A few years ago, in a review in The New York Times, the philosopher Alain de Botton reflected on Albert Camus’ famous 1947 novel The Plague. Camus believed that plagues—what we now call pandemics—are not simply medical events. They are moments when a deeper truth about the human condition becomes impossible to ignore.
What plagues reveal, Camus suggested, is something that is always true: human beings are radically vulnerable. At any moment our lives can be interrupted—by illness, by accident, or by the actions of our fellow human beings.
Once we recognize that truth, another question quietly emerges. If life really is this fragile—if none of us is immune from suffering—then perhaps the most important question is not why suffering happens, but how we choose to live with one another in the midst of it.
In Camus’ novel, the citizens of the Algerian city of Oran struggle to accept this reality. Like many modern people, they assume that disasters of this magnitude belong to the past. Surely modern medicine and technological progress have changed the rules. Surely the plagues that devastated earlier centuries cannot happen to us.
Camus dismantles that illusion with unsettling clarity. In terms of the unpredictable fragility of human life, history marks no real progress. We remain just as vulnerable as our ancestors were.
As de Botton summarizes Camus’ insight:
“Being alive always was—and always will remain—an emergency.”
Those words land differently today than they might have only a few years ago. The daily terror of the COVID pandemic may now lie behind us, but its aftershocks remain. Our sense of stability has been shaken. The world that once felt predictable now feels far less secure.
We have been reminded—rather abruptly—that the structures on which we build our lives are more fragile than we like to admit.
And so many of us quietly find ourselves asking a simple question:
Where can we stand when the ground beneath us keeps shifting?
It turns out that this question is not unique to our time.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples encounter a man who has been blind since birth. The disciples immediately ask a question that seems instinctively human:
“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
It is a revealing question. The disciples are trying to impose moral order on suffering. They want a cause. They want someone to blame.
If misfortune can be explained—if it can be tied to sin or failure—then perhaps it can be contained. Perhaps it can be kept safely at a distance. If suffering happens because someone did something wrong, then perhaps the rest of us can reassure ourselves that we are safe.
It is a question as old as humanity—and as modern as today’s headlines.
Whenever tragedy strikes, we instinctively search for explanations that shield us from confronting a deeper truth: that we too are vulnerable.
But Jesus refuses the premise entirely.
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” he says.
In other words, you are asking the wrong question.
The man’s blindness is not a moral puzzle to be solved. It is simply part of the brokenness of the world we inhabit.
Throughout his ministry Jesus repeatedly challenges the human impulse to divide the world into categories of deserving and undeserving, pure and impure, sinner and righteous. Religion itself can become a tool for maintaining these distinctions—and when it does, it hardens the human heart.
Camus saw a similar pattern in The Plague. In the novel, a parish priest declares the epidemic to be God’s punishment for human sin. But the town’s doctor refuses that explanation. Rather than searching for meaning in suffering, he focuses on confronting it.
When asked how one fights a plague, he gives a simple answer:
“The only way to fight the plague is with decency.”
Pressed to explain what he means, he replies that “Decency means doing my job.” In other words: showing up for others. Caring for others. Refusing to let fear harden the heart.
The Gospel story moves toward a remarkably similar insight. When Jesus heals the man born blind, the miracle is not only physical. The man receives more than sight. His understanding deepens. At first he simply knows that someone named Jesus healed him. Then he begins to see Jesus as a prophet. Finally he recognizes that the one who healed him stands within the very life of God.
The miracle becomes a journey from blindness to sight to insight.
Meanwhile those who are most certain they already see—the religious authorities—remain spiritually blind. Confident in their explanations, they never move beyond judgment.
And that raises an uncomfortable question for us.
If our eyes were truly opened, what might we see?
Perhaps we would see that the fragile condition Camus described is simply the human condition itself. Perhaps we would see that suffering is not something that happens to “them” rather than “us.” Perhaps we would see that we are bound together by our shared vulnerability.
And if we could truly see that, something remarkable might happen.
Fear might loosen its grip. Our hearts might soften. And we might discover the same insight shared by both Jesus and Camus’ doctor.
In the face of uncertainty and suffering, our calling is not to explain the world, control it, or judge it. Our calling is simply to live with courage and decency.
Not the illusion that faith protects us from suffering. Not the fantasy that progress has eliminated our vulnerability. But a deeper hope rooted in solidarity and compassion.
Because in the end the truth the man born blind discovers is also the truth we are invited to see:
We are all in this together—equally fragile, equally dependent on grace.
And perhaps the most faithful response to that fragile condition is simply this:
to show up for one another,
and to do the work that lies before us—with human decency.
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