And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him. (John 9:2-3 ESV)
Scenes from the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles brought to my mind the aftermath of the tsunami that struck Northeastern Japan in 2011.
Entire communities leveled to the ground. Survivors standing among the rubble where their homes—their safe spaces—once stood. The anguished expressions of those who lost almost everything in a matter of minutes but are grateful to be alive.
In Japan, destruction was by water. Here in California, it was by fire. Both resulted in utter devastation—and both drew comments from some proclaiming that it was God’s judgement on the people for their sins.
What struck me about this is that you don’t hear these same voices making such proclamations when tornadoes tear through the Midwest or hurricanes ravage the Gulf states.
And besides, is it our place to decide who deserves God’s judgement?
When God told Jonah to go to Nineveh, Jonah tried to flee because he thought that the Ninevites were too wicked and beyond redemption (Jonah 1:1-3). But the Ninevites did turn to God, and God showed them mercy (Jonah 3:10). “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry” (Jonah 4:1).
Like Jonah, we may think some people deserve God’s wrath, not mercy—but all of us deserve God’s wrath.
None of us are good enough to deserve God’s mercy—“as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one’” (Romans 3:10)—yet, God showed his love for us through Jesus’ sacrifice on a cross when we were still His enemies: still weak, still sinners, still ungodly (Rom 5:6-10). It’s by grace that we have been saved (Eph 2:8).
Grace may be hard for some of us to accept because we naturally want to earn things: we like to think that if we do “good” things, we will earn good rewards, and if we avoid doing “bad” things, we can prevent calamity. Thus, when someone endures hardship or faces catastrophe, we may tell ourselves that they somehow deserved it.
Years ago, when I was seeking God but not yet a committed follower of Jesus, I heard that a distant relative was stricken with cancer. My immediate thought was, “I wonder what she did to deserve that.”
That’s when I felt a sensation words alone cannot describe, as though I was in the presence of a holy, infinite being of unbridled power, bristling with a restrained anger that got my attention without outright terrifying me—this, I thought, must be what the fear of God is like. As I bowed under the weight of this presence, a series of words entered my mind, bypassing my own thought processes: “Do you think I’m as petty as you? That I would strike someone down with a disease because they slighted me?”
In an instant, I saw how small my human heart is and realized I could never even begin to comprehend the width and depth of God’s grace.
At that time, I had not read the Bible and was yet to be familiar with the story in the Gospel of John, where Jesus and his disciples came across a man who had been blind since birth. The disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2)
“It was not that this man sinned, or his parents,” Jesus replied, “but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:4).
The man’s blindness wasn’t a consequence of anything he or his parents had done to displease God—just as my relative’s cancer diagnosis was not the result of anything she had done to deserve it.
Being the finite and flawed creatures we are, we grasp for explanations to make sense of senseless tragedies. We can’t—or maybe we are simply afraid to—accept that calamity could strike anyone, anytime, because it challenges the illusion that we are in control of our lives and can avoid troubles by “being good.”
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was asked about a group of people from Galilee who had been executed by the Roman governor, Pilate, while on a pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2–3).
Jesus not only refuted the idea that people suffered for being “worse sinners,” he admonished the entire crowd to repent, using a plural “you.” All of us are sinners (Rom 3:23) and no one is better or worse than anyone else “for whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (James 2:10).
That’s the bad news—all of us are guilty of sin—but the good news is that, by God’s grace, we are forgiven because of what Jesus has done for us.
On the cross, Jesus took our sins upon himself taking the death penalty that we deserve but he never did, washing away our guilt.
We are made right before God, not because of anything we’ve done, but because of what God has already done for us. Nobody earns righteousness, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8-9).
And now that we’ve been saved by grace, we are called to be more like Jesus, known to his adversaries as a friend of sinners (Matt 11:19; Luke 7:34).
Los Angeles might be known as the film and television capital of the world and a major influence on culture, for better or for worse, which might be why some may think the region “deserved” the fires, which are still burning as I write this.
But in the midst of anyone’s pain, suffering, and loss—whether it takes place across the country, across the ocean, or right in our own backyard—it’s not our place to declare it as God’s judgement. Instead, we can choose prayer over posting, compassion over indifference, and grace over self-righteousness.
