Reincarnation and Jesus

Yes, we know that most Christian denominations deny reincarnation. But let's stop for a moment in the Gospel of John.

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

John 9: 1-2

This man was not just blind; he was born blind. If the gospel is an accurate record the disciples question would almost certainly have reflected popular beliefs at the time of Jesus about such afflictions and about sin as a cause of affliction. As they saw it there were two possibilities:

Option 1: Were the parents being punished, or at least dealt to by God in a fashion that could be accounted for as a consequence of their own actions. Tough on the blind man himself, perhaps, but definitely an option to be considered. For the sins of the fathers etc....

Option 2. Or did the man sin himself that he was born blind?

(We today, of course, would be making assumptions about genetics or about factors that might damage a fetus in utero at a critical period of its development, but these were not options for the disciples to consider.)

Now, apart from original sin, which would affect him no more and no less than any other individual, sighted or blind, the only opportunity to sin for the man born blind would be in the womb itself, which seems pretty unlikely, and failing that his sin must have occurred prior to conception.

Whereabouts was that man prior to conception that he was able to sin, and to sin in such a fashion as to warrant being born blind?

Option 2, as presented by the disciples to Jesus, is in effect a question which has reincarnation, or at least some kind of responsible pre-existence, as a given.

How did Jesus react? Did he rebuke his disciples for their foolishness in seriously considering reincarnation as an option. It was an obvious opportunity to do so. But he did not rebuke them. He merely proposed a third option.

The man had been blind from birth so that Jesus might heal him and manifest the glory of God.

3 Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him....
6.... he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,
7 And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing.

The disciples were wrong on both counts as it happened, but nothing in the record suggests that Jesus saw anything strange or foolish or odd or wrong about the reincarnation suggestion, as a suggestion, even though he proposed an alternative in this case.

This was an opportunity to correct what Christians today would describe as a gross error in the disciples' belief systems and Jesus did nothing at all. Go figure.

In the Middle Ages and later, people were burned as heretics by the Church for proposing such a possibility. And yet Jesus saw nothing untoward in the suggestion.

A Hands Off Guide to Spiritual Healing

Our freedom, in the very movements in which it asserts itself, creates budding habits which will stifle it, if it does not renew itself by constant effort.

Evelyn Underhill

The Abyss

The Man on the Cross

Frying Pan's Theology

In a time of floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, heatwaves, freezes, and tsunamis....

Beyond Darwin - which is even further out than back of Bourke

At the House of Simon the Leper

Hallucinations