To Live is to Suffer

Nearly every culture beside our own has recognized this truth. Nearly every religion and philosophy attempt to address it. To address suffering we must discover its source and address that source in the hope of overcoming or eliminating suffering.

John 9:1–2 (NET)

¹ Now as Jesus was passing by, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. ² His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who committed the sin that caused him to be born blind, this man or his parents?”

Why did Jesus’ disciples assume that the suffering of this man was the result of some moral defect of himself or his parents?

Psychologists today recognize this behavior as a defense mechanism. We attribute the suffering in others to some moral defect and implicitly locate ourselves in a superior position with respect to that defect to convince ourselves that we will avoid this suffering. Evolutionary psychologists assert that this psychological self-defense mechanism has found social expression in a host of religious traditions the easiest of which is identified by the idea of karma.

Karma

Karma is a belief in the conservation of moral energy or credit in the universe. If you do bad things, the universe will even the score and bring bad things to you. In the Hindu worldview all of humanity is trapped by karma in endless cycles of reincarnation until you finally do enough good or yoga to achieve escape from this cycle by no longer being a conscious individual self. Samsara is the suicide of the conscious, individual self by moral achievement. In Hinduism if you were born with a birth defect or born into an unfortunate social situation it is because you were immoral in a previous life and are simply getting what you deserve. You are owed no pity or assistance, you are just getting your just desserts.

Moralism

Religions that assert a personal deity work the moral equations by either alignment or offense of the controlling deity. If you do what the god or the gods want you are rewarded with good things. If you cross the god or the gods you will be punished. Humanity is a highly evolved version of Pavlov’s dog and the god or gods are our cosmic trainer.

This leads many people to be religious. They follow common moral guidelines within popular expectations to hope to avoid offending the god or gods and secure at least a chance for a good life and to make “the cut” after they die to go to a “better place”.

Religious Tribalism

In a competitive pluralistic context this usually results in religious tribalism. You can secure good fortune and a happy afterlife by backing the right god, the right moral system or the right religious group. You hitch your self-wagon to a religious superstar or spiritual athlete and ride their coat tails into glory. As a spiritual or religious consumer you look for the best path or leader who will give you the best deal or suit your personal choices.

The disciples being Jews assumed that either the parents or the man himself had offended Yhwh and his blindness was his punishment.

Skeptics

Modern skeptics that are functional or actual agnostics find the source of suffering either in material causes, randomness or chaos.

Sometimes misfortune has a quasi-moral source. If you have heart disease or cancer it is because you didn’t eat properly or exercise. You should have been more disciplined in your earlier years to quit smoker, worked harder, saved more, studied harder to get the right job, etc. If you find yourself old and in trouble, well, it’s your own fault.

Modern skepticism, however, has no answers for many of the troubles that plague us. The odds were not in the favor of the children with birth defects. Better to work on prenatal detection and abort them before they have a chance to suffer or burden their parents or society with their care. If you were born into a difficult social condition, a bad family, a poor country, genetic code that almost guarantees cancer, heart disease, mental illness or just a miserable personality you are again simply screwed. Make the best of it you can. Take heart, life is short.

Many Christians I meet are someplace between karmic superstition and tribalists. Their morality is driven by avoiding punishment from God and their loyalty is inspired by being rewarded by God for being most firmly on his side, not like “the rest” of humanity.

Jesus’ Troubling Answer

Jesus’ answer to his disciples satisfies none of the camps I have listed above.

³ Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but he was born blind so that the acts of God may be revealed through what happens to him.

Jesus begins by undercutting karma. This person wasn’t born with this disability because he was immoral or unworthy in a previous life. This man’s disability wasn’t because his parents were law breakers. Let’s take that one off the table right away.

Maybe you are a more hopeful moralist tribalist. The parents being good Jews (we’ll assume that they were), having the good fortune to be born into the tribe that worships the true God didn’t afford them the common privilege of having a healthy baby boy. Born blind in that culture to any family but the most wealthy meant that instead of being able to work, marry, and have a family of his own to carry on the inheritance he would have to demean himself by begging just to survive and not burden the family any more than he already has. Being born into the group that worships or is loyal to the right god doesn’t give you a pass either. Sorry.

