One Thing I Know

John 9
Gospel Reading for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Year A)

When your job revolves around questions of God, faith, and the mysteries of the universe, you need to become comfortable with an important three word phrase: I don’t know. That is not to say that there are some things that you do not know or at least about which you have an informed, educated opinion. Every person of faith should spend their lifetimes learning and seeking to know all they can about God.

There are simply times that our finitude crashes into the infinity and you realize that you don’t know that much. Like I do not know why God allows bad things to happen. I don’t believe God causes things like the Covid-19 virus or tornadoes or starving children. But I don’t know why God allows it. I hope that there is a good reason behind it. But I don’t know. When you get right down to it, there is much both good and bad about which we just don’t know.

All of which sets up what I love about this passage in John. Jesus heals a man born blind and the story veers into an episode of Law & Order: Strict Pharisee Unit. The healed man and his parents are interrogated about what happened. The second time this particular group of Pharisees are talking to the formerly blind man—who has to be confused as to why people are so upset that he has been miraculously healed—they demand that he give glory to God because Jesus has to be a sinner. You can almost hear the one playing bad cop slamming on the interrogation room table as he yells it.

The man doesn’t know if Jesus is a sinner. He doesn’t know how he was healed. He doesn’t know where he fits in this tale in which he has been unwittingly thrown. He looks at his interrogators and states, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

I think that simple statement has rescued my faith more than a few times.

I have not been physically blind. And though I adore the hymn “Amazing Grace,” I don’t usually think these days of my faith in terms of that binary of once being spiritually blind and now seeing. I get the symbolism and that’s even where Jesus drives the point home in this passage, but I think I’m just as likely to have blindspots in my spiritual vision three decades into trying to be a Christian as I did when I was, like, five years old. Perhaps even more so.

Yet what gives me hope in that healed man’s statement is that something happened to him and that was enough for him to follow after Jesus. He was blind and now he saw and that was something of such great significance that he could not ignore it. Despite all the things that he did not know, there was this one thing he did know and that one thing was enough to make a leap of faith.

I know that I have experienced God in a myriad of ways through my life. I know that God has been a source of comfort when I have felt lonely or invaluable. I know that I feel tethered to the person of Jesus despite the many ways in which I daily fail to follow him. Even though I think differently about the theology that I might have had at different junctures of my life, I know that I love Jesus. That even after all these years and all the crap of dealing with realizing that what I believe made me unsuitable for the religious tradition of my youth, my heart still very much lies with the one who healed that blind man. It was never a deconstruction of my faith because God has always been good. I just had to reconstruct some of the church and theology stuff that was handed to me.

I know that I have heard it in songs and in teenagers’ questions about faith. I have seen it when the church lives out its mission to serve those in need. I feel it burst to life when I read about the father sprinting after his prodigal son, read one of the psalms, or remember how Paul reminds us that there is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from God’s love. I sense it in true community. It’s there and when I start to forget, something usually reminds me.

I know that I still want to be called a Christian even though that word comes with several tons of baggage. Something has happened to me over the course of my life and despite the doubts, heartache, and a world that doesn’t always make sense, it is something of enough significance that I’m willing to make that leap of faith.

There is so much that I do not know, but I do know that what I have seen compels me to keep following Jesus.