The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Of all the difficult teachings of Jesus, I find the equation of sin and illness or disability, one of the hardest to fathom, and still more to swallow.  It just seems so outrageously unfair, and pointless, to suggest to someone who has lost a leg or has cancer that it is his or fault; that their misfortune is somehow akin to, or the result of some wickedness. Being ill or crippled is bad enough; why make them feel guilty too?
Moving from emotion to reason, superficially at least, sin is not at all like illness although there may sometimes be some causal connection between the two. Choice is at the heart of any notion of sin, certainly any sort of sin which can be forgiven. Sin may be caused by an underlying laziness or carelessness, but these too are a choice (such sin would be meaningless if industry and attentiveness had not been real possibilities). But who chooses to be ill or crippled? True we may choose to engage in activities – smoking or drinking or rock climbing or racing motor bikes- which dispose us to be ill or injured, but to call those activities sinful for that reason would be rather further than most of us would be prepared to go (and, anyway such a line of argument would result in a rather bland and anodyne existence).
We do associate sin and disease in metaphor when we speak of malignant tumours; of a sick society; of economic and social malaise. This is in part our reluctance to admit the possibility of wickedness. We would prefer to see crime, antisocial behaviour, selfishness and greed as the consequences of economic deprivation , social injustice or a deprived childhood- things which we could cure- it might be difficult but not categorically impossible.
But this metaphorical confusion doesn’t help much with the real problem; saying sin seems like illness in some useful respects is not the same as saying they are essentially the same thing. This is not, of course, what Jesus does; he says it’s as easy for me to say “you are healed” as “you are forgiven” He is comparing two different actions. There is, however a strong suggestion that the two fall into the same category. And indeed, from God’s perspective, they are both aberrations, a disordering of creation. They are not how things should be.
Puzzling over this, I had a flash of inspiration from a most unlikely source. How the British Humanist Association has my name on its mailing list, I cannot explain, but I recently received their annual survey of religious belief in the UK. It’s a pretty naïve document and among the crassest of questions was: Do you have to believe in God to lead a moral life?  You are only allowed Yes or No; so the choice is between religious bigotry- believing, for example, only Christians or Muslims can lead good lives or blind stupidity which has failed to notice that non-believers can indeed be good, and are often better. I want to answer that while atheists, even militant atheists often lead moral lives, they are missing something. The first and obvious thing they may miss, and the compilers of the survey certainly are missing , is that the definition of “good” and “moral” that they assume is the one that has been worked out by Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) philosophers over the last 2000 odd years. So it’s a trifle disingenuous to suggest morality has nothing to do with religion.
 Much more importantly, however, we believe in a God who creates and orders nature- both the natural world and the workings of our bodies in the same way as he make the law at the heart of human relations with each other and with their maker . This is the great step forward from primitive religion; our God is not just a god of nature; he is the God of nature; the creator with a purpose and that purpose is love. The same moral force and creative energy is behind physics and physiology and sociology and ethics; it’s same energy with the same loving principles, the same morality that directs the physical and the social and the individual worlds. And so Jesus is recognised as the incarnate God because for him, as father and creator, it is one to calm the storm, to heal the man with palsy and forgive the sinner. But this is quite another thing to saying that pain and suffering are punishments or that sickness and disability are somehow deserved. We do not understand why creation should be marred by such disorders, but we can believe that sin and suffering are both just that, disorders and that we can turn to God remedy them by healing and forgiveness, and that if we do turn to him, one way or another we find that relief. Amen.