Opportunities
John 9:1-42[1]
It doesn’t take long
for those of us who live in this world to learn that bad things sometimes happen
to good people. In fact, sometimes what happens to good people in this world is
downright evil. I personally think that makes praying “deliver us from evil” in
the Lord’s Prayer all the more relevant for all of us. For me, at least, one of
the reasons I look to the Lord’s Prayer is because the evil in this world can
cause us to struggle with our faith. In fact, more than one good soul has
turned away from faith because of the evil that has come either into their life
or the life of someone they care about. And there are many sensitive souls
among us who struggle to believe in a loving God simply because there is just
so very much violence and injustice in our world.
I would say that one
part of this experience that makes it particularly challenging for faith is the
pain and fear we may have to carry as a result of the bad things that can
happen to us. When those “bad things” truly rise to the level of “evil,” they
tend to leave a wound. And wounds like that can run deep and sometimes they
never fully heal. Or if they do heal, they remain very sensitive to certain
triggers. And that kind of pain naturally leads to fear. But I would say, from
my experience with fear, that it always cuts us off from the one source of true
healing: our God whose love for us never fails. We cannot know what the future will
bring, whether good or bad, but if we’re going to live in faith rather than staying
shackled to our fear, we’re going to have to learn to find the good that God brings
even out of the hard things in life.
Our Gospel lesson
raises this issue for us right from the start. The lesson tells us that as
Jesus “walked along, he saw a man blind from birth” (Jn 9:1). The fact that
this man was born blind led Jesus’ disciples to ask him what must seem to us a
strange question: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born
blind?” (Jn 9:2). I think the question must sound strange to our ears
because we don’t see a disability like blindness as a punishment from God. But it
was common in that day to think of the suffering in this world as a direct
result of somebody’s sin. And so they could entertain the possibility that a
person could sin even before they were born in order to explain something like this.
That kind of cause and
effect approach to sin and suffering had a long history with the Jewish people.
It started with the Ten Commandments, which say that God punishes “children for
the iniquity of parents to the third and fourth generation” (Dt 5:9)! And, of
course, it was the premise for much of the history of Israel in the Hebrew
Bible: when the king did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, so did the
people, and they suffered for it. And it’s the assumption that Job’s so-called
“friends” made: if you’re suffering in any way you must have done something
wrong. So they stubbornly kept trying to convince Job to admit his sin to find
relief from his suffering.
But Jesus explodes
that assumption about sin and suffering. He refused to accept the premise of
the disciples’ question, that someone must have sinned to cause this man to be
born blind. Instead, he answered them bluntly, “Neither this man nor his
parents sinned” (Jn 9:3). I think Jesus was carrying forward a point that had
already been made in the book of Job. Job maintained his innocence, even though
God reminded him that when he asked the question “why?” he was asking more than
he could begin to understand. But God upheld Job’s integrity. In fact, at the
end of the story, God’s anger was kindled against the friends for insisting
that God was punishing Job for something he’d done wrong. God rebukes them, saying,
“you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7). Even
Job’s questions were more true to God than their assumptions about sin and
suffering.
In our Gospel lesson,
Jesus not only denied the assumption that suffering must have been caused by
sin. More than that, he pointed his disciples in a completely different
direction. He insisted that this man was born blind “so that God’s works might
be revealed in him” (Jn 9:3). Now, I would have to say that this point of view
could also be abused. But I think what Jesus was trying to do was to turn
people away from obsessively looking for someone to blame when things go wrong
in life. Instead, I think Jesus wanted them and us to look for the good that
God can bring even out of the worst things that can happen to us. Of course, in
this particular situation, I think Jesus said what he did in part because he
knew he was going to restore this man’s sight.
One of my favorite
parts of the Study Catechism that we use with the Confirmation Class and in
worship is the affirmation that God brings “good out of evil, so that nothing
evil is permitted to occur that God does not bend finally to the good.”[2] It’s a wonderful promise that helps us look for the good that God can bring out
of suffering. But it can also present a challenge for our faith. After all, not
every blind person has their sight restored. And more often than not it can be
very difficult, if not impossible, when something bad happens to us or someone
we love to even consider that God could bring good out of it.
But I would say that
this is one of those places where our faith becomes more than just words we
recite together on Sunday morning. To be able to look at this life, this life
with all the suffering and hardships it can bring, and put our faith in the God
whose love for us never fails is perhaps the greatest challenge we will face.
Partly, that’s because we may never see the good that God brings out of the bad
things that may happen to us. The catechism does say that God bends the evil
that occur “finally” to the good. To leave open the possibility, the hope, that
God will bring good out of even the worst things that have happened to us in
this life is to take a step beyond a life of pain and fear into a life of
trust. To do so is to recognize that our lives are in God’s hands, and that we
may never know what opportunities, what good things, God can create from the
hardships we suffer in this world.
[1] ©
2023 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 3/19/2023 for Hickman
Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] “The
Study Catechism: Full Version with Biblical References,” Approved by the 210th
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA (1998), question 22.
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