"Why do bad things happen?" This question is at least 2,000 years old, and the answer that Jesus gives it is as pertinent today as it was when it was first wondered.
The assumption of the Pharisees was that someone must have sinned to have caused a man to be born blind--either the man's parents, or the man (a baby at the time) himself. Jesus confronts their hardness of heart and their wrong thinking by quickly dispatching their narrow-minded dichotomy: He states explicitly that neither the man nor his parents sinned--rather, the man was born blind so that God would be glorified through the work that Jesus did in bringing about the restoration of his sight.
Always ready to miss a point, the Pharisees quickly turned the debate away from who had sinned to cause blindness, to the "sin" of Jesus "working" on the Sabbath, the "preeminence" of Moses over the Son of God, and the insistence that they were seeing everything "perfectly clearly".
John Chapter Nine is one of the crucial passages to juxtapose the kindness and mercy of Jesus to those in need with the stubbornness of those who will not see what is plainly before them. There is much to learn from the blind man, his parents, the Pharisees, and Jesus.
Come join us, 6:30 pm, Sunday, November 2, 2025, at Panera Bread, The Greene, as we seek to know the One Who came to show us the goodness and grace of God, in the flesh!
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