Perceptions from a Pewboy

I have a very dear friend who is suffering right now. In fact, he is fighting for his life against all odds. His family, as one might imagine, is suffering along with him.

The suffering of this family has driven me to my knees many times in recent days. The essence of my prayer has been this: “Bring healing, O God. Bring miracles. Bring something redemptive to this condition of suffering.” Along with the prayer, of course, have come the seemingly inevitable “why” questions: “Why do good people hurt? Why is there so much pain? God, why do you allow your people to suffer?”

There is nothing new about those questions. The Psalmist wrestled with them long ago.

Have you ever known people who looked upon their suffering as a punishment from God?

A man who had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer once whispered these words to me through his tears as he sat in a hospital bed: “What have I ever done to deserve this?”

A woman who had just lost her 23-year-old son in an automobile accident pulled me aside in the funeral home and said to me, “How could God be so cruel as to take my only child away from me like this?” She expected some kind of an answer.

A man who had just lost his job after 27 years with the same company stopped by my church office in order to articulate this viewpoint: “I must not be doing something right in God’s eyes,” he said, “because my prayers aren’t working.”

A 49-year-old woman whose husband had left her for his 28-year-old secretary and who had just been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis stood up in the middle of a divorce recovery workshop that I was facilitating and gave expression to this desperate sentiment: “I feel like God is out to get me for something and I don’t even know what I did.”

On September 13, 2001, two days after the terrorist attack on our country, the late Jerry Falwell gave his explanation for the tragedy by utilizing words that were something like these: “The feminists and the gays and the lesbians and the ACLU and the abortionists who have killed 40 million innocent babies have angered God, and God will not be mocked.”

Each one of those expressions emerges from the theological presupposition that all experiences of human suffering and hardship are manifestations of God’s judgment and God’s desire to present a tangible punishment for human wrongdoing. Such a theological presupposition implies something troubling about the very nature of God, doesn’t it? Specifically, it implies that the Creator of heaven and earth, is, at his heart, a rather malicious, perhaps even malevolent, deity whose methodology is to generate human suffering and then assign that suffering to particular people as a means of punishment for sins of which they may or may not be aware.

That theological idea, by the way, is not new. In fact, in the 9th chapter of John’s gospel, when Jesus and the disciples come upon a blind man who had been blind from birth, the disciples say something to Jesus that demands serious reflection: “Rabbi,” they say, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

Do you sense the implications of their question? These disciples were harboring a worldview in which that man’s blindness could only be interpreted as a punishment from God, either for a sin that the blind man had committed, or a sin that his parents had committed for which he was being held accountable. In the disciples’ worldview, in other words, the man’s blindness was not simply the result of malfunctioning eyes. It was rather a form of suffering assigned by God to a sinner.

In what I think is one of the most important and revelatory teachings in the entire Bible, Jesus responds to the disciples’ question by telling them that their worldview is faulty. “Fellas,” he says, “neither this man nor his parents sinned. Rather, he was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed in him.” Which is to say, “disciples, your worldview is faulty and it’s time for a theological realignment. This man’s blindness is not a punishment for sin. It is simply a physical ailment that gives to God a significant opportunity to accomplish great things, even in the midst of this man’s blindness.”

Jesus heals the blind man in dramatic fashion, bringing him sight and thereby revealing the power of Almighty God. And yet, as dramatic as the blind man’s healing is, I do not believe it to be the most important healing in this story. Rather, I believe that the most important healing in this story is Jesus’ healing of the disciples’ broken worldview.

The disciples were absolutely convinced that the man’s blindness was a punishment for some sin. But Jesus incarnates a new worldview in their very presence—a worldview in which blindness and other forms of human suffering are looked upon, not as a punishment from God, but as an occasion for God to accomplish even greater things; a worldview in which human suffering is interpreted, not a curse, but as an opportunity for God to become more intimately connected with broken souls; a worldview in which God is prayed to, not as a malevolent deity who is eager to punish, but as a miraculous Parent who is eager to bring about miracles in the midst of the suffering of his children.

The implications of this new worldview that we find in Christ are enormous. When we find ourselves suffering and broken, when we find ourselves struggling with cancer or divorce or the loss of a loved one, the new worldview that Jesus liberates those experiences from the idea of punishment and illuminates them instead as divine opportunities for the miraculous. Sometimes God’s miracle will manifest itself as a dramatic fixing of the problem, as it did for the blind man in John 9. Other times, God’s miracle will manifest itself, not as an elimination of the suffering, but as a new way of living WITH or IN the suffering, so that the suffering no longer holds dominion over human souls.

Even as I type these words, I am praying for my friend who is suffering and his family. And I am wondering what the miracle will look like for them.

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