A Man and His Community See

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Come on, Jesus! Which is it?

Last week, we explored a story about a man in John Chapter 5 who was paralyzed for 38 years. Jesus healed him, and found him later in the day, and told him “do not sin anymore.” It isn’t quite clear in the moment what he means, but it sounds like he is aligning with a long-held theology that connects suffering and sin. It is at least as old as the book of Job, where a righteous man suffered in a multitude of ways, and his friends connected his suffering with his sinfulness. The formula that they operated out of was: A person sins > God punishes them > they suffer. Pretty black and white. At first glance, it sounds like Jesus is applying this formula to the man who was unable to walk.

But then, right when we think that Jesus fit into this formula, Jesus was walking with his disciples and they saw a man who had been blind from birth. The disciples, theological offspring of Job’s friends and this formula, ask a logical question of Jesus, “who sinned? This man or his parents?” Sin > punishment > suffering. The same presupposition that Job’s friends did, and the same presupposition that Jesus seemed to make in Chapter 5. Their question was not whether someone sinned, but who sinned. Either his parents did, or somehow the man himself committed some prenatal sin that made him guilty and subject to punishment. The formula is airtight, either way.

But look at what Jesus says in Chapter 9: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned….and you are missing the point!” So come on, Jesus! Which is it? Sin > punishment > suffering…or not? What does sin have to do with suffering?

I would suggest that we are still struggling with this question, some 2,000 years later. Consider the way that we as a society talk about and treat those without homes. In my work with Family Promise, you might be surprised how often folks look down on those who are homeless: “Surely they did something wrong to deserve this kind of suffering! They must have sinned.” Just like the disciples thought that the man committed some kind of prenatal sin, how often do children who are homeless become the target of scorn, or ordinances meant to criminalize homelessness, or politicians taking away free and reduced lunches for students, or shaming families who receive SNAP benefits. People of faith making these assumptions that suffering equals blame equals sinfulness…even prenatal sinfulness! Folks might not be this blunt, but there is a tone of “who sinned…this man or his parents?”

Or a second example, closer to today’s story. Theologian Nancy Eisland writes about the unspoken—or sometimes spoken—theological assumptions about those who have some kind of physical disability. Paralysis. Or deafness. Or blindness like today’s story. In her book, The Disabled God, Eisland writes about “sin and disability conflation,” that if those who possess some level of disability would just get right with God, then they could be healed. There exists an implicit blame towards those with a disability, that they are guilty of some unknown spiritual sin. Eisland laments how that blame results in congregations who exclude those with disabilities, physically or socially or even theologically. “Who sinned that made you like this?”

So the question remains…which is it, Jesus? It was a question that the disciples must have been asking, too. You need to remember that this was a pervasive theological formula, and the disciples were simply acting out of it. The prevailing theological assumption was this kind of exclusivity. In their minds there was a distance between them and the man: they were whole; he was not. Like last week’s story, this man was also defined only by what he could not do. In the same way that we sometimes look at those without homes or those with disabilities, they looked at him and searched for a way to distance, blame, exclude.

But if you think that the disciples stuck to this formula, wait until you meet the Pharisees! The Pharisees were this certain sect of religious leaders who took this formula of exclusivity and turned it up to 11! They were big into categories. Some people were allowed to do certain things, while others were not. So, for example, some people were not allowed to enter the Temple for worship because of who they are or what they had done. Likewise, certain days of the week required certain activities, and one could not do the wrong things on the wrong day. And they had a whole list of this kind of categorization. So, of course, it led to including some, and excluding others.

Their theology around this idea was that God had ordained such exclusivity, and it was up to them to enforce it. If people stepped outside of these categories, then they would bring shame to the whole community and everyone would be punished. Thus, the formula of sin > punishment > suffering was legalized and weaponized. Those who stepped over the line were publicly shamed, punished, or excommunicated. Exclusivity with teeth.

Perhaps the greatest example of this in the Gospels is their enforcement of Sabbath rules. Sabbath was meant to be a day of rest, so the Pharisees over the generations had created a list of requirements how that rest was to be done. Again, if someone stepped over that line, they were publicly shamed or excluded. So, they became like Sabbath ninjas…if someone did something that wasn’t allowed, they would appear out of the shadows to point it out and shriek that someone had messed up. In last week’s story, the authorities threw a fit because the man had taken up his mat on the Sabbath. This week, they threw a fit because Jesus took his saliva and dirt and made a paste…which was considered work. Again and again and again, Jesus got into trouble because he stepped over some line and got the Sabbath ninjas up in arms. In their minds, someone like Jesus needed to be stopped, or his sin…would bring on God’s punishment…resulting in their suffering. So, in the verses after what I read this morning, we have this interminable back-and-forth where the Pharisees attack the man…and when he doesn’t give the right answers they attack his parents…and when they don’t give the right answers they go back to the man…and when he tells them “it sounds like you are really interested in this Jesus; do you want to follow him too?”…they blow their tops and literally throw him out of the community. Their first, middle, and final response is to exclude. And the man leaves their presence….

