The Blind Man

 

The Blind Man


A passage from the Gospel of John, Ch. 9 states: As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. “Rabbi,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?” Jesus's reply to the disciples' question about the blind man is revealing. He says, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him”.

This incident offers one possible solution to the paradox presented in Harold Kushner's book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People”. Kushner questions why God allows a child, who is perfectly innocent, to be born with a debilitating illness. Certainly, God has the power to prevent such a heartless thing; so, if He doesn't it's either because He won't or because He can't. However, this incident of the blind suggests a third explanation. The child may have been born that way to serve a specific purpose, presumably in terms of how others will relate to it.

At first thought, this explanation appears to be no better than Kushner's two choices, because it seemingly portrays God as a thoughtless authoritarian who required one of His children to suffer for His own questionable motives. However, that argument overlooks the principle of free will. If we agree that God created His children for the purpose of sharing His love and joy, then it follows that the children must have free will, because love, by its nature, must be freely given. But if God gave His children free will, then this man must have agreed to perform this service; that is, to be born blind so that this miracle could be performed. He would have pre-existed as a spirit before being born in his defective body. That is not surprising in view of the fact that God told Job that he had existed when the foundations of the world were laid.

The Holy Spirit used this man to teach us a lesson: that the power of God can heal an inborn bodily defect. We can look on the blind man as an agent of the Holy Spirit, or as a part of the Holy Spirit.

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