It would be super cool to walk with Jesus and shoot him all sorts of theological questions. Imagine that. Apparently, it was popular to believe that some sort of hardship, or suffering, or disability in someone’s life was directly tied to someone’s sin. The disciples see this blind man and ask Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” (John 9.)
Bad theology never dies until the day it dies forever. There is nothing new under the sun. People still believe variations of this bad idea: that God pays us back for our sin with some sort of suffering. We have engrained in us a sense of justice that the fall has corrupted, so it’s easy to default to this view of God in which he is in this constant sort of back and forth. You do something wrong; he punishes you somehow.
It is true that suffering, something our blind friend in John, Chapter 9 would know intimately in a world that has no place for him, exists because of sin. Meaning, had man never rebelled against God, sin and all that comes with it, would not exist. Death exists because sin does. And it is true that we can sometimes see suffering as a direct result of sin. For example, emotional harm to a child whose parents abuse her. A man cheats on his wife, and his family suffers.
Here’s where we get in trouble: when we try to draw a straight line between someone’s sin and something in their life they have no control over. You are blind, and that’s because of your sin. We do not know God’s divine reason for permitting hardship in our life or the lives of others, and it is wildly inappropriate to play God and speculate. You can do tremendous harm to someone else when you tell them their sin causes their illness, or their sin has hurt their children.
Jesus does not accept their premise. This man is not born blind because of the sins of his parents or his own sin. Jesus provides a sort of redemptive framework by which we can approach a situation like this: Look not for the sin that caused this, look for what God can do in this.
I think this is good for all of us who have some sort of serious challenge-physical, mental, spiritual-look not for the root cause of it, but rather look at what God is doing in the midst of it. Don’t think punitively, think redemptively.
This blindness is an opportunity for the power of God to be seen.