It may seem strange to us to hear the words in John 9:1-12. Jesus and his disciples come upon a man who had been born blind and the knee-jerk response the disciples had to his condition was, “Who has sinned, him or his parents?”

Why do you suppose they would have asked this question?

I am currently toggling between two daily reading plans: one for The Journey and one for the Narrative Lectionary. The two readings for today converged to create an interesting perspective on this question. The NL reading was from 2 Kings 23:31-24:19. This is the story of how Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. The destruction of Jerusalem was the grand climax to the story that began in Deuteronomy where Moses said to the people, “If you obey the law you will live, if you disobey you will die, choose life!” The nation of Israel chose death more often than not and it eventually led to the annihilation of the 10 tribes of the northern Kingdom of Israel and the exile of the southern Kingdom of Judah.

Fast forward to Jesus’ day. The people of Israel remember these terrible stories of destruction too well. They were still suffering under the iron fist of the Roman Empire. Every time they flinched under the weight of their suffering, they heard the words of Moses, “obey and live, disobey and die.”

This either/or moralism was ingrained into their collective conscience, to the point that they associated every negative thing, like sickness or bad luck, to disobedience to God’s Law. That is called sin.

Part of Jesus’ ministry was to challenge this thinking. Is all sickness due to sin? Was this man born blind because he is a sinner, or is his blindness a punishment to his parents?

We will see as we continue through John 9 that Jesus’ healing of this man accomplishes three things:

1. It deconstructs the idea that sickness is the result of sin.
2. It liberates the man from the shame-based system and gives him dignity as a human being.
3. It challenges the authority of the leaders and teachers of the law, thus giving the people hope that the system can change.

What do you think? In what ways do we still practice a shame-based system of condemning suffering people for their suffering?

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