Not as a punishment from God, and not as a verdict on anyone's worth. Jesus rejected the "who sinned" logic outright. We live in a broken world, but every person bears God's image fully, and He is present in the suffering, not its author.
The Grace Answer
When someone is born into suffering, the oldest and cruelest instinct is to look for the fault: whose sin caused this? Jesus faced that exact question and dismantled it on the spot. His disciples saw a man born blind and asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” He refused the whole framework. The blindness was not a punishment, and it was not a verdict.
That matters enormously, because a lot of quiet cruelty hides in the assumption that hardship is God settling a score. Scripture will not let us pin suffering on the sufferer as a divine sentence. We live in a world broken by the fall, where bodies and genes and circumstances do not work the way they were designed to, and that brokenness touches the innocent. But brokenness in the system is a very different thing from God targeting a person.
Image and worth are never diminished
Here is what does not change no matter how a body is formed: every human being is fully made in the image of God and fully loved by Him. Paul even says the parts of the body that seem weaker are indispensable, honored, necessary. A person's worth is not scaled to their abilities. It is fixed by the God who knit them together and calls them His.
So the better question than why is where, and Scripture's answer is that God is not distant from the suffering. He entered it. The God who took on a body and bore its pain does not stand off from the hurting as their accuser. He is with them as their redeemer, and He promises a day when every broken thing is finally made whole. So we grieve what is broken without ever accepting the lie that God caused it to punish someone, and we honor every life as the image-bearing treasure Scripture says it is.