EYES WIDE OPEN
Texts: Job 42: 1-5; John 9: 1-42
As children, we all had questions. But one question was above all others: “Why did this (whatever) happen?” Voltaire used his satirical novel Candide as a response to Leibniz and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that killed thousands on a Sunday as they all sat in churches. In spite of the fact that we may know how earthquakes and hurricanes occur, or the medical or genetic reasons why a blind and deaf Helen Keller is born, we've always asked, “Why?" It is a question fundamentally different than “How.” It is a question that ultimately rails against what we consider to be the injustice of the universe – or of God. Job tries to justify himself before God and then realizes he cannot.
This morning's gospel reading provides us with a new approach to perhaps this oldest of all human questions, namely, the question of theodicy, or the role of God in human events. This morning's gospel also tells us that the old ways of creating meaning from the otherwise meaningless events of life do not work. When terrible things happen to people, especially good really good people, we naturally ask, “Why?” Christian theology has traditionally described God as omnipotent and, as a result, has used the explanation of “God's will” when bad things happened to good people. Otherwise, it seemed that bad happened and God had no control over them.
Thus, the disciples ask Jesus, “Who sinned, that the man was born blind: the man or his parents?” Since the man had been born blind from birth, how could he sin against God? So, it must be his parents, right? Neither, answers Jesus, throwing out traditional Jewish theodicy. But then he adds a theodicy of his own: “In order that God's works might be revealed.” But in this theodicy, Jesus moves from cause to purpose. The theodicy he pushes is a powerful one. The origin of evil is not the issue any more; it is how we address the evil that matters.
Our attempts at finding answers to certain fundamental questions, such as, why people are born blind, or why there are earthquakes, are not satisfied by scientific explanations of genetic mutation or shifting earth plates. Those answers are about how such things occur. No matter how sophisticated we think we are, we still ask “Why?” And we are frustrated by the lack of an answer, to be sure. Jesus' answer tells us to move beyond the question to finding a solution. This is usually more difficult. It's easier to stay locked in our old boxes of simple answers which ascribe to God every good and bad thing, stating that there is some “purpose” in all things, all events.
We make God responsible for what happens to us because, no matter how terrible the event, we can then say that because this is all part of “God's plan,” and that makes us feel that there is some so-called purpose to the suffering or pain. However, in reality, making God responsible for accidents of birth or terrible events, like hurricanes or the flooding in Malawi, is blasphemy. It's as if we never learned the lessons of Job. There is no reason why such things happen. They just do. This kind of thinking created such doctrines as predestination and the idea of the elect. After all, if God is omnipotent, then omniscience must follow. And, following the same line of argument, if God is omniscient, how can it be that certain people on earth are never “saved?” Augustine came up with a theory of predestination, explaining that God's omnipotence naturally meant that God not only knew the future, but predestined it as well.
This incredible doctrine was reborn during the Reformation as the doctrine of the elect. Calvin's doctrine of double predestination made God choose who would be saved – the elect – and who would be condemned. Although we've pretty much thrown out this strict form of predestination, we still have our milder form of this doctrine in the “God's will” theology.
Unfortunately, clergy sometimes use this approach when faced with the unanswerable. Faced with suffering and death, some clergy hide behind the idea of “God's will” as a way of not having to explain why awful things happen. It's cowardice. It's much more honest to say: “I don't know why this happened, but the love of God is with you at this time.” WE have a hard time dealing with the despasir that grows out of cruel twists of fate, such as birth defects, terrible illness, and suffering. Clergy are no different. I mean, we're supposed to have answers, right? Often, there are no answers.
Jesus provides us with a different approach. Okay, he says, what counts is not some arcane argument as to why someone is born blind. What counts is what we do with it. Jesus tells us to stop wringing our hands and get out there and do something! When we do get out there and do something, we will be faced with attitudes, such as those of the Pharisees, who try to figure out how to get around what has already occurred. First, they denied the man had been born blind. That's a common approach. Problem? What problem? The Pharisees of our day deny the systemic causes of poverty, structural inequities in our society, climate change so we're not required to do anything about the problems we face as a society.
Several years ago I was at a health fair organized by some community groups, a response to the loss of health education funding, to make sure that infants and young children were vaccinated against such diseases as measles, chicken pox, and mumps. A reporter asked me why it was so important to have these vaccinations early since children had to be vaccinated before they enter school. Have we really forgotten what these childhood illnesses can do that we only worry about them as a possible infection to others in school? My father was deafened by measles at the age of four. That was a lifelong result of the lack of vaccination in his time.
One in four – one in four – children die in many parts of the Third World because they acquire childhood illness for which there are vaccines. It is the misguided theology of God's will among radical Islamists that cause them to kill health care workers trying to vaccinate children against polio, measles, and other diseases with permanent results. But this approach just doesn't occur among those in the Third World. It carries over to our lack of social service programs for the poor in our own country, blaming the poor for not being greedy enough to be like the Koch brothers. Such utter blasphemy! How dare we blame God for our own lack of care for people or the environmental degradation we create.
Rather than addressing the unanswerable questions put to him by his disciples, Jesus simply opened the eyes of the blind man. The Pharisees then turn to the man and ask him, “How did this thing happen?” The man's response so angered them that they drove him out. And Jesus, when he heard that the Pharisees had driven him out, came to him and explained that some who see are really blind, blind to the truth they cannot see and will not face. With his eyes wide open, the man formerly blind became a follower of Jesus.
We are asked to do the same thing, to open our eyes. We must put away our old approaches to theology that absolve us of our responsibility to the world. We must accept our role in shaping our lives and our future. Jesus' response to the blind man is our model of action. As a community of faith, we are obligated to stop wringing our hands and to get out there and do something. That is the liberating power of the Gospel, that we can shape our lives and our future.
Let us come together in prayer: Liberating God, who gives us the power to change our lives and direct our futures, bring us together as a community of faith to act as did Jesus opening the eyes of the blind around us so we may have the vision to shape that direction. In the name of the One who opens our eyes, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.