“Who’s to blame?”
This is a question asked and answered all too frequently. Sometimes it is simply an attempt to avoid responsibility; if someone else can be blamed, then I will look better. Sometimes it is an honest attempt to understand causes and effects, to identify the people behind the negative occurrence. But once we identify someone to blame, it is an easy step from “dumb action” to “bad person.” Our motives for seeking someone to blame are often mixed and rarely pure. Yet we keep asking and answering this question.
Jesus is asked this question in the story of a man born blind (John 9). His disciples want to know who is to blame for this man’s blindness: “Who sinned? This man or his parents?” They are trying to understand how God works in our world. If God is in control and if he rewards good and punishes sin, then someone must be to blame for this man’s blindness. But it doesn’t seem right to punish a newborn baby who has had no opportunity to sin and it doesn’t seem right to punish a man for his parents’ sin. But someone has to take the blame.
No. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”
Maybe the disciples were asking a bigger question, “Why is this man blind?” The answer to that question could be a purpose rather than a cause; maybe this man is blind in order for Jesus to heal him and show everybody that he is someone special. There is a way to read Jesus’ response to say just this. But I can’t quite wrap my mind around the grammar or the logic. God did not intend for this man to be born blind, not as a punishment for sin and not a pretext for Jesus to heal him. There is no spiritual reason why this man was born physically blind.
Instead of answering the disciples’ question, Jesus heals the man. And, in the process of the physical healing, there is also a spiritual healing. By the end of the chapter it becomes apparent that this man sees more clearly who Jesus is and what he is about than everyone else in the story; his parents, his neighbors, the Pharisees, and even Jesus’ own disciples. Next to the man born blind everyone else seems spiritually blind. How blind those disciples were to have asked, “Who is to blame?” And how blind I was to have expected Jesus to give an answer to that question.
“Who’s to blame?” is a question I would be better off never asking or answering. … Except in one instance.
At the end of this story the Pharisees ask, “Are we blind too?” And Jesus answers, “Since you say that you can see, your sin sticks to you.” He seems to be saying to them, “You are to blame for your spiritual blindness.”
So that one exception is this, “Am I to blame for my spiritual blindness?” I may have been born spiritually blind. I may have inherited spiritual blindness from my family, and my culture, and my education, and even from my religion. But in the end, I may be choosing to remain blind by hanging on to a belief that I can already see.
A small first step out of this blindness is to put a pause on the asking and the answering of “Who’s to blame?”
