Sunday August 5, 2018 | Greg Boyd
As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.
There is a very common understanding in many Christian circles that everything happens for a reason, we can’t understand what comes to pass because God’s ways are higher than our ways, and ultimately every single act, no matter how consistent or inconsistent with the God revealed in Jesus, is a direct result of the power, control, & sovereignty of God. In this message Greg dissects John 9:1-3 confronting all these ideas head on showing how dangerous poor theology and inconsistent exegesis can be.
Since the idea that God meticulously controls every last detail and orchestrates each and every event in our lives became popularized, countless people who have faced the tragedy and malevolence of existence have, in good conscience, chosen to walk away from the faith. Making sense out of a God who would arrange and use such atrocities as the Nazi concentrations camps, childhood abductions, abuse, and diseases to teach us a lesson is a seemingly impossible task and has left many disenchanted and confused. Many Christians with good intentions trying to describe the world around them revert to passages like Romans 9 and John 9 to justify this all controlling teaching.
If the book of Job can teach us anything, it’s that we don’t know what we don’t know when it comes to suffering and why what we experience actually comes to pass. There is a very ancient idea that suffering is a result of the anger of the gods that Jesus appears to be directly refuting in the John 9:1-3 section of scripture. Although Jesus refutes the assumption of the disciples that either the blind man or his parents did something to deserve this punishment, the second part of his commentary is still problematic in that it seemingly attributes the infirmity that many suffer directly to God. People have used this passage many times to attribute all the suffering, infirmities, and evil in the world to God’s hand, either directly or indirectly.
Greg offers 3 arguments against this understanding:
Complex questions about why exactly things happen usually can’t be answered, but not because God isn’t communicating clearly. Rather because of the sheer complexity of creation and how many decisions by free agents are interconnected to one another. We live in the fog of war, and many of our actions have unintended consequences because of this war-torn creation we live in. We have to get better at saying “I don’t know” and acknowledging the complexity of creation while also being able to affirm what we do know about God revealed in Christ. This is what provides legitimate hope. If Jesus didn’t or wouldn’t do it, we need to affirm that God wouldn’t either. We need to let go of the blame question.