John 9:1-38
So I was in a hurry and running late, and I hate being late. But as I was trying to get out the door, I could not find my keys. Now, we all have our pet peeves, and one of mine is losing my keys. I can handle crises, pastoral emergencies, even deaths with some degree of equanimity, but my keys go missing – and it just frustrates me beyond measure. So I’m quickly looking around, aware that I need to go, but there are no keys anywhere, and my frustration level is rising. And so of course I turn to Lori Ann and say, “Someone took my keys!” Now, only two people currently live in our house, so it was pretty clear who I thought that “someone” was. But even as I unreasonably accuse my wife of misplacing them, I look and realize that my keys have been in my hand the whole time. I do dumb things like that, and it’s embarrassing, but beyond the ridiculousness of looking for something that I am actually holding, the disturbing thing about such an incident for me is how quickly I try to blame someone else. It’s not even conscious: it’s almost like a reflex. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. In the biblical story, blaming others goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent, and humans started a blame game that continues to this very day.
Sometimes we blame others out of sheer frustration: we need someone else to vent our anger on. Sometimes we do it out of fear: we’ve messed up, but we want someone else to get in trouble. There’s been a lot of talk about advances in artificial intelligence lately, but one commentator said that AI is clearly not close to being human. Why? Because no computer blames its mistakes on another computer. But at a deeper level, I think we often assign blame as a way of finding meaning, or at least some intelligibility, in our world. This may account for the terrible tendency some people have to blame victims. When something horrific happens to someone, it’s almost like it makes it more bearable if we can somehow think it was justified: “Oh, she was asking for it!” “Yeah, well, he just got what he deserved!” That can and does happen around illnesses. She got cancer – but, hey, she smoked for thirty years. He had a heart attack – but look, he was overweight and didn’t exercise. The idea of random suffering and unexplainable tragedy is hard to bear. We so desperately want the world to make sense.
Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Who’s to blame? If a newborn’s sin is responsible for his own blindness, of course, that implies he must have sinned in a previous life, which raises fascinating possibilities. But that’s a topic for another time. What matters now is that the disciples are trying to make sense of what would otherwise seem to be senseless misfortune – a baby born blind. Someone must be to blame! And the blaming in this story doesn’t stop there. The Pharisees want to know who’s to blame for this unauthorized, Sabbath-day healing, which has so upset their settled notions of what’s proper. And the parents, caught up in the scandal of someone actually helping someone else, point the finger at their own son: talk to him: he’s of age. But Jesus will have none of it. Of course it’s not the man’s fault, and it’s not the parents’ fault either. The question of who’s to blame is irrelevant.
Jesus is not a blamer. In fact, throughout the Gospels he shows no interest at all in explaining the nature and origin of suffering. He doesn’t mumble things like, “Why are there so many lepers?” or “How can God possibly allow so many people be crippled and lame?” Instead, he is very pragmatic. He practices a radical acceptance: reality is what it is. The only question that matters is: How are we to live faithfully in that reality? And as this story shows us, for Jesus living faithfully means loving and doing the works of God. So he heals the blind man, just like he feeds the hungry, and he welcomes the outcasts into community, and proclaims good news to the poor, and generally shines the light of God’s love on every instance of pain he encounters. The only explanation Jesus ever offers for the existence of suffering in this world is to see it as an opportunity to love.
We may or may not like that. But that’s how Christ calls us to make sense of the world. No one wins the blame game. That doesn’t mean we’re not responsible for our own actions; it doesn’t mean people who commit crimes should not be held accountable for their crimes. It means that devoting spiritual and emotional energy to blaming others, blaming the universe, blaming God for suffering produces no good results. It’s not a wholesome way of being, but one that can easily poison us.
And it’s just not necessary. We know how the story ends. We know Jesus rises from the dead. We know that in the end love wins and goodness prevails. We are all going to be okay, more than okay. If we can just trust that, then we can stop worrying about who to blame and focus on loving. We can rejoice in the goodness and beauty we encounter. When others suffer, we can work to relieve their pain. And when we suffer, we can rest assured that we are not being punished, but can live in hope and look for the love of God to break through our pain in one way or another.
Look, we all know that blaming goes on all the time – in our personal relationships, in our politics, everywhere. And it’s insidiously easy to join in that. So, if nothing else, this morning I invite us all to pay attention to ourselves, which is not a bad Lenten exercise. I know that when I start to blame others for bad things, when I give way to feelings of bitterness and vindictiveness, I don’t feel good and I don’t feel close to Christ – and I love less. When I put all the blame stuff aside and focus on helping others who are hurting, I feel happier and closer to Christ – and I love more. And I don’t think that’s an accident. Rather it is one thing we can happily blame on God.
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