of his passion. We will never be without those scars, just as he will never be without his. Yet they shall be wonderful, like his.
Have you ever noticed that verse from Psalm 23? “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” I know that I, at least, usually gloss over it, because it’s hard to see why enemies should have anything to do with this wonderful banquet of divine goodness at the end of the psalm, apart from pure spitefulness. But this is important: in the heavenly banquet, our enemies are no longer an occasion for fear or anger or even gloating. They are an occasion for deeper joy.
We all have enemies, don’t we? Perhaps you have a real personal nemesis. But for many of us, the enemy is maybe the self, my own ego, my own scarred past, an old relationship, a financial collapse, a looming sickness. Maybe the enemy is loneliness and hurt; maybe it’s working too much, or too little; maybe it’s that person who just always seems to get on my nerves.
And we just want God to fix it, to get rid of these enemies, to vanquish them. But real healing is harder, because it means letting them be redefined, given purpose and meaning. It means seeing in darkness the coming dawn, and saying with the confidence of David, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”