Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

One of the good things to come out of suffering is this: It forces those who cannot see any sense in it to grapple with the mystery, and strive to squeeze some meaning out of it.

Almost everyone who writes on suffering does so out of their own personal encounter with this mysterious monster.

In the book When It Hurts Too Much To Cry, Jerry Fallwell begins with this account.

He tells of Clifford who left his good paying job to come to Lynchberg to study for the ministry.

He had a wife and two small sons.

He was an excellent student, and Fallwell was proud to have such a caliber of man in his school.

One Saturday night just after Cliff had finished with family devotions someone fired a shotgun through the living room window and Cliff was killed instantly.

Fallwell arrived in a few minutes to see the most senseless thing he had ever witnessed, and he could not help but question God, and wonder why He would allow such a terrible thing to happen.

He gave it a great deal of thought, and the only conclusion he could come to was that it is an unsolvable mystery with no sense whatever on any level known to man.

In the light of this tragedy he rebukes those who deal with suffering superficially.

He writes, "I think Christian leaders often do their people a disservice when they spout glib and shallow cliches to people going through some of these dark experiences!"

There are many people who do this.

He has had others in this same category.

One of their fine students was going home and picked up a hitchhiker.

The student was killed and dragged into the woods where his body was found.

He has other horror stories as well, but the point is, you cannot look at the victims of serious suffering and not ask the question why?

The disciples of Jesus could not help but wonder when they saw a man who had been blind from birth-why?

Why would any man have to enter the world never to see it?

Why is there such meaningless suffering?

It is the most simple question to ask, but unfortunately, the answer is not so simple.

The disciples see no profound complexity in the situation.

They are confident they have narrowed down the answer to one of two alternatives.

Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?

Jesus could have taken either, and they would have been satisfied, but instead, he took neither, and said it was not personal or parental sin that caused this suffering.

Jesus through a monkey wrench of complexity into their simple solution to the problem of suffering, and by so doing he taught them, and teaches us, one of the most important principles we can learn on the subject of suffering.

The principle is this:

I. SIMPLE SOLUTIONS TO SUFFERING ARE SUPERFICIAL.

Show me a simple solution to the problem of suffering, and I will show you a heresy that will fit neither the revelation of God, nor the experience of man.

Simple solutions are none the less the most popular and widely held by the intelligent and ignorant alike.

Here are the disciples of Christ who are hand picked by the Master Himself, and they view suffering with the same old worn out theory held by the friends of Job.

They assume that such a terrible fate as being born blind had to be the result of somebody's sin.

It was so logical and obvious to them that they did not even see the cruelty of it.

They are asking, who is guilty for such an awful thing: His parents or himself.

In other words, who do we blame when this horrible reality occurs?

What kind of parents must they have been to give birth to such a monstrosity as a blind baby?

Or what kind of a low life scoundrel must he be that God would punish him at birth for the sins he foresaw that he would commit?

I hope the disciples at least asked their question out of ear shot of this poor blind man, for there are very few things more cruel than to make suffering people feel guilty for their own suffering.

Both the Old Testament and the New Testament reject this theory to account for suffering, and it is superficial, but it is still often promoted.

Fallwell tells of his personal friends Dr. and Mrs. Rudy Holland who discovered their young son had a brain tumor.

Surgery removed it, but 11 months later it returned.

This time it was much larger and inoperable.

They were told their son had less than a year to live.

They heard of a new technique developed at Boston Children's Hospital, and they took their son there.

The surgery led to all kinds of complications, and he was in the hospital for months.

He did eventually come home but was kept alive by synthetic hormones.

Then a cyst that had formed ruptured, and he was in a coma for 32 days.

After being out of it for a month he lapsed into it for another month.

He lost most of his memory and was going blind.

Fallwell says that you can't put into words the kind of suffering this family had to endure.

Imagine the cruelty of trying to figure out whose sin it is they are suffering for.

We want life to be simple, and we want to have easy answers that give meaning to life.

We want life to be black and white where the good guys are escaping suffering, and the bad guys are getting their due reward of judgment.

If life was only like the movies, but it is not, and often the real life story has the bad guys getting by with murder, and the good guys being the ones getting murdered.

So it was with Able, John the Baptist, Stephen, and on and on.

Simple answers are not always false, but they are so often foolish and cruel when applied to specific situations.

Do people go blind because they mix up a pile of gun powder and then light it?

Of course they do.

Do they go blind because they stare at the Sun too long?

Yes they do.

People go blind for all kinds of foolish things they do.

They cause their blindness by the choices they make.

But to take what we know to be true and make it the truth, and apply it to every blind person, is to be cruel.

If we see a blind child and say, I wonder what stupid thing this kid did to become blind, then we are the ones being foolish.

There are hundreds of reasons for why people are blind.

Those who assume that there is only one reason, and that is that they did something evil or stupid, are a part of the problem in the suffering of the world.

Simple answers are convenient, but they are often worthless or cruel.

Harold Kushner in his book When Bad Things Happen To Good People writes, "I once read of an Iranian folk proverb, ' If you see a blind man, kick him; why should you be kinder than God?' In other words, if you see someone who is suffering, you must believe that he deserves his fate and that God wants him to suffer.

Therefore, put yourself on God's side by shunning Him or humiliating Him further.

If you try to help him, you will be going against God's justice."

It is simple solutions like this that make so many religious people cruel and without compassion.

It is true that many people become stronger through their suffering, and they become great examples of how it can strengthen character.

But it is a major mistake to try and apply this to somebody else's tragedy.

If a family just hears that their teenage daughter has been killed in an auto accident, and you try to comfort them by saying God wants to make you stronger, you are being cruel.

You have no business trying to interpret other people's suffering.

If they ask you for an opinion, you can share your theory, and they can take it or leave it, but to impose your unasked interpretation on people based on ignorance is to be a part of the problem.

It is as foolish and superficial as someone standing at the cross asking, who did sin, this man or his parents that he should meet with such a violent end?

This question might fit the two thieves for they were suffering as a direct result of their crimes, but Jesus was innocent.

You can say that two out of three ain't bad, but it is bad when you apply a simple solution to a situation where it is superficial and does not fit the facts.

This was just what the friends of Job were doing for days, and they were making his life miserable, and they were completely wrong.

Now the disciples are doing the same things with this poor blind man.

They were not so cruel as Job's friends, for they did not spend days rubbing his nose in it, and making him feel guilty.

But they believed the same simple falsehood that all suffering is connected with specific sin.

Old errors die hard, if they ever die at all.

They usually become so ingrained in the minds of people that even after they are rejected they continue to affect the attitudes.

The book of Job ends with God's rejection of Job's friends simple solution to his suffering.

It would have ended with God's judgment on the friends had Job not interceded on their behalf.

God was angry with their superficiality which they so dogmatically defended.

Now we are seeing history repeating itself in our text.

Jesus is again rejecting the simple solution to specific suffering by saying it has no connection with any specific sin in the sufferer or his parents.

By doing this Jesus shut down the number one most popular explanation for suffering of all time.

The vast majority of the human race has always clung to this simple explanation of suffering, that it is the punishment for sin.

Let's consider why-

II.

THE SIMPLE SOLUTION IS SO SUCCESSFUL.

The reason for its popularity is its simplicity.

It basically eliminates the problem of suffering altogether.

If all suffering is a result of the sin of the one suffering, then where is the problem?

All is as it should be, and justice is being done, and all it fair.

Everybody is reaping what they have sown.