Who sinned?

John 9:1-7 p. 102

John 9:1–7 NRSV

1 As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7 saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

We are in this season of Lent and trying to ask the right questions as we seek after God and follow Jesus to the cross. We want to get it right, we want to know what God has for us and our world.

Sometimes, we ask really good questions, questions that draw us closer to God and the other. Questions about who we will turn our hearts to, questions about what it means to truly sacrifice and receive God’s grace.

We also, if we’re honest, ask the wrong questions. This morning’s text is a case of asking the wrong question — who sinned?

We ask this question from a posture that expects it is someone’s fault for a condition such as blindness or disability, somehow thinking from an ableist perspective that there’s something inherently wrong with the person because their body isn’t working the same as ours. These kinds of questions are filled with assumptions, judgement, and dismissal of the real person.

Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, a Presbyterian pastor and contributor to our “Seeking” devotional this Lent, wrote this beautiful commentary piece on our morning’s text. He says,

First let us name the ableist notion that “blindness” is an inherent deficiency. Metaphors using blindness are built on the idea that this physical state of being is somehow “less than” and, regardless of the cause, is in all cases a problem, malady, and affliction that must be solved, healed, and fixed. The culture of Jesus' time did not think any differently, thus the many examples of physical limitation being the stand-in for sin and brokenness.

The passage today uses physical affliction as a vehicle to point out how humanity always wants to be sure and secure about the world. The crowd is certain that there must be a cause (someone’s fault) and effect (God’s judgment) at play, and when the effect is made known, they refuse to believe the cause that has been given credit.

We want to believe, but only on our terms.

We want to believe that people should be held accountable for their actions; generally speaking this is not a terrible thing for society, but in this case, we are talking about a human’s personhood and the assumptions made about the person. The disciples' first reaction is to debate the blindness and not deal at all with the human. Intellectualizing and theologizing outside of seeing the created being right in front of them led them to ask the wrong questions. Rather than ask, “How can we heal and help?” they ask, “Whose fault is it?”

We do the same thing today when suffering, pain, and affliction are revealed right before us. Empathetic inquiry is set aside and we rush to diagnosis and treatment before we even know the nature and depth of the problem we are trying to address . . . or if it is a problem at all. We too easily view one another through a one-dimensional lens so much so that all we can do is start down a path toward misplaced questions and actions based on mistaken assumptions:

• “They must be poor because of X, so let’s solve X by doing Y...” • “She must be incarcerated because...”

• “The reason they are being deported must be because...”

• “He must be experiencing mental health issues because...”

• “He must be sick because...”

We turn genuine struggles of the human condition into solvable formulas of cause and effect, which then gets warped into the idea that if something bad is happening to us, it is because God has determined that we deserve it. And the need for security does not stop there. Rather than give God credit for the healing and new life—because it would lessen the perception of power and authority of the religious leaders—the rational cause- and-effect argument from the beginning is ignored and replaced with a position of, “We know what we know and nothing you do or say will change our minds.”

Again, it is not a difficult leap for today’s application:

• “We know people are poor because...”

• “We know people are incarcerated because...” • “We know people are sick because...”

• “We know...We know...We know...”

The truth is, we don't know, but the hope is that we could know more if only we would take the time to ask better questions.

So what might those better questions be?

What if, instead of “what’s wrong with him?” they asked “how can we help? or “how do you experience this blindness, how can we know you where you are?”

All evil and pain is meant to be turned to good? Maybe not.

The text does not say that all events reveal God’s work…rather than in this particular man, God’s work is being revealed as Jesus heals him. This is important, because if we begin to think that all pain and suffering is somehow meant to reveal God’s goodness and hand on our lives, then we come up short as we consider the depth of suffering so commonplace in our lives and in the world. There is great evil at work in our world, evil which divides countries into war, families into conflict, harm done for the benefit of the perpetrator. There is wickedness in so many places, even welling up in our own hearts as we seek to harm others or protect ourselves unjustly. To say that God will use a story of harm or trauma, abuse or neglect, to show God’s work is to transform that trauma incorrectly. Yes, God is present our moments of deepest pain and sorrow. Yes, God knows all that we go through and must confront in our lives. But we must be careful not to somehow expect every sorrow to have a silver lining. Some things are just hard.

AND...

And, in all things, God’s way is revealed. Is it God’s way that this man was born blind? That’s the angle of this questioning that Jesus receives from disciples. They want to believe there is a purpose to this man’s suffering. And they also are caught up in a story from their religious tradition that says the sins of the parents are born by the child, that sinfulness gets passed down and this man’s blindness is somehow a consequence for their previous actions.

We know where this thinking comes from. The Hebrew Law, set forth in the 5 books of the Torah, the opening of the first testament, gives very explicit teaching on how the sinfulness of one generation would be punished down their lineage.

Deuteronomy 5:6–10 NRSV

6 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; 7 you shall have no other gods before me. 8 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 9 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, 10 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

The ancients understood the implications of their actions and how harm or disconnection that occurs in one family or group would often continue to be inflicted upon the generations to follow.

