John 9:1-7
“God Permits Evil – A Blind Man”
November 17, 2002 - Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost

         My sister would be more qualified than I am to preach this sermon. Eighteen years ago her son was born with a major heart defect. She embarked on a long, painful journey of watching him suffer. Matthew went through several surgeries right after birth. Then every few years more surgery has been needed to correct his heart as his body grows. Long nights beside her son’s hospital bed taught my sister in ways which no amount of study or theological reflection can match. In what I say this morning, I can only hope to imagine myself in her place and in the place of people like her who have been touched by deep and profound suffering.

         One of the first lessons learned by those who suffer is that there are no good explanations for it. As we read in verse 2, most of us look for simple, easy reasons for the suffering and evil we find in our lives. Jesus’ disciples believed that this blind man’s suffering could be easily accounted for by sin. Either he or his parents had sinned so greatly that he received a severe judgment from God.

         Those disciples were touching on good philosophical theory. The “free-will defense,” is one of the best solutions we have to the problem of evil. If your problem is how a perfectly good and all-powerful God can allow evil to happen, then free-will is the answer. Evil does not come from God, it comes from human choices. And God allows those choices because freedom is so important. Without real opportunities to choose, love and righteousness would not be genuine. God could have created robotic creatures who loved and obeyed Him perfectly, but what would be the point? Only if love is freely offered does it have any value.

         So the disciples applied that theory of free-will to the blind man’s plight. God is not responsible for his suffering, so it must be the result of someone’s choice. Either he or his parents freely sinned and brought this evil on him. His blindness was the natural outcome of misusing God-given freedom.

         The free-will defense is a good bit of Christian philosophy. It helps enormously in addressing the problem of evil. But Jesus’ answer to the disciples teaches us that it not the whole solution to our questions about evil and suffering. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus. You can’t explain this one by free-will. Not all evil is moral evil. It is not all produced by bad choices. There are different reasons for some of our suffering.

         It is surprising how often we continue to make the disciples’ mistake. While hardly any of us would dream of telling a mother like my sister that her son’s pain is the result of his or her sins, we constantly say much the same thing about a whole variety of illnesses. Modern understanding of wellness and disease asks us to believe that our health is largely determined by our own choices.

         How often do you open the newspaper and read that some bit of medical research has discovered yet another lifestyle factor which is related to a particular disease? Last year my wife read that eating good amounts of tomatoes is linked to a lower rate of prostate cancer. So Beth wanted me to enter upon a massive program of tomato consumption. But I am not a fan of tomatoes. I have great sympathy for the early American colonists who believed they are poisonous. After all, the plant belongs to the nightshade family. For me, the result of this new piece of health information was simply an addition to the long list of things I should be doing but don’t.

         I believe that my experience with tomatoes is repeated over and over in regard to the lifestyle decisions we make. You don’t even need to consider smoking and drinking too much. You dread going to the doctor because you know she will lecture you about exercising more, eating less fat, and eliminating salt from your diet. When you catch a cold it’s because you don’t wash your hands enough. If you have stomach trouble it’s because you don’t eat enough fiber, and on and on.

         All of it boils down to the implication that your health is your responsibility, the result of your own choices. If you only lived better, you would feel better. And when it comes to psychological illnesses, the actions also of a previous generation are held responsible. When you suffer from depression or paranoia, any number of therapists will look for causes in the behavior of your parents. Medicine has greatly advanced and we have dropped the word “sin” to describe our failure to take care of ourselves, but when we are sick the question often remains pretty much the same, “Who sinned, you or your parents?”

         Even in the disciples’ time, the question was an old one. It was what Job’s friends asked him over and over: What sin, what poor decision, brought this terrible suffering on him? He must have done something to deserve it. He must have made the ancient spiritual equivalent of poor lifestyle choices. Job was to blame for his own misery, and so also, thought the disciples, was the blind man.

         You might wonder why we are so ready to blame ourselves for our misfortune. That attitude results from our need for control. Even if I do nothing about it, knowing that my health is held in my own hands feels good. If it is my fault that I am sick, then I can do something about it. I can change my life and feel better. Taking responsibility for my illness gives me power to control my situation.

