Born Blind

Propers: The Fourth Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

“Don’t you feel guilty that your son got cancer? That wouldn’t have happened if you’d followed a vegan diet while you were still pregnant.”

I know that sounds ridiculous, offensive, and over-the-top, but it is sadly an actual question that a young man with cancer overheard a woman at church ask of his mother, blaming her for the loss of his legs. And she a Christian woman! People still think in this way. They see tragedy, injustice, pandemic, and they look to assign blame—because if someone is at fault, then the tragedy makes sense. And if it makes sense, then it isn’t quite so very scary for all the rest of us.

When something goes wrong, when a child dies, when we suffer injury or loss or some awful diagnosis, people try to explain it away. And the easiest thing to do is to blame the victim. Oh, he got sick because of his lifestyle. Oh, she lost her job because she wasn’t dynamic enough for this economy. Oh, that hurricane wiped out New Orleans because they’re all notorious sinners.

Such rationalizing is, of course, nakedly selfish. It doesn’t comfort the person suffering. It only seeks to assuage those of us made uncomfortable by their suffering—uncomfortable because we know that if it could happen to them, then it could happen to us. And we need to come up with a reason as to why it won’t, why we’re different, why they deserved for this to happen, and we somehow do not.

Such is the mindset that Jesus must confront directly in our Gospel reading this morning. He and His Apostles encounter a man born blind, and the Apostles seek a justification for this, a divine sanction for their possessing sight while he does not. Obviously, someone sinned. That’s the only reason this would happen in a just world, a godly world, right? So who was it? Did he sin, presumably in utero? Or is his very birth in this manner a punishment for his parents’ transgressions?

This is victim-blaming at its worst. It’s the same sort of mindset that tells us that if we’re safe, if we’re wealthy, if we’re prosperous, it’s because we deserve it, we’ve earned it, in ways that the teeming masses of the globe have not. We always find justification for our own privilege. It makes us uncomfortable to think that who we are, what we own, is a gift, the product of grace. Because if we didn’t earn it, well, then we might be expected to share it with others who didn’t earn it.

Surely there is sin involved here, but not in the way that we wish it were.

Jesus has no patience for such karmic retribution. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” He answers them. “But that the works of God might be displayed in him, we must work the works of Him who sent Me.” And this, mind you, even makes the translators uncomfortable. In many versions, they add the phrase, “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed.” But that’s not in the text. It was added to make it seem as though God made him blind.

And what a funny sort of God that would be! First He blinds a boy yet to be born, then comes down in the flesh to heal Him of the very malady He’d inflicted. This would seem to pit God the Father against God the Son—and since the Son does naught but the Father’s will, the Father’s will would thus be self-contradictory. It’s nonsense. God’s will is revealed in the work and life of Jesus Christ, and that will is for the sick to be healed, the sinful forgiven, the dead raised, and the blind given sight. God in Christ Jesus has no patience for blaming the victim.

The truth is that bad things happen because it’s a broken world, a fallen world—a world scarred by sin, disobedience, and rebellion; by the fires of pride, avarice, envy, wrath, sloth, lust, and gluttony. The world is not as God intends. Nor will He let things stand in this state of affairs. He made the world good, and by God, He will make it good again. And for as much as we might wish that He would snap His almighty fingers and force it to be good—work divine violence against evil—that’s not how love works. That’s not how God works.

If anyone has a right to blame, it’s God. But that’s not what He does in Jesus Christ.

God has come down as one of us to spread healing, forgiveness, new life, and enlightenment. He has come to love the world back into being. We can shake our fists as the injustice of the cosmos and demand that He get off His high heavenly throne and get down here to do something about it—but He already has. He has come down to join us in our suffering, to take it all within Himself: all the violence, all the blame, all the brokenness, all the hatred; to absorb it all within His broken, tattered body, and nail it in Himself to the Cross.

And then from that Cross—from the very Blood that we ourselves shed—He pours out such an ocean of superabundant mercy that it drowns out hell and floods Creation all the way back up into Heaven. He does not ignore suffering; He claims it. He does not abandon the forgotten; He raises them up. He does not stand aloft and aloof from this world but plunges down into the mud and the blood and loves us all the way to hell and back. And the work, it’s true, is not yet done. But the victory is already won in His Son.

When tragedy strikes—war, pestilence, natural disaster—it’s easy to blame God, to say that the suffering deserve what they get as their just desserts. It’s even easier when we replace God with karma: that Australia, say, deserved to burn because of their coal industry; that of course China produced the coronavirus what with their oppressive regimes and unregulated wildlife markets. We assign blame so as to dodge guilt, and thereby we avoid compassion altogether.

When these things happen, when suffering breaks forth, when the world rolls off course, so that the way things are is not the way that we know they ought to be, we cannot credit this as the result of divine retribution, of Zeus hurling thunderbolts. Nor is it the result of particular human guilt, as though this group of people deserves to die, as though they brought it on themselves. No, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. All of us have had a hand in breaking our world. And all of us are still in this together.

Covid-19 has reminded us, brutally, that we are not separate from the suffering of mankind; that the West is not somehow better, somehow transcendent above and beyond the sick and hungry masses of the two-thirds world. But as tempting as it may be, it is surely sin to blame this on the wrath of God—or even on God’s benign neglect. We know where God is, right now. We know what God is doing, right now.

He is working through the hands and minds and steely spines of doctors, nurses, researchers, cleaners, clerks, grocers, teachers, and all those who in this time of crisis are risking and sacrificing in order to serve and protect the most vulnerable in our society: the poor, the elderly, and the ill. He works in those merchants who ration toilet paper and hand sanitizer and food, standing firm against the satanic evils of hoarders and price-gougers and profiteers of human suffering. He speaks in all of those leaders who prioritize protecting the common citizen rather than firming up the walls of the wealthy.

Wherever there is suffering, there is God: in the helpers, in the lovers, in the givers, in the selfless. In bus drivers who deliver meals to hungry children. In parents who turn now to homeschooling their kids. In citizens under quarantine who applaud from open windows those tireless medical workers toiling to save us all. God did not break the world. But He is healing it even now, through the very same agents who broke it—through the ministries of angels and of men.

In times of crisis, of turmoil and of plague, the light of truth reveals each of us for who we truly are—for whose we truly are. Those who steal as much as they can, who hole up, heavily armed and brooding, on their dragon-hoard, have already cowardly submitted to greed and to fear. But look for the helpers. Look for the servers. Look for the holy. And there you will see the living God still at work in this world.

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