And goes straight into the arms of Jesus. Throughout the story, Jesus pushes back on the conflation of sin and disability. On the assumption that some persons were considered OK and others were excluded. On this sin formula that everyone else seems to operate out of. To be clear, Jesus did not reject the notion of sin. Jesus never said that sin is not real, or that we should ignore it or excuse it. What Jesus does do, however, is redefine sin. Sin, according to Jesus in the Gospel of John, is all about relationships.

This might be the toughest thing for us to understand from our cultural context. Many of us, perhaps most of us who have grown up in an industrialized, individualized society have grown up with a definition of sin that is largely about individual actions that are declared as impermissible. You can sin and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. I can sin and it doesn’t have anything to do with you. But over these last weeks, I have been leaning heavily on the insight of Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbagh, about the social dynamics of the Scripture. They have talked about the social nature of discipleship during the Nicodemus text, and the social nature of health and healing last week. And this week, their commentary doubles down on this idea, exploring the social nature of sin.

They suggest that Jesus proclaimed that sin is a breach of interpersonal relations. Our relationship with God is tied up with our relationship with others. Whether it was the disciples, or the Judeans, or the Pharisees, or in John’s terminology, “the world,” the society at large had missed the point of sin. Sin is about broken relationships, and it always had been. Jesus seemed to read the Torah and the prophets through this idea of interpersonal relationships. He wasn’t throwing out the law, or the Torah, or the idea of Sabbath, or even Temple worship. He was simply trying to dismantle the idea that all of that stuff required relationship-destroying exclusivity. This is what made Jesus so angry over and over with the Pharisees. Because in their attempt to keep people from sinning, the Pharisees were destroying relationships. In their attempt to stop sin, they were multiplying sin! Their exclusivity around their sin language was—in fact—a breach of interpersonal relationships: the very definition of sin!

By the way, this is how we might answer the question from the beginning of the sermon. If we look at Jesus’ two different comments about sin through this lens, it starts to make sense. Through the lens of interpersonal relations, Jesus could tell the man in John 5 not to “sin,” not to participate in the broken relationships that kept him from having people to bring him down to the water. AND Jesus could tell the disciples this week that this man’s blindness was not about blaming and excluding and rejecting this man, but an opportunity to see how God brings new life and new hope and new relationships. When you translate sin as a breach of interpersonal relationships, Jesus and his actions and words make a whole lot more sense.

Which leads to the real good news this morning. Because if we see sin as this breach, then we might see ourselves as restorers of that breach. For Jesus, the interpersonal nature of sin cried out for an interpersonal nature of redemption. We find restoration together in the arms of God. We encourage one another, in the inclusive nature of the worshipping community. We build up and support—not shame and reject. Broken relationship is the problem…and restored relationship is the solution. Remember in the story last week, after Jesus healed the man, he went to the Temple for restoration. And remember how the text describes what happened next? “Jesus found him.” In physical and spiritual terms, the man was restored to relationship with Jesus, bringing him to a place of restoration with others.

So it is no surprise, then, what we find here in verse 35. After the healing and the back and forth, and the final exclusion, the text once again says “Jesus found him.” But this time, there was more work to be done. Noelle York-Simmons writes that Jesus healed the man a second time. Because when he found him this second time, Jesus invited him—recruited him like he did Nicodemus. And the man became a part of Jesus antisociety and his work of healing others. He had comprehended where others had not. The blind man had seen, and the “seeing” men demonstrated themselves as blind.

It is the calling for us today, is it not? Jill Crainshaw says it this way: “To take up Jesus’ actions of courageous compassion is to embody spiritual sight and insight. What this meant in John 9 is still true today: to be prophetically compassionate is to seek out those who have been excluded and with them to work toward a future when all of God’s children recognize each other and worship together in a spirit of justice, love, and grace.”

Perhaps that is our work today…not to extend sin by joining in the work of the world to exclude, and categorize, and judge, and legislate against those who are different. But to join in the Jesus work of building relationships. Of opening eyes. Of dismantling shame. Of pointing to the restorative grace of Jesus. After Jesus had made the paste and put it on the man’s eyes, he told him that it was his turn to act…he must go and respond to that grace. In case we miss the point, John reminds us that even the name Siloam means “sent.” We, too, are the sent, to tell this story of grace, of welcome, of love.

That was John’s story. A different John than the Gospel writer. In fact, this John was born in London at the height of the slave trade in the 1700’s. If there was ever a historic example of putting people into categories of acceptable and unacceptable, it was the chattel slave system that much of the West was built upon. John profited from that trade, and participated in the work of trafficking African slaves for his profit. For years, he travelled back and forth on slave ships, participating in and supporting one of the most systemic sins in history.

But over time, John would later explain, Jesus found him. And impressed upon him that what he was doing was evil. And not only did he feel called to personally stop, but believed that he was called into the Gospel ministry, with the center of his calling the ministry of abolition of the slave trade. Not only was this evil destroying him, and those he had enslaved, but it was destroying the world. It must be stopped. He fully engaged in a new way of living, with his heart changed and his mission clear. The former slave-runner had become an abolitionist against slavery. Jesus found him and changed his heart.

Some time later, John would record his spiritual experiences. In language reflecting John 9 and the man born blind, the abolitionist John Newton penned these words: