Sin, Health, And The Sin Of Not Reforming Health Care

As serious as were the consequences of “original” sin --- toilsome work for Adam, painful childbirth for Eve, and eventually, death for both (but not on “the very day” they sinned) --- one thing that apparently neither of our First Parents had to suffer as punishment for it was bad health. It did not take long, however, for the idea to get going among their descendents that everybody else’s diseases, infirmities, and foreshortened lives (threescore years and ten does not begin to match the patriarchs’ longevity) were in some way God’s retaliation for their own sins. No matter that particular ailments were hard to match up with particular sins; it was the general theory that counted.

One would think that by now, for Christians at least, connecting ill health with sin would have no credibility whatever. Jesus himself roundly repudiated doing it. (See, for instance, John 9:1-2) Part of what went into his repudiation still makes good sense. Many saintly people get one ailment after another, while many rotten people seem never to lose a day’s dishonest work. Further, if by divine decree sin impedes health, its forgiveness should make people physically well immediately, and the refusal to honor God as a forgiving God should make evil-doers as sick as they can get without becoming downright dead.

Jesus’s refusal to look upon ill health as a by-product of sin is not without difficulties, however. The passage cited above goes on to make a theological point that, with all due respect to the Johannine school of the first century, squares all too well with at least one part of the message that it is the aim of its whole Gospel to communicate. In this particular case, of a man who was born blind, Jesus is quoted as saying that his blindness had nothing to do with his parents’ sinning, but rather with a decision on the part of God to demonstrate His power by curing him. There is more than just this one text in the New Testament supporting the notion that God must have his reasons for making people sick or infirm, but this one may be the most offensively stated of them all. John the Baptist seems to have been content to proclaim his own decrease that Jesus might increase, but no one else should entertain even the possibility that a God of love would ever inflict an infirmity on one of his creatures in order to aggrandize His own need to be a Curegiver. We can leave that kind of thinking to charlatan faith-healers.

It is important to disconnect our ideas about illness from our ideas about sin and divine purposing. By doing so, we can align ourselves the right way with responsible medical science, whose proper aim is to attack illness on the purely physical grounds upon which it should be attacked. And also, we can align ourselves the right way with responsible Christian witnessing to sin’s forgiveness more than to its ubiquity. God does indeed work in mysterious ways, but not by sticking it to one person whose sins happen to tick him off more than does another’s, and not by making the infliction of misery an essential component of the abundant life His Son has promised us.

And now, the point of all this for health care reform. The only credible explanation for this country’s dilly-dallying a half century and more over getting this done has to be that deep-down, there must still be lingering the notion that people who get sick deserve it and that alleviating their distress somehow would disrupt the divine economy of salvation. Still clinging to this lingering notion is the perfectly awful idea --- its Calvinist roots notwithstanding --- that it is meet and right for wealthier people to have easier access to health care because their worldly success is itself a sign of divine election.

People who suffer from this demented thinking also see the very real connection between poverty and ill health as even more evidence of God’s coming down on the side of the more successful among us. “The least of these” should get what they deserve. And if they are “illegals” besides, they should just be made to go away. In more down home theological language, the outlook here is that God clearly wants a few people more than he wants others to have all of life’s goodies, and that as a consequence and by his grace he enables his chosen to secure their benefits without any more than token struggles, while everybody else grabs, usually unsuccessfully, for whatever little may be left. It is sad to contemplate that this kind of a God is even more petty than we are.