The Fourth Sunday in Lent

 John 9:1-25

“Rabbi, who sinned – this man or his parents – that he was born blind?”

That’s the question the disciples put to Jesus one day when they encountered this man begging by the side of the road. Unable to work and provide a living of his own, the man was dependent upon the generosity of others.

And I think the disciples felt badly that it was so. In their journey with Jesus they had been discovering all sorts of wonderful things about the love of God for people. And more and more, it just didn’t seem to make sense that a loving God would allow such tragedies to take place.

So they had questions. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents – that he was born blind?”

 At its heart, it is the same question you and I ask when we are confronted by the harshness of life. It is the great existential question, “Why?”

Why was this man born blind?

Why was my child born with Down’s Syndrome?

Why did my husband die leaving me all alone?

Why did I get cancer?

Why did that tornado destroy my house?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

“Why was this man born blind?”

In asking the question, the disciples are quick to offer God an excuse for this handicap. They do not assign responsibility to the Deity, but rather place the blame squarely on the human actors in this drama.

“Who sinned, this man or his parents that he should be born blind?”

Does it sound strange to you that the blind man’s own sin could have been the cause of his being BORN blind? There was a belief in those days that it was possible for a person to sin in utero­ – before birth – still in the womb of their mother! This was how questions of birth defects were answered. So maybe the tragedy was the man’s own fault!

We human beings often do that – blame the bad stuff that happens to people on some sin or lack of responsibility on their part! I will always remember when Lydia came to me, sobbing about something that had happened in the grocery store. Her children were acting up, causing an uproar, and some other shoppers were getting irritated. One woman glared at the children – two of them white, one of them black – and then looked harshly at Lydia and said, “Serves you right for going outside your race!” And the woman called her a very bad name.

Lydia told me this was not the first time it had happened when she, a beautiful blonde white woman with two beautiful blonde children and one beautiful black baby went out in public. People assumed she was morally loose and the children were fathered by men of different racial groups. And they were. But the little blonde children were hers by her husband Tom, and the black child was fathered by someone who had decided to not be a father, and whose drug-addicted mother had given the child up. And Tom and Lydia had taken the foster child  into the safety and love of their home and family.

We are quick to blame people for their troubles, and slow to understand their truth.

“Who sinned, this man…that he was born blind?”

Or was it his parents who messed up?

Over the years, I’ve been in the company of many parents who have – in the face of their children’s failures and tragedies – asked the question, “How did we fail?” “Where did we go wrong?” “What did we do to deserve this?”

Sometimes we deal with the tragedy in our lives by blaming ourselves.

“Who sinned…his parents that he was born blind?”

So the disciples were only being human when they asked the question they asked. And being good religious people by then, they made sure they defended God by blaming the blindness on the misdeeds of either the man or his parents.

But Jesus said, “No.”

“Neither this man, nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus. And then Jesus said something terribly controversial. “…this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life…”

I don’t believe that Jesus is saying that tragedies befall people so that God can later heal them and gain glory. That would be like a mother cutting her child so she could later dress the wound and put on a band aid and find favor for being a good, loving mother. Or, maybe it would be like my father who in my childhood gave me a spanking for some misdeed. As he put me over his knee and wound up to whack me, he said, “Butch, this is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.”

Yeah, right! Ha. Ha. Ha. Trust me, I did not give my dad the glory for that spanking!

One of the great discoveries to be made in this story of the man born blind is that Jesus does not really take up the question, “Why did this happen?” Instead Jesus, turns his attention to another more important question, “What can I do about this tragedy in the name of God?”

So Jesus responds by teaching his disciples that we must do the work of God while we can.

He moves us from “Why?” to “What?” – from a question we really cannot answer to what we can actually do. And you heard what happened. Jesus spit on the ground, made some mud, applied it to the man’s eyes, then told him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam. And we read, “So the man went and washed, and came home seeing!”

WOW!

From “Why?” – to “What?” – to “WOW!”

