Sermon Tone Analysis

The Problem & Abolition of Suffering (John 9:1-12)

“No one ever told me about the laziness of grief.

Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort.

Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.

Even shaving.

What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth?

They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself.

Only as a dog-tired man wants an extra blanket on a cold night; he’d rather lie there shivering than get up and find one.

It’s easy to see why the lonely become untidy, finally, dirty and disgusting.

Meanwhile, where is God?

This is one of the most disquieting symptoms.

When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms.

But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find?

A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.

After that, silence.”

These are the words of C.S. Lewis, no more than a few weeks after the death of his wife, Joy in 1960.

He would publish these words in a book aptly titled, A Grief Observed, where he would detail his unfiltered grief and suffering of losing his wife, whom he was married to for only about four years.

He even published it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk because he did not want to be associated with the work when it was published.

But, while we are not all prolific writers like Lewis and our suffering will not be published for the world to see, his words resonate with us because we all suffer and it is difficult to wrap our minds around our suffering.

We struggle to put words to it.

We ask questions like “Why?

How long?”

Maybe we even wonder if our suffering is disproportional to the event that caused it.

As we come to John 9, we meet a man born blind, and while this whole chapter centers around this one man’s healing and the controversy that follows, I want to focus on the problem of suffering that Jesus’s disciples raise when they ask who is responsible for this man’s ailment and Jesus’s subsequent response to his disciples and healing of the man.

Part 1: Suffering

First, we will look at suffering.

What it is, what causes it, how it manifests itself, what lies we can believe about it.

Now, I am going to combine my first two points into one statement because I don’t want to lose you or hold you in suspense.

All suffering is caused by sin; but...

Not all suffering is caused by your personal sin

I think it is important to put both of those out there first because I don’t want to start off this sermon with you thinking how all of your suffering is your fault, because that is not what I am trying to say at all.

All suffering is caused by sin.

The disciples, to their credit, were not far off when they connected this man who was born blind and sin.

They knew that sin, somehow and someway, was the reason why this man was blind, and that is because they, to some extent, knew that suffering is caused by sin.

When Adam and Eve fell into sin, they brought all of creation down with it.

In Genesis 3:16-19, look at the punishments that God doles out to them:

To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”

They were called to “be fruitful and multiply, and now that will cause Eve physical pain.

“Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”

There is marital and relational strain.

And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you.”

Creation itself is cursed.

It does not yield fruit, and now it is prone to natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc.

“In pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread...”  Now it is hard to feed your family.

Working the cursed ground is difficult

“...till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

And, last and most devastating of all, human beings are now prone to decay and death.

Every aspect of the life that Adam and Eve had in the garden—bring married, having children, working the garden, walking with God, and so on—became marred with sin and brought suffering to themselves, to their race, and to us.

Don’t you have struggles in your marriage, in your family, in your vocation, in this world?

Adam and Eve’s sin pushed the first domino over and they are going to keep falling until Jesus comes back.

All suffering is caused by sin because suffering entered into the world through the first/original sin.

But, while you can trace your suffering back to Adam’s sin, you may not be able to trace your suffering back to your personal sin.

Not all suffering is caused by your personal sin.

Sometimes it is, but it would be false to say that all of our sin is caused by our own personal sin.

This is the main premise of the Book of Job.

Job was a faithful worshipper of the Lord, when all of a sudden (at least from his perspective it was “all of a sudden”) Job’s property is burned up, his children die, and he is struck with a painful skin disease.

The only thing he has left is the breath in his lungs, his insufferable wife, and his three friends who try to convince Job that he sinned and this calamity that has fallen on him is God punishing him for his sin.

But, we know that this was an attack from Satan that caused Jobs suffering and not his own personal sin.

There are three ways sin causes suffering:

1.  Suffering is caused by our own personal sin.

Our sin has consequences.

Sometimes those consequences are immediate and sometimes they are delayed.

Sometimes the suffering is directly related to the sin (i.e.

Adultery leading to divorce; stealing from your job gets you fired and maybe even landing in jail) or sometimes God disciplines us in one area to awaken us to the sin in another area (I am thinking of 1 Peter 3:7 where a man’s prayers are hindered for the way he is dishonoring his wife).

2.  Suffering is caused by the sin of another.

Like I said, our suffering is not always directly connected to our personal sin.

We live in a world where 100% of the population are sinners; we live in households where 100% of children and 100% of parents and 100% of spouses are sinners.

Sinners are going to sin and quite often they are going to have someone in their crosshairs.

I don’t think it’s very fair to blame someone for ending up in someone else’s crosshairs.

I don’t think it is very fair to blame the victim.

If you are honest with yourself, you should be able to think of time where you were the victim and when you were the perpetrator; when you put someone in your crosshairs and when you were the one in the crosshairs.

But, it is here where we need to realize that, sometimes, when it comes to suffering, there is no one necessarily at blame.

Sometimes we are to blame, and sometimes someone else is to blame.

But, who is to blame when a perfectly healthy person gets cancer?

Whose fault is it when a freak car accident leaves someone injured or worse [even if someone is legally at fault, was what they did sinful]?

3.  Suffering is caused by living in a sinful world.

Suffering is unavoidable.

Our bodies are fragile and prone to decay, sickness, and death.

Creation is cursed, prone to natural disasters.

Circumstances are tumultuous.

If we are broken and the world is broken, we are going to experience that brokenness in profound ways everyday of our lives—even if no one is at fault.

Look at the man born blind.

The disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

They thought it was someone’s personal sin that made him blind since birth.

Either his mom or dad (or both) sinned so bad that their punishment was their baby boy coming out of the womb blind.

This was a popular thought back in the day.

They had a proverb that is quoted in both Jeremiah and Ezekiel, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

Or, maybe to make it contemporary, “The fathers eat candy and drink soda, and their children get cavities.”

They think the Lord punishes the children for the sin of their parents, but that is not the case because the Lord tells Jeremiah and Ezekiel to tell the people to stop using that proverb.

Or, on the other hand, maybe this baby sinned so bad in his mother’s womb that the Lord made him blind.

That was also an idea that ancient rabbis floated around.

But, it could be, that this child had a congenital birth defect that left him blind, and it was no one’s fault (except Adam’s).

Now, let me ask this question: in the case of the man born blind, was his suffering physical or was it spiritual?

You would want to say physical because he is blind, that is a physical ailment, something is wrong with this body.

But, would you say that this man never struggled spiritually?

First off, I think it is safe to assume that this man had some internal, spiritual struggles with the fact that he was born blind.

Second, we see in v. 8 that he was a beggar, so he had some socioeconomic struggles stemming from the fact that he was a beggar and could not really work, which brings its own set of pains to the table.

But here is the point I am trying to make about suffering:

When we suffer, we suffer physically and spiritually (not either/or; but both/and)