We know how these cycles look in our modern world, as well, though we don’t link them with sinfulness directly. We know that there are cycles of generational poverty that keep certain families or even entire people groups locked into unhealthy and tremendously difficult circumstances.

Generational poverty is a good example of this: children born into poverty feel the generational impacts, as families who lack enough food to eat, experience higher instances of delayed brain development. In Washington State, children born into poor households, as well, are something like 3 times as likely to drop out of school, which then leads to an inability to find a job that pays enough to provide for them and their families, which leads to children born into poverty, and again, you can see how the cycle perpetuates itself.

We could be like the disciples and look at a family living in this cycle of poverty and ask the question: whose fault is it? Is it the parents, who couldn’t provide for the child? Is it the child, who didn’t have the ability to pull themself up by their own bootstraps? Is it the education system that wasn’t able to intervene or social services that weren’t available? We want to blame someone for these cycles, while also acknowledging that we aren’t providing the right solutions to break these cycles.

Add another layer upon this: systemic racism against black people in our country leads to another self-perpetuating cycle of poverty and lower degrees of social mobility. I found an interesting Brookings Institution article that noted for Americans born in the “1940s through the 1960s, the median white American in their early thirties had $29,000 more wealth than the median Black American of the same age.” They went on to note that as we age, “the media white American in their late fifties had $251,000 more wealth than the median Black American.” The author states, “this is not just because initial wealth gaps compounded over time....[In fact] even conditional on having the same wealth in their thirties, white Americans reach a significantly higher wealth rank by their late fifties than Black Americans.”

The article goes on to talk about the lack of upward mobility experienced by Black people in contrast to white people, where white folks move up and oftentimes, black folks will actually move down the wealth ladder generation to generation.

If we stick with this line of thinking around generational poverty and impact of harm or sin in the many rippling layers of family, we could ask the question: who sinned? Racism tells us that there is something inherently superior about white people that leads to these difference. We have deep wounds and scars on our national psyche that somehow lead us to point the finger at the ones in the struggle. Or, take the prosperity gospel preached in some churches, which says that we are somehow blessed with riches when God shows favor upon us, utterly ignoring the realities of generational wealth and privilege which greatly impact our social mobility.

What if we turned this question of who sinned back around and used it as a mirror? Who sinned, so that black people are more likely to suffer under the weight of lesser social mobility in this country? Was it black people who sinned? How about if white people could turn this question around and see ourselves in the mirror: In this context, it is white people who sinned, and in some ways continue to sin, by holding black bodies as inferior, for benefiting from the systems of slavery and bondage that our nation was built upon. Who sinned? Slavers and all the people who benefited from the subjugation of an entire racial group and those who perpetuated this subjugation through Jim Crow laws, segregation, red-lining, and mass incarceration of black people, which continues to this day.

So what are we to do?

We acknowledge generational sin and the lasting impacts it can have on our society. We acknowledge that while we may not be actively perpetrating harm to others, we are influenced by layers and layers of generational action that lead us to order our world the way we do.

We acknowledge that we are complicit.

And in all of these acknowledgements, we have the opportunity to repent, to seek forgiveness, and to set out on a better course.

Let’s go back to our blind man, for a moment.

We don’t have much information in this text about the man, other than he was born blind. We now know that blindness is commonly caused by things like vitamin A deficiency, measles, congenital caratacts, conjunctivitis, and retinopathy of prematurity. I’m sure the doctors and nurses here could explain how each of these conditions impacts the person’s ability to see. We know so much more now, with our research and scientific breakthroughs.

As a father, I remember all the concern and worry before Asher was born about what possible illness or struggles he might have based on the genetics I passed on to him. What in my DNA or Stacy’s DNA would show up in Asher? What could we do to prevent this or work with it? We know that our genetics pass on so many things — please, please, may they be the best of us!

And even now, now that my son is 8 years old, I wonder at what I’m passing on to him, not just genetically, but socially, behaviorally?

I hope I’m passing on a thirst for knowledge, a joy in God’s creation, a need for others. I hope I’m not passing on my tendency towards slothfulness, my anxiety, or my big nose.

We hope we pass on what is good and true and beautiful to those who come after us.

This text invites us to ask better questions, to turn our assumptions or our worries back around, inviting us to look at ourselves and what we are perpetuating and how we might make change.

The man born blind receives the grace of Jesus as his eyes are washed. Mud and spit. The grace of true knowing and intimate connection.

We must get beyond questions of “whose fault is it” and instead draw close to the ones we see hurting, the parts of us that are struggling, and listen, learn, and seek healing.

What if this way, this posture of transforming the questions, is where we discover God’s presence? What if it is in seeking healing, rather than blame, that truly restores us, makes us new?

Who sinned? No, wrong question. What is God showing, inviting, illuminating for us here? Better question. May ask better questions and seek the healing, restoration, and liberation from cycles of generational struggle, together, for all people.