“Jesus answered, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned..." John 9:3
“Jesus answered, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.’” John 9:3
Sometimes bad things just happen in life. It is all too easy to try to point fingers and find blame. We often hear people say things like: “Because my parents did “_____”, I am a mess.” Or people say, “Because _____ happened when I was a kid, I can’t be successful.” The self-help guru Marie Forleo often says on her YouTube MarieTV show and in her book, Everything is Figureoutable, “You can have excuses, or you can have results.” In the Gospel of John, Chapter 9, Jesus heals a man born blind. The man did not ask to be healed, and when Jesus gave him directions to wash the special clay off of his eyes, the man did it. And he got results! He was instantly able to see.
Throughout the rest of the chapter, the Pharisees, the man healed, the poor man’s parents, and Jesus all argued about the nature of this healing, and why and how it happened. So much judgement was circulated among the people! “Who sinned?” “Was the healing a sin because it happened on a Sabbath?” “Was the man really born blind in the first place?” At the end of the story, the Pharisees scold the man who was healed, “You were born totally in sin!” (John 9:34) All of this finger-pointing and judgement is so characteristic of how we behave today.
Jesus states that no one sinned. There was no “original” sin in this story.
Rather, a negative thing happened so that “the works of God might be made visible” through the difficulty. Miracles are available to all of us! There is a way out of any difficulty if we slow down, pray, mediate, and look for where God may be working or calling us. Sometimes, the way out of the difficulty might mean that we need to go against the conventional wisdom of our present community. That is what we see happening in this story. Everyone is judging and pointing fingers because something new and different has happened. Yet, the man who received the miracle stands firm in his new understanding of the world, God, and his place in it. The healed man is thrown out of the community by the established leaders. Jesus finds the man and asks if he believes in Him. The healed man says, “I do believe Lord,” and he worships Jesus (John 9:38).
Jesus says, “I came into this world so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind” (John 9:39). The blind man received a miracle because he was open to it and he followed the prompting of God (Jesus) . He allowed the challenge of his blindness to open him to the possibility of a new and better life. When opportunity knocked, he got up, and started working with the signs of hope and change. On the contrary, the established religious leaders were so busy judging everyone and everything around them, they missed the opportunity for a miracle. They stayed stuck in the negative cycle that prevented them from receiving blessings.
What about us? The same choices present themselves to us today. Are we going to judge and blame other people, or the economy, or the Coronavirus when things don’t work out? Or, are we going to turn to God, silence our inner chatter, ignore the ‘haters’ in our community, and look for signs of a coming miracle? Beautiful light and miraculous events can often come out of difficult situations, if we just look to see where God is working.