Whose fault?

When Jesus and his friends ran into a man who had been blind since birth, the friends wanted to know whose fault it was. In the thinking of the time, misfortune was the result of sin. Being born blind – did that indicate sin of the parents or was a baby capable of sinning while still in the womb? That was the gist of their question and it was a familiar point of debate at the time.

Jesus turned it on its head. Nobody’s fault, he says in effect. Stop looking for someone to blame and instead see what good you can bring out of the situation. In this case, Jesus was going to use the man’s ailment to illustrate his claim to be the light of the world. He would heal his physical and his spiritual blindness.

We live in a blame culture, where we often seek to shirk responsibility and instead identify something or someone else to blame. By looking back we can get sucked into a mire of recriminations, and as we identify a culprit we usually find that we ourselves rise up a few notches in our own estimation. 

But basically we’re all the same. We all make mistakes and do things wrong. And we live in what we Christians call a fallen world, so that bad stuff happens which has nothing to do with what we or anyone else may have done. It’s just the way it is.

Jesus counsels us to look forward. What can we do in the situation in which we find ourselves? How do we redeem the situation so that good can come out of it?

Vision. Hope for the future. Redemption from the past. That’s what belief in Jesus as Saviour and Lord gives you. A new focus. A new life.

Just beginning to gear up for Christmas here. Starts with Thanksgiving this week. More on that another day.