Meditation for the Sixth Sunday after Pascha: Sunday of the Blind Man (John 9:1-38)
“It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”
The disciples put this question to Jesus. And the question is asked every day: why is this one born blind, or that one paralysed…? Such cases are too many to count. The disciples asked this question of the Creator himself! Why does man suffer so many pains? In other words, what are these natural evils that accompany human life every moment, and why? Human life is a mixture of health and sickness, rest and pain; and often the equation does not balance, so that misery colours a person’s life and always puts the question on his lips: “Why was this one born blind?” What, then, is our view of suffering after the Resurrection?
People have many answers to this question, and the Lord’s answer to the disciples’ question – “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” – contains and sums them up.
If “this man sinned”, that means the solution to the problem of suffering lies in “reincarnation”: for he had been blind from birth, so he must have sinned in a previous life before he was born, and his blindness came as a result of that earlier sin.
If “his parents sinned”, that means the explanation of suffering rests on belief in “inherited sin”: the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge! And it is no wonder that some Christians even today believe in the inheritance of ancestral sin as if we were condemned for the sin of our first parents, so that we, the children of Adam, always bear the punishment of the first Adam’s sin. (Note: in Catholic teaching, Catechism nos. 404-405, the original sin we inherit is the loss of original holiness, a wounded nature, not a personal fault committed by each of us.)
But Christ answered both these mistaken ideas: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned”, but “that the glory of God might be revealed in him”.
So there is another, Christian solution, which does not believe in reincarnation or consider sin to be inherited: suffering exists “so that the name of God may be glorified”. At first sight the answer seems very unjust. But Jesus explained it at once by adding to his words the gestures of the first creation, pointing to and recalling the work of the first creation. He gave life to the blind man’s eyes, which had never known life, just as he gave life in paradise. Here he formed clay from earth as he did there, and spat on it here as he breathed there. In this way he points to “re-formation”, to “the renewal of creation” and to “the new creation”. And we are still in the joy of holy Pascha, so we can clearly understand these expressions. So, to answer his disciples’ question about why he allowed suffering in his creation, the Creator compared the first creation in paradise with the second after the Resurrection.
In the first creation Adam was born immortal by grace and knew no pain; not by nature but by grace. So the first Adam was given the resurrection of the body, that is, the body’s immortality, and in this then-conditional immortality he was asked to be perfected in the spirit and in the knowledge of God, that is, the resurrection of life.
But the fall of man showed clearly that Adam’s children were not worthy of the perfection of body given to them. The purpose of the body’s perfection and immortality is the perfection of life, that is, our spiritual resurrection. For, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa says, the immortality of the body in moral corruption would mean that evil becomes imperishable. In God’s mind, the immortality of the body is a precious vessel for the perfect life. And the fall of man proved that this gift was of no use, and that man chose to be perfected by way of suffering. That is why, after the Resurrection, we came to know the new way to perfection: that man should first be perfected spiritually and then bodily, and that moral perfection must come first as a guarantee for bodily perfection. In other words, we must first rise spiritually so that God may then grant us our bodily resurrection. We must be renewed spiritually so that we may be given bodies of light.
Christ’s resurrection is sure proof that we will be given these bodies. But what is asked of us now is to offer spiritual perfection: before the body of light, spiritual perfection is required. Christ’s resurrection is the pledge of this body, so we must die with him in a death like his, to rise with him in a resurrection like his. Indeed, this body of light deserves from us the spiritual perfection that God has allowed to be achieved through suffering and death, after it became clear that man did not achieve it while in bliss. After the Resurrection, man offers the perfection of the spiritual life because he awaits the gift of the perfection of the body of light, of which he received a pledge in Christ’s resurrection.
The righteous and the wicked will rise on the day of judgment. What the first psalm says – that the wicked will not stand in the judgment – does not mean they will not receive the resurrection of the body, but that they will not be able to stand or face the day of judgment. So we will all be immortal, but what kind of immortality? Life is not the immortality of the body, which everyone will have; life is the knowledge of God. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is first proof that we have been given a pledge of the body’s immortality, and second a demand that we live by the Spirit and know Jesus Christ, because the body’s immortality truly requires us to be alive in the Lord.
So why was this man born blind? So that the name of God might be glorified. And why is there suffering in the world? Suffering is a call and a message that we will receive a body without suffering; but the real suffering would be to be in that body without life in Christ, and that is hell.
That is why it is very clear in the story of the Samaritan woman that the living water, for her, was in the end her knowledge of Jesus. On the Sunday of the Paralytic, after Jesus healed the sick man’s body – and this healing of paralysis is a pledge of the general resurrection of the immortal, luminous body – Jesus at once told the paralytic: “See, you are well! Sin no more”, asking him for the spiritual perfection required. And here, with the blind man, Jesus gives light to his eyes, and the man answers him: “Lord, I believe”, and worships him. As Chrysostom says: “What harm did his blindness do this blind man, since it led him to know Jesus and glorify his name? And what good did their sight do his parents, since their bodily sight did not make them fit to know him? He gained life through his sufferings; they lost it through their health.”
The resurrection of Jesus Christ resolves for us the problem of suffering in the world. Sufferings are not disasters: they are a call to repentance and to renewal of the spiritual life. Suffering is a call to repentance; it is a path to the spiritual life. Suffering reminds us first of the first Adam, who was free from it, and second of the immortal body that awaits us. It reminds us of our return to the full stature of Christ and to a body of light like his. Suffering, then, is a path of spiritual re-formation that prepares us for the luminous re-formation.
Truly, the suffering was there so that the name of God might be glorified in it. Amen.
Fr. Gerard Abi Saab