Jesus also disappoints and maybe angers the modern skeptic by saying that his disability wasn’t simply a product of chance. This assertion in our context usually elicits anger from both secularized Christians, dualistic Christian tribalists and irreligious skeptics. It offends irreligious skeptics by asserting that a person deity controls history.

Part of the project of irreligious skepticism is the attempt to banish such assertions as cruel and shaming. Because of the strong tradition of both overt and implicit moralistic karma we might experience Jesus as “blaming the victim” even though Jesus has already made it clear that this is not the fault of the man or the parents.

Dualistic tribal Christians are offended by this because this seems to make Yhwh the author of suffering. Surely a good god would not want ANY children to be born with anything but perfect health and not family burdened by having to raise a disabled child. If the source of the defect is not moral than it must be Satan or demons or some other evil intruder that God lacks the control to prevent.

The Divine Passive

Jesus then goes on to say that the man was born blind “on purpose” but it isn’t articulated “who” made him blind. The implication clearly seems to be God.  Bible readers have long understood that sometimes in the Bible the text uses what is called “The divine passive voice“.  Sometimes in texts when no agent is given the implicit message is that God is acting.

This is a strong candidate for “the divine passive” especially because of the rest of the sentence. Knowing what will happen in the story it is easy to understand that what is to follow is in fact “the act of God” that Jesus is about to accomplish, but the divine passive is frustratingly vague because of where we want to take it.

“Are you saying that God made him blind so that Jesus could heal him? What does this say about God? Does God play with our lives like this for his own purposes? What about all of the other miserable people that Jesus healed? What about all of the miserable people that Jesus didn’t heal? Is God a sadist who brings trouble and difficulty into our own lives for his own reasons that he doesn’t bother to explain to us?!”

There is of course the book of Job, where God allows Satan to bring misery and loss into Job’s life and while God has a meeting with Job in the end he never bothers to explain himself to Job or the little bet he had going with Satan. Sounds pretty bad.

What the divine passive, demands however, is God’s silence like his silence to Job. The man was born blind like how many others born with disabilities. No explanation. It is implied that God is involved. It is not outside of his control but he doesn’t explain. We don’t know and if Jesus knows he isn’t telling.

What Our Demand For An Explanation Reveals

That “not telling” is offensive, frustrating and difficult. We want to know. The answer from the Bible is something that feels like paternalism. Either God doesn’t want to explain for his own reasons or maybe we are incapable of understanding. In any case this casts us in the role of a child or someone shut out of the conversation. How you respond to this has everything to do about what you think about who you are trying to relate to and your assumptions about yourself and God. In any case we have to own our own feelings about this because protesting (as in Job’s case) does little good. We have no power to force God’s hand or make him talk.

We hate this. God’s refusal to explain himself to us is deeply offensive. Who is God to withhold information from us!

Deep within the demand we assert our claim of authorship of our own stories. We assert that we MUST be in control of our own stories. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no reason for this assertion beyond our own desire for it to be so. In fact, in our inter-personal relationships we repeatedly violate this idea upon others. We assert our rights of authorship of THEIR stories as well.

Sometimes this is simply judgment. “She’s a bitch. He’s an asshole. My child is perfect…”

Sometimes this is our acts of power against others, in violence through force, in business through money, in relationships through lying and manipulation.

We demand to be the author of our stories, no matter how many other people are involved.

God doesn’t accede to our demand.

In many ways the atheists I know are far more honest than the religious persons. They at least have the honesty to kill God, rather than to let him go around being author. Nietzsche was brilliant, honest and consistent, among other things of course  

When Philosophy Becomes Serious

I’m 50 years old and have never been a patient in a hospital since my birth. My children are all healthy, do well in school and are wonderfully obedient. My wife is healthy. My father wasn’t a patient in a hospital until once a month before he died and even then just overnight. I’ve had the luxury of playing with ideas about God and good and evil and suffering but have, if we were to “average” suffering out in the world led a very charmed life. My sufferings have been small compared to the vast majority of humanity. I have been fortunate.

