The other week in the Thursday Bible study, the question of why bad things happen came up. As often happens when this issue arises, no one had a satisfactory answer. From the time we are toddlers to our years as elders, “I don’t know” is the least comforting answer to the question, “Why?” The problem with “why” is not in the asking; sometimes it is in the idea that the question has an answer we can know in this life.
As Jesus and his disciples walk along, they encounter a man who has been blind from birth. For the disciples, his blindness is a puzzle to be solved. He isn't a person to them yet; he is a theological case study. "Rabbi," they ask, "who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"
It is such a tidy question. It assumes a universe that functions like a vending machine: you put in a certain amount of sin, and you get out a certain amount of suffering. If you can just find the cause, you can justify the effect. This is the snare in the pursuit of "why." Discovering a “why” shores up our illusion of control. If a "why" is linked to a specific sin or a specific mistake, then as long as we don't make that mistake, we can believe we will be safe. A cause-and-effect God is a predictable God, and a predictable God feels comfortable.
But consider the world right now. We should ask “why” in regard to news cycles filled with the smoke of cities at war, the cries of the displaced, and the silent grief of those who have lost everything to powers far beyond their control. If we ask "who sinned" that these children are dead or these families are grieving, we end up in a spiral of blame that never actually heals, achieves justice, or rebuilds. Do we ask "Why me?" only when the difficult diagnosis comes, or "Why them?" when tragedy strikes? The “why” that only comes in pain assumes that God’s presence is only marked by an absence of struggle. We treat peace and health as the default settings of a blessed and faithful life, and anything else as a glitch in the system that must be someone’s fault.
Jesus, however, refuses to play this game. He looks at the disciples and effectively says, "You’re asking the wrong question." He rejects their binary of sin versus health, of blindness set against wholeness. He moves the conversation away from ancestry—where this came from—and shifts it toward agency—what God is going to do with it. It is not simply that God’s work has been dormant in the blind man until this moment; it is that the moment is needed so that those who are around the man can see that God has been with him all along (even if people haven’t).
It would be a cruel misinterpretation to state that God made the man blind just for him to wait around to be healed in adulthood. That is not a kind of puppetry that I am willing to attribute to the Fount of Every Blessing. Rather, Jesus is saying that in the kingdom of God, the point is not the origin of the wound, but the opportunity for grace. The focus isn't on the "why" of the past; it's on the "what now" of the future.
When we ask our “whys,” we want God’s answers to conform to our expectations of where, how, and when. When something takes too long, doesn’t happen like we expected, or isn’t convenient, we sometimes wonder if God is at work at all. We love reformation, restoration, and resurrection, but we like them on our own terms.
Think for a moment about the resurrected body of Jesus in the upper room at the end of the fourth Gospel. Remember Jesus showing the wounds in his hands, his feet, and his side. The triumph over death did not come with the erasure of the signs of pain. If the resurrected, conquering body of Christ still bore the marks of the nails and spear, then we may have to rethink what wholeness actually means.
In our culture, we sometimes act as though healing equals erasure. We want the scars to disappear. We want the memory of the trauma to be wiped clean. We want to go back to the way things were before the war, before COVID, before the change (whatever that was), before the pain or loss. But Christ’s Gospel doesn't promise a return to the Garden of Eden. It promises something much more profound and necessary: accompaniment and solidarity through the Garden of Gethsemane.
True healing isn't the erasure of the hard parts; it’s the scab, then the scar, and then the going on in hope. The man born blind didn't just get his physical sight; he gained a testimony that confounded the most powerful religious leaders of his day. His "flaw"—the very thing seen as a mark of sin—became the site of God’s most visible work. His history of blindness wasn't deleted; it was the very thing that allowed him to see Jesus more clearly than the people who were sure they were watching for a Messiah so closely they’d never miss him.
When we look at our own lives, and when we look at a world ravaged by conflict, we often miss the reformation that is happening right under our noses because we are waiting for a version of "fixed" that God never promised. We are waiting for the scars to vanish. We are waiting for the "why" to be answered so we can finally feel okay again.
Todays’ psalm (23) doesn't say, "The Lord is my shepherd, everything will go great for me." It says, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." The valley is there. The shadow is real. The rod and the staff aren't there to magic us out of the valley; they are there to comfort us while we are in it. God’s presence isn't the absence of the shadow; it is the light that the shadow cannot overcome.
When we pray for wholeness, sometimes the answer comes as the strength to carry scars as witness. Restoration can look like a new way of seeing, even if the physical circumstances haven’t shifted to our liking. It is the ability to look at a weary, aching world and not see a lost cause, but a place where the works of God are waiting to be displayed through acts of mercy, through the courage of peacemakers, and through the stubborn hope of the church.
We are often conditioned to see perfection as the goal: the perfect body, the perfect family, the perfect peace. But the cross tells us that God works through imperfection. God works through the mud and the spit. God works through the man who has spent his whole life in the dark.
This past week, when our girls’ basketball team lost two games in a row at the State level, it was a bummer. We ache for them. We cannot undo the pain of that loss for the team, nor the feelings of the boys’ team in a similar situation a few weeks ago. Yet there was something else that happened. Sweet Grass County High School had one of the larger student cheering sections, a pep band, and cheerleaders present. Due to the weather, the team from Shepherd did not have those things. Even in their own disappointment, the SGCHS students stayed and cheered on the Shepherd Mustangs to victory. It wasn't the win they wanted at the start of the day. It didn’t redeem the loss. But that effort was its own kind of win, its own blessing, its own act of agency and revelation of what it means to be team players.
Losses, wounds, pain, grief, and scars are not receipts for sin. These are not signs that God has abandoned you. They are the place where your testimony is being forged; they may not ever answer the question “why,” but they do point to Who—who is acting, who is bringing wholeness, who brings life out of dust, mud, spit, and nothing.
We are not called to be people who have never been hurt. We are called to be people who have been healed into something new—something that still bears the marks of the struggle, but shines with the glory of the resurrection.
Why? “I don’t know why,” said the man born blind. “Don’t know where exactly or how exactly. But I do know who. And I want to follow him.”
May this be our response. Every time.
Amen.
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