“Rabbi, who sinned, that we are all in quarantine?” The Chinese? The Europeans? Fox News?
We mostly don’t ask that kind of question anymore, at least not of our religious leaders. Exactly nobody has asked me whose sin caused the Novel Corona Virus epidemic, although a few people have asked me if we are living in the end times. In the terms spelled out in Biblical Apocalyptic literature—the Books of Daniel and Revelation, for example—I would say no. But I do know we are living in hard times, and that may get harder before they get better. This is our current reality.
In our time, people generally reject the reasoning used by the disciples who—upon seeing the suffering of a blind man—conclude that someone must have sinned. You’ll notice that, in our lesson today, the disciples were debating only the question of whose sin was at fault. They did not debate whether sin caused suffering; that they simply took for granted. In contrast, we look for physiological or epidemiological reasons for illness. But that doesn’t mean we don’t wonder about what causes suffering.
Why DO bad things happen? Of course we ask this kind of question, because we are a species that seeks to make meaning. “We can bear nearly any pain, wrote Rabbi Harold Kushner, if we think there is a reason behind it.” We are also a story-telling species. Our brains have a preference for grand narratives with an overarching point and a satisfying end, in which things happen for a reason and loss has a point. We may be able to suffer pain, but we are truly haunted by the prospect of randomness.
If you feel frightened or lonely right now, and are wondering why, know that you are in very good company. We’re all there with you, right alongside our foremothers and forefathers who lived through flood and famine, exile and tyranny. It’s actually a great time to pick up your Bibles and reacquaint yourselves with the narratives that shape us as a faith community. You’ll notice that almost none of them begin with shiny happy people holding hands. God is recognizable as savior only because people recognize themselves as lost. God’s great act of liberation freed the slaves from oppression Egypt, but notice that they were almost immediately thirsty and hungry again. They continued to call upon God. There are thirsty and hungry refugees massed in deserts even now. They were suffering before the Corona Virus and they will likely continue to do so when this particular epidemiological crisis passes. Which it will. But it’s still hard and uncertain to be human.
In the meantime, we are scared, some of us are sick, and we continue to wonder why. Theodicy; the theological problem of explaining why suffering exists, asks this central question: why do terrible things happen in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God? How can God simultaneously possess all three of these qualities and yet allow bad things to happen to good people, sometimes with savage intensity? Rabbi Kushner’s answer, in his best selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, was to forego belief in God’s omnipotence: “I believe in God. But I do not believe the same things about Him that I did years ago, when I was growing up or when I was a theological student. I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and human moral freedom.” Which, as we know, were God’s gifts to us in creation. Kushner went on to propose: “Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. But we can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them.” Our question should be “Now that this has happened, what am I going to do about it?’”
That’s a question that is good and right. Especially in contrast to today’s Gospel, which is an object lesson in the problem of asking the wrong questions. There are a lot of actors in this story, asking a lot of different questions, reflective of a variety of perspectives and a few not-so-hidden political agendas. That is to say, the questioners were actually a lot like us. But for arguments’ sake, I’m going to highlight what I call the moral failure and technical solution questions. That is, who did something wrong, and how exactly did Jesus heal the man born blind? No less than five times, the religious leaders asked “How did he open your eyes?”
There is a proper place for both of those kinds of questions. We want, for example, to teach our children to do the right thing. Aren’t we grateful for all those kindergarten lessons in handwashing right now? And from a technical standpoint, we surely need more tests, more ventilators and faster vaccine development; these are part of the answer as to how we get through this. But I can’t help but notice how Jesus avoided questions of moral failure and technical solution. He refused to assign blame to a sinner, and when he did answer questions, he deftly changed the subject to reflect his concern for light, sight and insight. This is Jesus as John knew and loved him.
“Here is an astonishing thing!” said the man who was born blind. “You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” Look who’s answering the question of who Jesus is; look who’s willing to be astonished.
In the midst of disability, blame, and attempts at entrapment, Jesus invited his disciples to engage a different line of inquiry. From where does our hope come? And so I ask you: what does our situation look like from the eyes of our hearts? How do we continue to be a community? How do we care for the most vulnerable among us?
People are saying that Novel Coronavirus is unprecedented. And that’s true in some ways; most of us haven’t lived through a global pandemic. I haven’t, certainly. But I did bear my children in Nicaragua in the middle of a cholera epidemic, so I really affirm the value of frequent handwashing. That epidemic was short-lived—which is my prayer for our current pandemic—but the benefits of all that public health education resulted in lower incidents of infectious disease across the board.
God’s people have lived through hard times before, and unexpected good has happened as a result. Even now, I see our church community acting in courageous and generous new ways. We’re forming teams to do ministry more effectively, to reach further outward and be more present to those who feel isolated, albeit in virtual ways. To the extent that we are in a new situation, we really do have to ask new kinds of questions. Here’s my final one for you, then. How will you think and act in new ways, so that—even in the darkest times—God’s light may shine through you?