I have, however, seen a lot of suffering. I’ve seen what suffering does to people, it makes them desperate.

For us in the affluent west our desperation turns to the doctors, but many of you know that the doctors don’t always “work”. The area of medicine probably most frustrating is the area of mental health. We imagine common things are manageable and avoidable, a broken bone (don’t walk on the ice or climb trees) or heart disease (eat right, exercise), or cancer (try having good genes, get regular check-ups) but mental illness is another story. These people look normal and healthy but aren’t and the drugs prescribed seem to be given on the basis of trial and error. This illness too comes with a stigma and while you may be able to hold down a job or maintain a relationship with heart disease or cancer, mental illness seems to rob you of almost everything.

Exorcisms in India

Read a fascinating treatment of exorcisms in India in the American Scholar. These accounts make Biblical or Pentecostal Christian exorcisms look tame.

Daylight! I stood on a terrace outdoors. Pacing around, I tried to clear my head. The floor was strewn with crushed flower petals, dust, random brown lumps. I jumped back as a woman collapsed with a long wail. Two priests turned her face-down, then pinned her ankles and shoulders to the floor. Another priest slowly set a thick, flat stone on the middle of her back. Then he hefted another slab onto her buttocks. The priests chanted quietly. Her moaning subsided. Her lips opened, and I heard steady, rasped breathing.

“She is starting to vomit a preta now,” said Praful, who had followed me out.

“How long will it take?”

He shrugged. “There can be many different kinds of spirits in her. She must stay under stones all day, I think.”

Blinking in the light, I saw two other women and one man lying face-down on the terrace with huge, flat rocks on their backs. All the people having spirits crushed out of them were attended by family members—men, women, and children—who sat nearby on benches, taking turns wiping the patients’ faces and murmuring into their ears.

The author reflects on his own experience with mental illness treatment in America. Is this mental illness? Is this something other? What does your worldview equip you to face and how does it bias how you face it?

Our academic ponderings about suffering and evil go out the door when real suffering comes into our lives. Suffering makes us desperate, scared, willing to try anything and look for hope in any corner that promises relief.

Jesus’ Astounding Claim

Jesus follows his undermining all our aspirations of control and pretense with God with a statement of absolute audacity. People who kvetch over claims of the virgin birth but pass over statements like these are clearly not paying attention.

John 9:4–5 (NET)

⁴ We must perform the deeds of the one who sent me as long as it is daytime. Night is coming when no one can work. ⁵ As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

The disciples have just been stumbling around in karmic-folk-religious explanations for evil and suffering when Jesus stops them, declares that they have neither knowledge nor control over pain and suffering because it’s God’s business and then drops this on them.

In case you might have noticed it, this passage is all about seeing. Notice that the introduction wasn’t “and there was a man”, it was “he [Jesus] saw a man who had been blind from birth.” Then Jesus says that the purpose behind this man’s suffering was so “the acts of God may be revealed/exposed/made manifest by what happens to him” and then Jesus claims to be the source of light not just right there, but for the whole world! Jesus will be the agent by which that which God has not disclosed with respect to the suffering of the world will be revealed. Better pay attention, he says, because “night is coming”.

Performance Art

John 9:6–7 (NET)

⁶ Having said this, he spat on the ground and made some mud with the saliva. He smeared the mud on the blind man’s eyes ⁷ and said to him, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated “sent”). So the blind man went away and washed, and came back seeing.

This is one of Jesus’ most bizarre miracles hands down. This is the Jesus who heals a woman when she grabs his garment. This is the Jesus who says “your servant is healed” to a pagan Centurion and he goes believing that if he’s got the power to heal then he doesn’t need to go the dramatics that usually accompany supernatural healings. Jesus, however, goes into the dramatics. Why?

