This is not a punishment
When illness or loss arrives, most of us start searching the past for the crime that explains it. Jesus was asked that question twice, and both times He refused the premise.
It usually comes at night. The scan has been read, or the phone call has been made, and the house has gone still. Then the mind starts going through the past the way a man goes through drawers. You go back to something you did at twenty, and to the years you did not pray, and the voice says that somewhere in there is the reason. You know what you did.
Sooner or later, in almost every suffering life, that voice suggests that the pain is a sentence. Sometimes it arrives in a visitor, one of Job's friends at the door with food and a verdict. More often it is interior, and at that hour it speaks with more confidence than anything else in your life.
The voice keeps coming back in every century and in every heart. It comes from fear rather than from Scripture.
Why we want it to be deserved
A world where suffering must be deserved is a world you can control. Live carefully, keep the rules, pray properly, and the lightning will always fall on someone else. The punishment story is a safety story the healthy tell themselves. That is why visitors reach for it so fast at other people's bedsides, and why we reach for it at our own.
Even a guilty verdict can feel better than a random one.
A guilty verdict means the universe still runs on rules you can read. Some people hold on to self-blame for exactly this reason. If I caused it, then I mattered to the outcome. If I repent hard enough, I might reverse it. That bargain feels like hope, and underneath it is fear.
The cost is savage. The punishment story adds guilt to pain, so a person ends up carrying two weights instead of one. And it paints a face onto God that is not His. A father who breaks his child's body to settle an account is a stranger to the Father Jesus showed us.
A consequence and a sentence
Some suffering does flow from choices, and this has to be said carefully, because half-truths here turn into weapons. Scripture says so, and so does ordinary life. Years of drinking scar a liver. Cruelty wears a marriage down until it breaks. If part of your suffering traces back to something you did, pretending otherwise would be no kindness. But that kind of link is the grain of a real world, where actions have weight, the way fire burns whether or not anyone is angry with you. A consequence is built into things, whereas a sentence has to be handed down by someone. A consequence does not mean God rose up against you, and it sets no limit on His mercy, which meets people in wreckage of their own making every day.
What Jesus closed the door on is the other reading: disaster as divine payback, tumours and stillbirths and falling towers traced to somebody's secret sin.
The disciples once walked past a man blind from birth and asked Jesus whose sin had caused it, his own or his parents'. They took it for granted that the blindness was someone's fault. The only open question, to them, was where to file the guilt. Jesus refused the file. Neither this man sinned, He said, nor his parents. Then He knelt in the dirt and made mud and gave the man his sight (John 9:1-7).
On another day people brought Him the news of their time, Galileans killed by Pilate at their own sacrifices. The unspoken question was the same one. What had those people done? He answered it head on. Do you think they were worse sinners than everyone else? No, He said. Then He reached past their example to one of His own, eighteen crushed when a tower fell at Siloam, and answered that the same way. After that He turned the crowd towards their own hearts, because everyone needs to turn to God. But the arithmetic they had brought, sin traded for catastrophe, He rejected in public (Luke 13:1-5).
Twice He was handed the ledger, and twice He put it down. The apostle who leaned on His chest at supper later wrote down what he had learnt of the face behind those refusals.
God is light and in him is no darkness at all.
1 John 1:5 RSVCE
There is no second face, no cellar in God where the cruelty is kept. The One who knelt in the dirt for the blind man is what God is like, all the way down.
If you are serving a secret sentence
I have met this reader many times. The one who nods at all of this and still, underneath, is serving time. There is a thing in your history, maybe decades old, that you privately convicted yourself for. When the suffering came it felt like the sentence finally arriving. You may never have said it aloud to anyone.
Two things belong to you. Please take both, because each without the other is unsafe.
The first. If real guilt lives in that history, there is a place to bring it, and that place is a confessional rather than an oncology ward. Guilt is answered by mercy, fully, at the price Christ already paid. Go to confession and say the thing to a priest. Hear absolution spoken over you, and then let it be gone. God does not run two treasuries, one for mercy and one for payback. He has one, and it holds mercy.
The second. Once mercy has been received, you are allowed to put the verdict down. The same is true where there was no real guilt at all, only the ache of a tender conscience. You do not have to argue with it every night. When the voice comes, and it may come for a long while yet, you do not need to out-debate it. You need one sentence, and you may borrow it from the Rabbi who was asked about the blind man. It was not that this man sinned. Say it about yourself. He said it first, about a man who had done nothing, in front of people who were sure someone had.
The voice may go on for a while. It has lost the argument all the same. Your illness is not His revenge, and your loss is not His invoice. He was asked, twice, and both times there was no darkness in His answer.