         Jesus, however, pointed the disciples to a much thornier problem of evil. We are not in control. Illness, pain and suffering do not all stem from choices we hold in our own power. As difficult as it is to accept, some pain and evil arises in the providence and purposes of God. After denying their sin theory of the man’s blindness, Jesus went on to explain to His followers in verse 3 that “this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in [the blind man’s] life.” Ultimately, God was responsible. God permitted this evil.

         Many Christian philosophers recognize that suffering which stems from no one’s choice is a much greater problem for faith than that which the free-will defense addresses. We are willing to countenance a God who allows us the freedom to determine our own fate, but it is much harder to accept a God who permits the forces of evil and pain to invade our lives regardless of our choices.

         As Stanley Hauerwas recognizes, the suffering of children may be the hardest case of all.[1] As a couple of you know too well, to speak of a man born blind is to remind us that there was a blind baby, and then a blind child, growing up in a struggle to find his way through a hopelessly dark world. Because of the way things were then, he ended up in the streets begging for his living.

         When adults suffer, there is always the hope of slipping back into the free-will defense, of imagining that somehow it is all deserved, all the result of human choice. But right at this moment we know personally of two children fighting cancer, Brittany who lives across the street from us, and Gabriella who used to come to church here. And it looks like Gabriella may be losing the battle. Who could look at these girls with their hair fallen out from chemotherapy and their bodies terribly thin from nausea caused by the drugs and say they deserve their pain? Who would dare to suggest that their own choices brought this evil into their lives?

         Confronted with children’s suffering, we must look elsewhere than ourselves for the answers. And all our theories come up short. What we are looking for is known as a “theodicy,” a combination of the Greek word theos for “God” and odos for “way.” We are looking to explain the ways of God. How could He in His love and mercy ever permit such things? What possible reasons could He have?

         If we hope to find our theodicy, our explanation of God’s ways, here in verse 3, we may be disappointed. Jesus told His disciples that the man was blind “so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” When we try to turn that into a theodicy, into a justification for the suffering, it seems to fail. What would justify the anguish of a little boy struggling through life without vision? What could God possibly hope to accomplish by it? To show that Jesus is His Son? To increase the faith of the disciples? To challenge the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees as the rest of chapter 9 tells? All such answers pale in the face of the reality of a child in pain. Even to propose them as explanations would suggest that we haven’t been close to such suffering.

         At this point we need to remind ourselves of just what is the work of God. We need to return to where this series of sermons began back in September. At the end of Romans 8 we learned that God’s providential work is all aimed at bringing us safely into the love of Jesus Christ. Absolutely everything in all our lives works together for the purpose of bringing us to God in Christ.

         A theodicy for the man blind from birth and for the suffering of any child it is to be found in what God is doing in Jesus. Because God is working all things together for good in Christ, no suffering is meaningless. As horribly difficult as it may be to accept, disability, sickness and pain work for our good in the long run.

         Medicine may confuse us about who is responsible for illness, but medical treatment also offers us a picture of how God can use suffering for our good. In Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on the book of Job, he argues that afflictions are a kind of medicine for the soul. He says,

… it sometimes happens that God hearkens not to a person’s pleas but rather to his advantage. A doctor does not hearken to the pleas of the sick person who requests that the bitter medicine be taken away…; instead he hearkens [to the patient’s] advantage, because by doing so he produces health, which the sick person wants most of all. In the same way, God does not remove tribulations from the person stuck in them…, because God knows these tribulations help him forward to final salvation.[2]

Philosopher Eleonore Stump brings the metaphor up to date by picturing sin as a kind of cancer of the soul. Suffering, then, is God’s spiritual chemotherapy.[3] Just as a doctor may administer what is actually a poison in the hope that it will root out and kill the cancer before it kills the patient, thus saving physical life, so God permits pain and suffering to enter our lives in the hope of rooting out sin, thus saving spiritual life.

         None of this is to say that suffering alone will save a person or that suffering is somehow really a good thing. The drugs used in chemotherapy are still poisons. Suffering is still an evil. But God is the Great Physician, and if we let Him, He can use our pain to bring us out of sin and spiritual death and into His glory in Christ. What we must remember is that His goal is not to make us feel better in this world, but to give us a spiritual health which will last into eternity.