It seems pretty clear that Jesus is scripting this event. He doesn’t ask the man if he wants to be healed, he simply seems to approach him and begin to smear his eyes with mud made with his spittle. The man won’t be able to “see” Jesus until after he can see. It is also clear that Jesus wants him to go to a pool with a special name, the “missionary” pool. Remember Jesus has already described himself as “sent” by “the one who sent me”, and now he sends this guy to the “sent” pool.

If You’re Looking for a Biblical Hero…

One of the most common mistakes in approaching the Bible is to see it as a compilation of moral examples. The fact that this myth persists is testament to how much we want a holy book rather than wanting to actually read it. Skeptics who actually read the Bible rightly note the bad character of many of the Bible’s men of faith. Abraham disavows his wife, twice. Isaac plays favorites. Jacob is a con man and a bad father. Noah can’t handle his drink. Samson has bad judgment when it comes to women. David and Solomon can’t be satisfied no matter how many women they have. Gideon has no faith. Peter is a big show but caves under pressure. Job has no patience. What we find here in John 9, however, is a truly good man. While the crippled man that Jesus heals in John 5 throws Jesus under the bus, this man born blind is honest, courageous. reasonable and as we will see, brave enough to do what makes sense even when the world stands against him. If you’re looking for someone to emulate in the Bible, pick this guy.

When Moderns Investigate a Miracle

One of my favorite podcasts is an English radio program called “Unbelievable“. The format of the show is to bring on two people with opposing viewpoints, usually involving Christianity, and the host, Justin Brierly does a good job at helping the two sides to present their views on the subject. This is enormously difficult usually because they are trying to talk about what we most like to fight about, religion.

One show recently tackled the question of whether healing miracles do happen.

One side of our culture likes to imagine that “ancient peoples believed in foolish things like miracles but we modern people have science and so know that miracles don’t happen and they can all be explained away.” Another side still believes in miracles and loves miracle stories, wants them to get us out of scrapes, or wants them to confirm whatever religious or spiritual ideas we have about how the world works.

What happens in this story shows that ancients didn’t simply swallow whatever happened and also understood that miracles stories play a part in how we see the world, in the evidence we compile to try to figure out how things work.

In this Unbelievable episode the atheist starts out basically saying “everything can be explained by science” and the Christian healer says “God can heal people”. We see that the ancients in the story mostly side with the second guy. What we also see is that when you begin to get away from the theoretical and start to address specific cases things get much more complicated.

The Christian on the show talks about cases where people’s illnesses or problems seem to disappear unexplainably after prayer. At about minute 53 in the podcast they are discussing a case where a man was prayed for who had a history of heart disease and the Christian asserts that he was completely restored including the removal of a pig valve that he had gotten in a previous surgery. The atheist exclaims “if this had really happened then it would change the world, that could not stay contained…” The conversation then goes into the question of documents, witnesses, memory, etc. No, there no documentation that would satisfy the skeptic, but would any documentation be able to satisfy that God did this and not some other cause? Would the world really change if somehow we could document that person X asked Jesus to heal and then the doctors couldn’t find any other reason for the valve to disappear?

He also tells a story (at about 1 hour into the show) where Robbie Dawkins who is praying for his mother (who is not healed) is asked to pray for another woman in the hospital and her cancer goes away. The doctor understands that he can’t explain why her cancer disappeared except for the fact that he prayed. Does the unexplainable really change what we believe? Don’t we either dismiss “unexplained” events or see them through our interpretive filters to have them confirm what we already believed? Maybe we just keep them in the “unexplained” category?

A First Century Investigation

What happens in the story isn’t much different from what we do today. The Pharisees call in witnesses to try to figure out what happened. Surely if this Jesus was able to do something amazing like this, surely everyone would believe that Jesus is who he said he is, right?

