“Rabbi,” the disciples say to Jesus, “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  From the safe distance of two millennia, we smugly smile. A common question in that ancient culture, we assume.  We know better than to make such an assumption.  Perhaps. And perhaps not.

Fast-forward to our own time, to a jury in Fort Lauderdale, interviewed after acquitting a Georgia man accused of raping a woman in a restaurant parking lot. The 22-year old woman had intended to attract attention, thought the jury.  Yes, she had been attacked at knife-point and was raped twice.  But at the time, she was wearing a lace miniskirt, a green tank top, and nothing much else.  Said the jury foreman:  “We all feel she asked for it.”  (Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez, “The Just World Theory,” on the website of Santa Clara University:  www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/justworld.html.)

I hope we are shocked, but we should not be surprised.  It’s a human tendency, social psychologists tell us, to believe that victims of misfortune deserve what happens to them.  There is a common human desire to see victims as recipients of their just deserts.  In fact, the tendency is so common that it has a name:  the “Just World Hypothesis.”  Human beings have such a need to believe that the world is orderly, predictable, and just that we assume that people get what they deserve, say the experts.

These same researchers explain their findings thus: We need to believe that we live in a just world, a world where people get what’s coming to them, if you will.  And this need means that whenever we see evidence that suggests that the world is not just, we may act quickly to restore justice by helping the victim. Or, if we fail to act, we persuade ourselves that there is no injustice.  So, two we respond in one of two predictable ways. We either lend assistance; or we decide that the rape victim must have asked for it; that the homeless person is simply lazy; or that our fallen political or religious hero is immoral, and, having lost our affirmation, now deserves our scorn. In fact, this belief in a just world plays such an important role in our lives that we reinforce the notion repeatedly, in fairy tales, in fables, in comic books, and in endlessly repeated TV crime dramas where the police “get their man.”

Over a lifetime of research, social psychologist Melvin Lerner has developed a body of research that documents a common human eagerness to convince ourselves that victims deserve their suffering, and beneficiaries deserve their good fortune.  One of his books is titled “The Belief in a Just World,” subtitled:  “A fundamental Delusion.”

You can tell by the subtitle that Lerner himself is not a proponent of blaming the victim.  He merely explores our natural human tendency to do just that.  And his research confirms a core truth:  We all do it.  Perhaps as important to us this morning, is a corollary finding:  we in the church are most likely of all to blame victims.  In surveys examining this human tendency to believe in a just world – a world in which those who suffer actually deserve their suffering – those with a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be: more religious; more authoritarian; more conservative; more likely to admire leaders and institutions; and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups.

But remember, there are two possible reactions – and religious institutions tend to have both reactions, just as individuals do.  We all tend toward either one response or the other:  we jump in to help, or we “justify” the injustice we sense in our experience.  No matter how we respond, our hope is the same: we are hoping to confirm that our world is just, either by correcting the injustice we see around us, or by persuading ourselves that what we see is not actually wrong.  We say, “We’ve got to do something,” or we say, “There’s nothing we can do; this is not really injustice anyway.”

So we arrive back at today’s lesson from John.  The disciples come to Jesus with a question we now know we might also find ourselves asking:  “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) With those earlier disciples, we want to believe in a just world.  If was can’t make this man see, at least we can know that his NOT seeing is somehow fair. If this is an act of God, then God has a reason.  Someone is at fault. Right?

But Jesus will have none of it.  John tells us that it is because he knows he can do something, even if the disciples cannot.  Jesus has the power to heal.  And he says so.  “I am the light of the world.” (John 9:5) It’s a theological statement, but also an affirmation of power.  John writes this gospel, he tells us at the end, so that we “may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that believing [we] may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)

Still, there’s more in this story than mere testimony to the person and power of Christ.  The story is also about the compassion of Jesus, and thus it points to the love of God for the world.  Not only CAN Jesus heal this blind man.  He wants to do so.   For having a just world is important to Jesus, too.  He is not content with merely establishing the appearance of justice, joining the disciples in establishing blame, and then moving on.  Rather, he stops to lend assistance, to challenge this injustice of birth.

So I think that this long story from the gospel of John has many purposes, but at least these two:  one purpose is to remind us that Christ loves the world – the whole world.  The implication for those who follow Christ is this:  we are called to relentlessly, tirelessly, and lovingly to work for the good of those whom we all too easily name as victims.  Yes, we are human.  And in our frailty we will tend to dismiss the sufferings that tend to overwhelm us. But if we are to follow Christ to the cross – that seemingly ultimate symbol of injustice as the sacrifice of a truly innocent man – then we are called to curb our own human impulse to ease our consciences by blaming the world’s wounded.  Being fallen, our world is all too often capricious, not compassionate. We know about sin, so we do well not participate in the blaming. After all, we’ve read in Genesis about Adam and Eve blaming each other.  But even more important, we know that our own motives are never, ever, truly just.  We all want life’s scales tipped in our direction.  That’s OUR blindness.

Thus the story’s other purpose, I believe, is to help each of us identify with the blind man in the story.  Both Jesus’ friends and his foes want to justify his blindness.  But Jesus moves to make him whole.  And the similar miracle is that Jesus wants to open the eyes of his followers and his detractors, too.  At the end of the story he almost sighs:  “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (John 9: 39, New Revised Standard Version) Why? Because Christ loves the spiritually blind as well as the physically blind.

Only those who accept their blindness ever come to sight.  Only we seeing our own indifference to the needs of others can we know that we, too, have needs. Returning from his retirement dinner, the accolades of friends and colleagues echoing in his ears, a man asks his wife:  “I wonder how many truly great men there are in this world?”  And she, loving him well and truly, answers, “One less than you think.”  May our community of faith be such a place where truth is lovingly shared.

This Lent, our task is to see in ourselves our own need, and thereby open ourselves to the healing of the great physician.  God wants us to be healed:  healed in body; healed in heart; and healed as a sin-sick, indifferent society. It’s not something we accomplish alone.  So we have each other, the church.  And we have God’s unfailing grace. 

Often, we are blind.  Occasionally, we see.  That’s a gift worth accepting, with open hands.  Come, brothers and sisters in blindness, to the gospel feast, a feast of light and of sight.  Come to Christ, the light of the world.

 Amen.