At some point, in the small hours, almost everyone asks it: What did I do to deserve this? Underneath that question sits a picture of God who keeps accounts — whose hand is behind the tumor, the layoff, the accident, evening up the books. This week we name that myth and let Jesus dismantle it.

When the disciples see a man born blind and ask whose sin caused it, Jesus refuses the whole frame with one word: Neither. In Luke 13, twice over — a massacre and a collapsed tower — he’s handed the punishment theology and twice flatly refuses it. Stop reading tragedy as a scoreboard.

But if not punishment, then what? We look at the world the Bible actually describes: not a tightly controlled system, but a good creation under occupation — contested ground where Jesus treats sickness as an enemy to be pushed back rather than a lesson to be accepted. And we look at what this myth does to real people: it isolates the ones who most need holding, turns comforters into prosecutors, and quietly makes God unsafe.

The turn is this: God does not explain your suffering. He enters it. The shortest verse in the Bible tells us what God does in the face of death — he weeps. The hands you imagined clenched in punishment are stretched out and pierced.

And then the part that surprises people: you’re not a spectator in this. Every time you sit with someone in their grief instead of explaining it away, you take ground back.

Scripture: John 9:1–3 · Luke 13:1–5 · John 11:35 · Colossians 2:15 · Acts 10:38