They call in the man, call in his parents to confirm he was born blind, call the man back, but what happens is that this man who has been blind sees more clearly what is going on than the investigators do. They are faced with evidence that Jesus healed this man. They have already had conversations about Sabbath observance and Jesus’ action. Jesus attributed the sanction to his action based on who he claimed to be, this claim that they have rejected. This rejection then causes them the trouble of dealing with this miracle that they wish to dismiss. What do they do, they insult the man and try to forget the whole thing ever happened.

What this amazing man does is process the evidence rationally for the Pharisees based on their own system.

John 9:30–34 (NET)

³⁰ The man replied, “This is a remarkable thing, that you don’t know where he comes from, and yet he caused me to see!³¹ We know that God doesn’t listen to sinners, but if anyone is devout and does his will, God listens to him.³² Never before has anyone heard of someone causing a man born blind to see.³³ If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” ³⁴ They replied, “You were born completely in sinfulness, and yet you presume to teach us?” So they threw him out.

The man basically says “based on what we all agree to be true, and based on what you yourself agree to be ignorant of, the most reasonable thing to do is to believe Jesus is who he says he is.”

This reasoning is flawless. If you accept the premises then the conclusions are clear and audacious.

Why can’t the Pharisees accept the premises? Because they have an additional premise “God won’t show up unless he does so according to our preconceived ideas.”

In other words, God must serve our ideas and agendas, not the other way around. Here we have the basis of our offense at God’s silence with respect to our questions. Here we have the heart of our rebellion. Any god that serves our agenda is our servant and not our master and that god does nothing but make us the high god ourselves. This any real god cannot do. The man born blind is ready to see God, the Pharisees are not.

The Man Meets Jesus

John 9:35 (NET)

³⁵ Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, so he found the man and said to him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

Jesus now hearing (not seeing) that he was thrown out on the basis of simply telling the truth now seeks the man a second time. Remember, the first time he saw him and we don’t have any evidence that Jesus even asked the man if he wanted to be healed. He didn’t ask for belief as a condition for healing. now he wants to ask him “Do you believe in the Son of man”

This isn’t the first time we’ve had Jesus talk about “the Son of Man”. When Jesus spoke with Nicodemus  he also talked about the Son of Man. This Son of Man figure is from the book of Daniel, he is the man that the Ancient of Days turns the world over to after the imperial beasts are defeated. This Son of Man is given an everlasting kingdom.

What was the question that Jesus was asking him? What does “do you believe in” mean? Does it mean something like “Do you believe in Santa Claus?” meaning “do you think he exists? I don’t think so. I think the question in English might better be asked “do you trust in the Son of Man?” Is this “Son of Man” someone who can be relied upon, depended upon, looked to, followed? Why do I think this?

John 9:36–38 (NET)

³⁶ The man replied, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” ³⁷ Jesus told him, “You have seen him; he is the one speaking with you.” [³⁸ He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.

The man didn’t just say “yep, now I know that Daniel was right, let’s get a name tag and write “son of man” on it and stick it to Jesus.

Instead what happens is unprecedented in the gospel of John, this man, a Jew, worships Jesus. If he thought not caving to the investigative team would get him in trouble, this will surely seal his fate.

Conflict

What follows is ugly.

John 9:39–41 (NET)

³⁹Jesus said,] “For judgment I have come into this world, so that those who do not see may gain their sight, and the ones who see may become blind.”

⁴⁰Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and asked him, “We are not blind too, are we?”

⁴¹Jesus replied, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin, but now because you claim that you can see, your guilt remains.”

It is instructive that for the Pharisees the astounding good fortune for the man born blind is now lost to them. They cannot see the value of this healing for the man born blind. They cannot accept any of what Jesus has said to them about why he heals, how he heals and why he does it on the Sabbath. All they see is their own pride and ego. Instead of having any capacity to celebrate something that is undeniably good they are instead feeling wounded and attacked.

This story does connect in many ways to the story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night. Nicodemus who is told “you cannot even SEE the Kingdom of God unless you are born from above.” Nicodemus can’t even HEAR what Jesus is saying or SEE Jesus as the Son of Man. That discourse ended in this way and it seems to fit well into this story.

