John 9:1-7
Ugly Secrets about Pain

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes, saying to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

New Revised Standard Version

For most Christians, one ugly secret no one wants to talk about is pain. When we experience pain, so often we want to hide our pain from others. Sometimes we just don't want to talk about it. Sometimes we believe we can ignore the pain and it will go away. Sometimes we don't want to show the pain, and the doubts and the frustrations it brings, because that might cause others to think less of us, that we are not in control, or that our faith is too weak to cope with the pain. To do any of these ignores the obvious: pain hurts!

These are ancient feelings, and the followers of God back in Old Testament times tried to come up with "the answer" to pain, as we see in the book of Job. Most of the discussions in that book have Job's friends arguing that his misfortunes and pain must have come from his sin, for it simply must be that God rewards good people and punishes sinful people. Job argues back that this is not so in his life, any more than it is so in the real world, where good people still suffer and bad people still prosper.

We still want those convenient answers, because they give us a way to make sense out of pain. It is the same as the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil" in the Garden of Eden--we want to have the assurance of our goodness, to know that we are going to pass the final exam of life. For Job's friends, the absence of pain in their lives, and the presence of pain in other people's lives, was a mid-term report card that assured them all was well. So long as they could measure and influence the scoring system for "goodness," they would know where they stood.

But there, too, is a ugly secret that no one wants to talk about. We all know that we are not "good." Jesus even reminded us that only God is good. We can take great comfort that we are better than so many other people, that we haven't broken any of the "really big" Commandments, and that we have outgrown our "wild years" from the past. We want to define what "goodness" means. We want to measure ourselves according to a human-centered "fairness," assuming that God will be "fair" with us, too.

We can delude ourselves this way for a while, and some of us can keep up this charade for most of our lives, but there will be a time when we break down and see ourselves as the sinful failures we are. Even Job, as strongly as he proclaimed his innocence, had to wonder if his pain wasn't due to continuing punishment for sins in his younger years. Pain hurts, pain reminds us that we are fallible and temporary, and pain reinforces that we are not even close to perfect.

Even worse is the pain that we bring on ourselves. We don't know how to deal with an illness brought on by our choices, so friends choose their words delicately when talking to a smoker battling lung cancer. Bad attitudes and bad actions lead to many divorces, and while friends want to place blame for which partner is at fault, both partners know where they did wrong. We make bad decisions based on the wrong reasoning, we suffer the consequences of bad choices, and we ultimately must admit that Life has no tolerance for our failures. There are no "mulligans," there is no "Undo" menu selection, and we can't buy our way out. We deserve pain, and that hurts even more.

Jesus gives us a different answer in this passage, one that sounds harsh measured against our self-righteous views of fairness, but one that sings of hope when we have finally faced our failure. Jesus avoids the disciples' philosophical question about the nature of sin expressed in that one blind man. Instead, he says, the man's blindness is an opportunity for us to be doing the work of God. Some translators have interpreted the passage to mean that Jesus, rather than us, must be about the work of God. In other words, that blind man was at that place at that time so God through Jesus could heal him, right? Nope. Jesus gave them an answer not about the blind man, but about them and us. Their question was wrong.

Jesus tells us the only right question to ask is, "how should we be doing God's work?" The wrong question looks backward, the right question looks forward. The wrong question deals with limitations, the right question deals with possibilities. The wrong question looks to human wisdom for answers, the right question looks to God for answers. Look no further than to Ginny Owens, Contemporary Christian artist and composer, who, commenting on her blindness, says "It's like He takes the thing I like the least about myself and uses it for His glory."

We cannot expect ourselves to jump straight from pain to glorifying God. We have a few steps to take first:

• We must let go of our guilt and accept God's forgiveness, for even if it is our fault that we are in pain, that is not how God wants us to live. It is no coincidence that Jesus would first forgive a person's sins, then heal their bodies.
• We must let go of our weaknesses and accept God's strengths, for we must know that even at our strongest, we cannot live the fulfilled life that God wants to give to us.
• We must let go of our expectations for how the world should be and accept God's promises for the blessings to come. Paul tells us in Romans 8:18 that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing to the glory God will reveal in us.
• We must look for what God has given us to do, because we need the work for our recovery, and we need to see how God will bless our work.

There is another ugly secret about pain that gnaws at our sense of control and fairness. We want to pray, to lift our pain to God, and give it over to God -- so God can remove the pain in the way we want. We too often resist letting go of our pain, because we can't trust God to handle it in the way we want it handled. it is like those who give a "gift" to a church, then dictate how the gift must be used, or like a boss who makes an assignment, then hovers over the worker's shoulder to make sure it is done his way. It is no different than Simon Peter, putting his strong fisherman's arm around the Carpenter's shoulders, and explaining patiently to the obviously naive Jesus how all this talk about dying just isn't necessary. Sometimes God will not remove the pain, but when we trust, God will make everything right in the way that God knows is best.

Pain hurts, and overcoming pain is all about surrender to God at a time when we want to fight against the pain or just succumb to the pain. God's answers to pain carry us past the pain to the greater purpose and joy that God has prepared for us.