Now the “why?” question is a good question. And we should ask it always! Trouble is, we seldom find an answer to it. And even if we did, understanding WHY bad things happen in the world does not give us anything we can use to make things better. If there is a benefit to asking “Why?” it is that the question brings us face to face with our very human limitations. Life is bigger than us. It is beyond our control. And quite often, life is beyond our comprehension. The only truthful answer to the question, “Why was this man born blind?” is “Who knows?”

But he is BLIND. And we can DO something to help with that.

Some of you may know that Sandy and I are avid Lady Vol basketball fans. We had season tickets for many years when we lived in Tennessee. Over time, we got to know some of the people who sat around us, and one of the more interesting groups was a family of four that sat in the row directly in front of us. There was an older man and his wife, and another man and a younger girl – perhaps a daughter or a niece. And there was something odd about this family. From the moment they arrive at the game to the moment they left, they never said a word! They did not cheer on the Lady Vols or yell at the referees as I like to do. They did not speak to us or any of the other neighbors around them. And strangest of all, they did not talk to each other. They were a family that lived in silence. For three years I watched them, and not once did I see or hear one of them say anything to anyone. Why do you suppose that is? What a bizarre family!

Well, during our last season there, they started bringing along a little boy – maybe 2 or 3 years old. He was a funny kid, always wiggling around and playing with little toys. Once, he had a superhero figure and was “shooting” one of the men in the family with it. The man smiled. But he never said a word. Odd! I’d been trying to psychoanalyze what was going on with this group, but I could not figure them out! For some reason, they just didn’t say anything – despite the little boy’s efforts to get some sort of rise out of them. I wonder WHY?

But they obviously love the little guy. He often sat in the lap of the woman we assumed was his grandmother, and she kissed his face and rubbed his back. The fellow we thought was the grandfather would occasionally pick up a diaper bag and take the little guy out to change him, and when the boy returned, he almost always had something delicious from the refreshment stand.

But they didn’t talk. They never talked. In three years we never witnessed them saying a word.

Until the last game of the season.

The little boy was playing peek-a-boo with Sandy. His grandfather must have thought he was bothering us because he picked the boy up and started to turn him away. But Sandy said, “Oh, he’s not bothering us. We enjoy watching him! He’s such a cute little boy!”

And then, all of a sudden, the man spoke. It was the first time ever that he said anything to us. And this is what he said:

“Our daughter died last September. Now we have him, and her newborn, too. Their father was separated from our daughter when she died, and wants no part of them. So we are raising babies again.”

The “Why?” question I had been asking for the past three years all of a sudden was irrelevant. And I suppose the “Why?” question that must plague that family goes continually unanswered – “Why did our daughter have to die leaving two little children behind?”

Why?

But, for Sandy and me, the “Why?” question melted away in the truly beautiful face of the “What” they are doing in the midst of their tragedy. They have set their own lives aside, to love and nurture two little orphaned children. They are doing the work of God.

And even the odd fact that they don’t SAY very much seems to have much less meaning in the face of the LOVE they are articulating into the lives of those precious children.

In the face of all their “Why’s” they are displaying the glory of God.

I don’t know WHY there are wars in this world, but I do know that we can be peacemakers. I don’t know WHY there are so many divisions between people, but we can be reconcilers. I don’t know WHY people get sick and die, but I know we can walk with them along the way and lend them our strength for the journey. I don’t know WHY mothers die leaving little children behind, but I know we can love those children and help them grow.

At the end of the story of the man born blind, the religious authorities demand to know WHY the healing happened if Jesus is a sinner as they suspect.

And this is how the man answers, “I don’t know if he is a sinner, or why or how this happened. All I know is this – I was blind, but now I see!”

From “Why? – to “What?” – to “Wow!”

You may not be able to answer the “Why?” questions of life, but you can do something about the “What?”

And like our neighbors at the game, all you can say when you see God’s glory at work, is “WOW!”

This is the Good News of Jesus Christ!