John 3:16–21 (NET)

¹⁶ For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him. ¹⁸ The one who believes in him is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. ¹⁹ Now this is the basis for judging: that the light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil. ²⁰ For everyone who does evil deeds hates the light and does not come to the light, so that their deeds will not be exposed. ²¹ But the one who practices the truth comes to the light, so that it may be plainly evident that his deeds have been done in God.

Why can’t the Pharisees SEE Jesus too? 

The evidence they give for rejecting Jesus’ claim of being Son of God and Son of Man is his Sabbath observance. Jesus did this miracle on the Sabbath, violating the Sabbath thus showing that he was in rebellion against the creator God’s decrees. Earlier in the book of John in chapter 5 the matter of Jesus healing on the Sabbath was treated and Jesus didn’t merely justify his working on the Sabbath because it was a good thing, but made the stronger assertion that they knew God worked on the Sabbath and therefore so much Jesus. Jesus was redefining Sabbath for them and revealing his identity to them.

Their logic basically went like this: Jesus can’t be God because he works on the Sabbath, even though he notes that if he were God it would be OK to heal on the Sabbath, but because he of course isn’t God (he can’t be after all, what a crazy claim) therefore he is against God.

In many ways their argument is identical to that of the skeptic in the Unbelievable show.  If someone is healed after prayer it cannot be God because there is no God therefore healing doesn’t prove there is a God. Of course a healing after prayer also doesn’t prove there is a God because there are unexplainable healings without prayer. In other words, the sign won’t convince someone who has already decided not to believe. There will always be a reason not to believe, just like believers can always find a reason to believe.

What is more interesting is how could these first century Pharisees, the conservative, religious party side with a modern skeptic? The skeptic would call the Pharisees closed minded religious persons, but our skepticism can be just as closed. In each case the only god they can see must submit to their notion of a god and their agenda for that god but by definition any god that would do this is not the source of all light and life and the author of all.

Misery-Deliverance-Gratitude

We begin the story noting how the blindness of the man is due to no moral shortcoming of his own or his parent. We end the story with Jesus asserting that the shortcoming of the Pharisees to not see the revelation of the act of God IS their fault for which they will be morally culpable.

The interesting character in the story is the man born blind who now sees. He did not choose Jesus, Jesus SAW him. He did not seem to inherit his good sense from is parents. They seemed dim and cowardly unlike their son. He received an amazing gift with absolutely no strings attached. When Jesus comes to find him again he is fully ready to accept and respond to Jesus in a way that few in the gospels are. He worships him.

The man could have, like the crippled man in John 5 simply took his healing and walked away. The man is a poster child for misery-deliverance-gratitude. He was born to an unfortunate circumstance through no fault of his own. He was seen by Jesus and delivered from his disability. He responded to his deliverance in gratitude.

Into The Light

If we are to live with the light on we must see that to live is to suffer and we have no authorial power to destroy our suffering and death. We may be able to blunt the experience, but the age of decay wins every time.

Jesus comes and invites us to put away all of our religious-suffering-control strategies. Managing karma doesn’t work. Trying to put God in our debt by obedience and loyalty doesn’t work, God cannot be bought off. Declaring God to be dead if God isn’t dead is simply denial and does nothing about suffering or the age of decay.

Our authorial strategies, whether they be religious like the Pharisees or skeptical like the moderns closes our eyes to the light. This blind man was rational within the premises of his cultural frame and saw and worshipped Jesus to his joy, not out of obligation but out of gratitude. The Pharisees were left to their anger and suspicion which would lead them to become murderers.

•  You are not the author of your life so you will not author it to avoid suffering.
• Our schemes of authorship make us reject the light and stay in the darkness where we can continue to imagine our authorship unchallenged by reality
• We will see that our rescuer is good
• We will see that our rescuer suffers with us and for us
• We will see that our rescuer can recycle our suffering into good things
• We will see in the resurrection the defeat of suffering and death