AS WE WATCHED and prayed in response to disturbing reports of turmoil in France—the damage being done largely by angerblinded young Frenchmen from North and West African immigrant families—we thought of an incident that occurred 2,000 years ago.

One day on a Jerusalem street, Christ Jesus noticed a man who was suffering from congenital blindness. Eugene Peterson's rendering of this incident in The Message offers a valuable insight: "His disciples asked, 'Rabbi, who sinned: this man or his parents, causing him to be born blind?' Jesus said, 'You're asking the wrong question. You're looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do'" (see John 9:1–7).

As in praying for restored calm and a healthier body politic in France, so in healing the human body, the question is, Are we asking the right questions? Are we mesmerized with surface impressions, or do our responses and treatments reach beyond appearances to the underlying causes of discord and disease?

By seeing the man born blind from the basis of a flawed theology—the religious "old wives' tale" of original sin—Jesus' followers reasoned that the supposed sins of the man's parents were plaguing an otherwise innocent person. In contrast, Jesus saw only the man's original innocence.

Today, the cause-effect diagnosis might be that the man suffered from some kind of genetic flaw. In an age of genebased medicine, when most, if not every bodily condition or human behavior, is believed to result from genetic predisposition or "broken" genes, that conclusion seems likely. But does this conviction take us any closer to the truth?

A passage in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures speaks pointedly to that question: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appeared to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick" (Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 476–477). What Jesus saw through the lens of divine Science—through the law of like producing like, of Spirit creating men and women as wholly spiritual beings—gave the man freedom from all the condemnations associated with human birth and physical history.

Whether the belief is transmitted sin or genetically transmitted blindness, a moral deficiency or an accident of birth, there is in reality no cause-effect therein. And the influence of Christ breaks through the darkness of such consensus belief with the inevitability of sunrise. Christ is God's message revealing Deity's loving parental nature and our closeness to Him, and our perfect manhood and womanhood.

After the man in John's gospel account was healed, for the first time seeing his own way home from the Pool of Siloam, Jesus said (again, in The Message's rendering), "I came into the world to bring everything into the clear light of day, making all distinctions clear, so that those who have never seen will see, and those who have made a pretense of seeing will be exposed as blind."

It takes genuine humility to accept that one has been blinded by his or her opinions—by prejudice or hardheartedness. Yet, the seeds of another broader kind of liberation may be in that very kind of self-knowledge. Such has been the case in the United States and the United Kingdom, when soul-searching has followed in the wake of race riots.

Reporting on the recent incidents in Paris and many other cities, a London Times correspondent noted that while the French ideal has been assimilation of minorities into a "colour-blind republic," the reality for many Muslims and African immigrants has been "access denied" to "the so-called ascenseur social (social elevator) that was supposed to lift immigrants into the mainstream. ... 'The young have the feeling that they have been abandoned, left at the roadside,' Larbi Kechat, rector of the rue de Tanger mosque in Paris, said' " ("Colour-blind policy has fed Muslim radicalism," November 7, 2005).

We support no party or policy, except the policy of divine Love's power to overrule hate. We're partial to asking the deeper questions. High unemployment, discrimination, and despair are never excuses to condone violence, or to accept its inevitability. The healing of the effects of abandonment—and of blind, reactionary rage—may not come in a rush. But the same divine influence that healed a blind man on a Jerusalem street is still present to change hearts and minds anywhere ethnic or racial strife flares up. The Christ sees no condemnations of birth, no sides—and each one ruled by God's love. "Look," Jesus said, "for what God can do."