Bad Things

Propers: Laetare, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

That’s the question, isn’t it? And not just for religion. This is a universal question, one that goes right to the heart of all human experience.

One of the things that make us uniquely human is our ability to differentiate between the way things are and the way things ought to be. This is really quite remarkable when you think about it. We look at the world and we know that something’s wrong, that reality is not the way it should be, the way it was meant to be. We see injustice and suffering and evil, and we know we can do better, that we should do better. How do we know that? Against what standard are we measuring the entire world?

We appear to be the only animal that possesses this mixed blessing. Beasts suffer, yes. They mourn, yes. But your dog, for example, is not overcome with existential dread at the apparent unfairness of the world. He’s pretty happy just being a dog. Yet you and I can see that the world is broken, can’t we? that it’s all gone wrong. And the reason we can see it, when we bother to pay attention, is because we’re the ones who broke it. We ate that fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And so we are condemned to see the world both as God made it and as we’ve made it.

In our rather lengthy Gospel reading this morning, Jesus’ disciples see a blind man, and they ask Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” They want to know why bad things happen to good people. In a perfectly just world, good things would always happen to good people, and bad things would only ever happen to bad people. So clearly somebody screwed up. Who is at fault when the world goes wrong?

Now, there have been many attempts to answer this question, perhaps the most famous being karma. Karma is this notion that everything balances out, that you get what you deserve. Do good, get good; do bad, get bad. Simple, elegant, sensible. If a man goes blind, it must be because he deserved it. Clearly he did something wrong, and with karma what goes around comes around. Hence, a bad man goes blind.

Of course, a man born blind complicates things a bit. What could a baby have done to deserve such punishment, be a bad fetus? In such a case as this, perhaps it was his parents who screwed up, and this is really their fault. Or perhaps the baby just did something particularly naughty in a previous life, should you happen to believe in such things.

One can see the appeal of karma. It tells us that injustice is an illusion, and that the world, far from having gone wrong, in fact balances out in the end. All our worries were for naught. The nasty side of this, however, is the implicit urge to blame the victim. If someone is poor, if someone is lame, if someone is blind or injured or abused or raped or murdered—well, they had it coming. But if someone is rich and prosperous and lives a life of conspicuous consumption—they’re only enjoying their just desserts. Such moral calculus keeps the strong on top, the weak underfoot, and the suffering in despair.

Yet to this day, people honestly seem to think that this is how God works. That if you get cancer, or lose a child, or your house burns down, somehow that’s justice. It’s all part of God’s inscrutable plan! What did I do, we ask, to deserve this? The answer, of course, is nothing. You didn’t do anything to deserve this. Bad things do not happen to good people because God put His thumb on the scale. Bad things happen to good people because this is a broken world, a fallen world, a world that does not function the way that God intends.

I can’t tell you how many horror stories I’ve heard of people who’ve lost children, and the preacher or some other well-meaning fool tells the grieving parents that God must’ve had a reason for taking their beloved son or daughter. Shut up! What, God kills babies now? Did I miss something? Did we just skip over the parts of the Bible where it flat-out says, “God did not create death,” “It is not the will of My Father that even one of these little ones be lost,” “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that all who believe in Him might not perish but have eternal life”? Death is not God’s game. We can talk about David and Moses some other time.

Bad things happen because it’s a broken world, period. And yes, it is broken by our sin, but that doesn’t work out on a one-to-one basis. When one of us sins, the consequences are not limited to oneself. We’re all too interconnected for that. Jesus has come into the world not to condemn the world but to save it—to forgive us our sins and heal our wounds and raise our dead! When bad things happen, we want to know why God doesn’t get up off His heavenly throne and do something about it. We want Him to batter this world back into submission, to force it right again, to make us be good. Because that’s what we would do, if we were God. Right?

But God doesn’t work that way. Love doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t tyrannize, doesn’t force. Instead, God does what we least expect Him to do. He sets aside all His power and glory to come down here, as one of us. He responds to our sufferings by sharing them. He responds to our brokenness by entering it. He responds to our death by taking it all upon Himself. When Lazarus died, Jesus didn’t say, “He had it coming!” or “It’s all part of the plan!” No. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept. And then He pulled his sorry carcass right out of that tomb and raised him to new life with but a word.

God doesn’t want the man to be born blind. God doesn’t want the child to die. Don’t preach to me about the sovereignty of God if it turns Him into some cruel despot. But such is His goodness and His power that He can take these terrible things, these tragedies that seemingly can never be set right in this world, and He miraculously extracts good out from them—strength from weakness, glory from shame, life from death! In the end God wins not through violence or fiat but through undying, immortal love.

Look, it’s true that virtue and wisdom will often result in a better life for ourselves and for all those around us. And it’s also true that people who do terrible things often reap their just rewards. But not always. It’s still a broken world. And when things get personal—when it’s us who suffer, us who receive that horrible diagnosis, us who lose the ones we love—no amount of theological theory or pious pontificating will suffice. We want to know where God is when horrible things happen, and we want to know what the heck He’s doing to make it right.

The answer, of course, is that God is right where He’s always been: beside us, above us, within us; not alien but intimate; not distant and uncaring, but with us in our sufferings. And He is still promising to us that impossible promise, the one we could never hope to believe were it not for the Holy Spirit burning inside us the fire of faith: the promise that we are forgiven, and beloved, redeemed; that the day is surely coming when Christ shall dry every tear, and heal every wound, and raise every mother’s son from the loamy earth of the grave. Then shall God be all in all, and the world at last set right.

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus said of the man born blind. “He was born so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.