         You might think this all flies in the face of the fact that Jesus healed the blind man. And in the Old Testament, God restored Job’s health and gave him back all he had lost. Doesn’t that mean God can and does make some people feel better now? Yes, but Scripture is very clear that these miracles and answered prayers are not God’s goal. Whatever well-being is given in this world is only temporary. God’s goal is that we will place our faith in Jesus Christ in order to come to eternal rather than temporary well-being. He heals and restores some of us now to remind us that He has the power and the intent to heal forever all those who trust Him.

         So the Lord did not just correct the disciples and give them the proper reason for the blind man’s suffering, explaining how God was working in the man’s life. He made theodicy a visible reality by healing the man. Jesus spoke to His disciples about the work of God being done and then He did it. Jesus healed the man born physically blind to give full demonstration to the truth He spoke in chapter 8 which He repeats here in verse 5, “I am the light of the world.” If we are looking for answers in the darkness, whether it is caused human evil or natural suffering, they are to be found in Him, in the Son of God who does His Father’s work.

         However, there is a bit more to say about all this. When in verse 4 Jesus talks about doing the work of God, He uses the word “we.” He doesn’t speak only of Himself saying I “must do the work of him who sent me.” He says “we must do the work…” He invites the disciples and every Christian to join Him in the work of healing which He performs. In saying that God can use suffering, we are not saying that it is a good thing. Definitely not all suffering needs to exist for God’s purposes. Just as physicians work hard to assure that the drugs they administer in chemotherapy are not lethal doses, so Christians have a role in God’s work to limit the amount of suffering on earth.

         That is why Hauerwas says that suffering is a practical rather than a theoretical problem for the church.[4] It is all well and good to get our theology in order and discover truth which makes suffering intelligible. But it still remains for us all to respond to the suffering which we find around us. How will we handle evil and pain when it touches the lives of people near us?

         Jesus healed people in many ways. Often He simply spoke or touched a person and His power made them whole. This time, however, we find in verses 6 and 7 that the Lord used what seem like odd medical tools to us. He spit on the ground, made a bit of mud, rubbed it on the man’s eyes, then told him to go and wash.

         It sounds strange and unhygienic to us, but as William Barclay maintains, spit was common sense medicine in those times. People have always observed how animals lick their wounds. Ancient people believed that the application of spit had curing powers. The Roman historian Pliny devotes a chapter to the healing properties of spit. Spit was supposed to protect from the poison of serpents and from epilepsy. Spit from a person fasting could heal leprous spots on the skin and other diseases.[5] So Jesus was actually using an ordinary medical practice of the day. If it had been today, He might have used Visine instead.

         Barclay argues that “Jesus took the methods and customs of His time and used them,” in order to gain the confidence of His patient. Let me suggest a different reason. Jesus used common medicine in order to invite the disciples – and us – to follow His example. He healed the blind man using ordinary means available to any of them. He called them – and you and I – to join Him in the work of God. The spit is there to demonstrate that while we may seldom have the miracle working power Jesus had, we always have means to help and care for those who are suffering.

         Jesus calls us to employ whatever means we have in God’s work of caring for those who suffer. Some of you have medical skills; some of you are good listeners. Some of you have time or resources to offer to those in need; others can cook. Garrison Keillor isn’t all that far wrong when he says that “a nice hot-dish with macaroni, cream of mushroom soup and tuna is really the best response to the existence of evil in the world.” Christ called us to take whatever we have and place it in the service of those who are hurting.

         Jesus said then that we must work now because the night is coming. For Him it was the night of the Cross, of His death for our sins, when all His work on earth would be done. For us the night is coming when God brings this world someday to an end. All the work we might do for God will be finished when our Lord returns and brings history to a close.

         In the meantime, we not only suffer for our own good, we have a great mission to help others who are suffering so that they can see how God is working in all things to bring them to Jesus. As we will recall next week, our Lord will then judge how well we have responded to those in need around us. May you and I faithfully and joyfully do His work so that blind eyes everywhere will see that He indeed is the light of the world.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2002 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj