Simple Suffering

Text: John 9:1-41

A common way to interpret the Gospel of John is to consider it to have two parts. In this view, the first part is called the book of signs and the second part the book of glory. The first part contains seven stories, which we might call miracle stories. For example, the first of these is the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana. Each of these stories is described by John as a sign. They point to something. What they point to is the glory of God embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. We are supposed to pay attention, like the famous smart dog, to the thing pointed to more than the finger pointing to it.

However, this makes some pretty amazing stories—and long and detailed ones like today’s—some pretty amazing stories into things a little boring and contrived. These stories are not just about random miraculous deeds. All but one of them have to do with healing someone or feeding someone, or many someones. This is not a coincidence. The story itself tells us a something important about Jesus and the world he proclaimed.

The episode today about the blind man and his cure is simple on the face of it. A man is blind. Jesus heals him. That is sign enough, if that is all you are looking for. But of course, as in real lives of real people, things get complicated. Everyone brings their own expectations and baggage, powerful people exercise power, and as sometimes happens, people get hurt.

The political core of the story is, as it often is with Jesus, about what is OK to do on the Sabbath, which is protected by the third commandment. The day is holy because it reminds us of both God’s work in creation and freedom from captivity.

Jesus cannot be from God, the Pharisees claim, because he healed someone on the Sabbath when it was not dire—he could have waited but did not. Jesus does this a lot, elsewhere saying famously (and a little unfairly) that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.

Jesus heals the blind man on the Sabbath. To our Protestant thinking, there is nothing wrong with this. What’s the problem? If a person suffers, you relieve the suffering. But as the story shows, acts of compassion are rarely without consequences. The Pharisees are upset by the behavior of Jesus, which undermines useful and God-given rules for people trying to live together. The parents are fearful (and, it turns out, rightly so) of what all this weirdness means for their son and for themselves in their own community. The man himself is amazed and pleased at first, but his life is irrevocably changed.

Helping someone—relieving suffering—is a choice we make. Is it always harmless to chose to be compassionate? How do we decide? In the face of the anger and sadness which this act caused, how did Jesus decide to help the blind man to see?

He could have ignored him. There are always plenty of reasons to pass people by. Their suffering could be from birth, as the blind man’s was. Who sinned, the disciples ask, this man or his parents? They had no doubt the man was blind for a reason, and none either that his blindness was permanent. Perhaps people who suffer are to blame, perhaps their upbringing is. Their culture, their genes, their circumstances. Their character. Do they deserve to be helped? Helping people might be fruitless, it might create ungrateful dependency, it might aggravate things. It might be inconvenient at the moment.

But for Jesus, healing is always timely. The demands of suffering are always urgent. Jesus tells his disciples: “We must work the works of the one who sent me while it is day.” No dawdling. No waiting for approval or to get ducks lined up.

Though not in a gospel known for ethical teaching, this story gives us four interconnected ethical guidelines for Christian behavior.

First, present suffering always trumps hypothetical future benefits or dangers. Arguments about the imagined dangers of healing a man on the Sabbath are outweighed by the actual benefits of his seeing for the first time. Even if the dangers are likely, that is not enough to deny healing when it is possible. Or on the flip side to justify causing suffering. We do not know the future, and to allow or to cause suffering for the sake of an imagined future is hubris and arrogance. We can learn from the past, we try to prepare for the future, but in the moment we are called only to relieve or prevent suffering.

Second, and as a corollary, compassion always trumps form. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong paperwork is not sufficient to deny healing. Procedures, taboos, and expectations are helpful, but they are not compelling.

Third, knowledge is not a prerequisite for helping others. We do not have to know how someone came to be hurting. We do not have to know whether he or she sinned or not. Or will continue to sin or not. We do not need to know the consequences of our compassion. “The one thing I do know,” says the man, is that “I was blind, now I see.” How did this happen, the Pharisees ask? “We do not know how it is that he sees,” say the parents, “but now he does.”

And fourth, underlying the other three: suffering is simple and complete. It is not complicated, subject to equivocation and argument. It is not good to suffer. There is no redeeming virtue. There is no meaning to it. There is no need to explain it (except to know how better to heal it). The man’s blindness in itself is sufficient to call on Jesus to heal him. “As Jesus walked along,” it says, “he saw a man.” That is all it took. To relieve suffering, no questions asked, is one way to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The disciples in John call Jesus rabbi, meaning teacher. But he does not so much explain God’s work as reveal it. In this story, it matters not how God works but that God does.

What Jesus calls himself—in the very next verses in John—he calls himself the good shepherd. Jesus is a pastor (which means shepherd). He is not a theologian. He is not an ethicist, either. He comes to heal the suffering world. To save the world, as John puts it. Not to debate about saving it.

Shepherds, like the one in today’s psalm, know the sheep, make sure they have food and water, a safe place, a place to rest, a trustworthy guide. To be fearless, to be undistracted, and to love the sheep first of all.

The Lord is this, our shepherd. May the Lord’s goodness and mercy pursue us all our days.