Sermon 3.15.26 Often Wrong, Never in Doubt

Do you ever find yourself in a place of struggle, where you have options of how you can respond to a situation in your life, but you really don’t know what to do?

Find yourself in an obscurity, and know how much you need the light?

It seems to me that one of the key distinctions that is being made in our Gospel passage this morning, is the distinction between certainty and humility; of pretending to see clearly, and keeping a sense of awe and wonder for what is possible in this world.

I often joke that our family’s motto is: “Often wrong, never in doubt.”

What this means is that if you ask someone in my family a question, they will give you an answer before looking to see if they are right.

It means that no matter how many times we have been incorrect in our assumptions in the past, it does not deter us from having total confidence right now.

“Often wrong, never in doubt,” means that one has certainty, when humility would serve us better.

Now, I used to think that “often wrong, never in doubt,” was a special charism; that this penchant for letting our gut feelings rule the day was particular to us.

For a long time, I thought that this funny little quip about my family’s level of certainty on any topic regardless of expertise was a little bit annoying to others, but ultimately harmless.

What makes it amusing is that hint of irony and satire and a recognition that the yawning gap between our confidence and certainty juxtaposed to objective reality is comical.

As I look at the world around me, though, and as I read our gospel for today, I realize that what is particularly striking about this motto is how often it is the main operating system for humanity as a whole.

Now, you know me and you know how much I would love to blame this on the internet and our access to vast amounts of human knowledge and cat videos.

But our gospel lesson today shows us that this motto has been the clarion call of humans for millennia.

Now, the easy way to show this would be to focus on the contrasting tropes of blindness and sight.

Jesus, in today’s gospel, gives sight to the blind man and starts a trial that is not too dissimilar from the trial that he himself will go through in a couple of weeks’ time;

Religious authorities trying to get to the bottom of a court case.

This is why we see all of the minute details and evidence that is being stacked up:

Was he blind from birth?

Is this the same person?

Bring in the parents as witnesses, because we need to verify that he was blind from birth.

When did the healing happen? Oh, it was on the Sabbath? Naughty naughty, Jesus!

Is this man who was blind old enough to speak for himself in this judicial setting?

What will the judgement be? Will we be kicked out of the synagogue?

It’s an interesting passage, because though it seems like it is the young blind man who originally comes to be interrogated and put on trial,

It is ultimately Jesus who is on trial.

And though the passage turns on this idea of blindness and sight, I want to look at how the idea of sin and certainty illuminate the passage.

The idea of who is sinful, who is a sinner, who sinned, permeates the whole episode.

For the religious authorities and for the culture in ancient Judah, sin was not a matter of opinion or conjecture, it was a matter of law and knowledge.

Notice how many times in the passage we hear word “know,” and how many times something in the passage is a matter of common knowledge.

When someone asks, “who sinned, this man or his parents,” what lies behind that is the cultural certainty that such afflictions are known to be the result of sin.

People didn’t ask if it was sin that caused his blindness, that was known;

They asked whose sin had caused it.

That’s a knowledge question.

As we move further into the passage, we see more evidence.

After interrogating the formerly blind man, the Pharisees say, “this man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.”

Again, they know explicitly that Jesus is not from God, because he does not fit their category of Sabbath keeping observers.

And, this leads them to their next statement, “we know that this man (meaning Jesus) is a sinner,” we just need to be able to prove it.

Finally, they know that God has spoken through Moses, which is another way of saying that they know that their received legal tradition, upon which they base their understanding of sin, is not up for debate.

Now juxtapose this to the other people in the narrative.

Against the sure and certain knowledge of the Pharisees, we have a group of people who don’t know much.

The people at the beginning of the story are not certain whether the man who was healed is the same man who was blind.

The formerly blind man himself is asked if he knows where Jesus is and he says, “I do not know.”

Later, as his parents are being interrogated by the Pharisees, the only thing they know is that this man is their son and that he is old enough to testify for himself.

They do not know how he came to see after being born blind.

As he gives his own testimony, the formerly blind man concludes that though he doesn’t know whether Jesus is a sinner, he does know that he was blind and now he sees,

And he knows that God doesn’t listen to sinners.

What we see in all of this talk about knowledge and sin is the principle that I began with today:

Jesus wants us to know the difference between certainty and humility: the ability to say “I don’t know, but I believe.”

“Often wrong, never in doubt” is no way to live a life of humility.

Jesus concludes this whole episode with his own reframing of the idea of sin.

Sin is not indicated by some affliction that you were born with “the sins of the parents will curse those to the third and fourth generation,” as it says in Exodus 20.

Sin, for Jesus, is not the failure to observe exact legal traditions that were modified and casuistically formulated outside of the biblical tradition.

Sin, in this passage, is certainty and judgement against afflicted people, when humility and mercy are the order of the day.

When Jesus says, “if you were blind, you would not have sin, but now that you say “we see” your sin remains.”

What he is really saying is that if you have certainty in a legal system that focuses more on legalism than the needs of people,

If you “see” and you “know” all things moral and legal with certainty, and yet you still refuse to care for your neighbor,

Then your certainty has become your sin.

And so, what I want you to take away from this passage today is a new kind of discipline that is counter cultural, both to our current moment as humans and to the whole history of humanity.

When you are most sure about something, when something hits your gut, or you find yourself about to say that something is “common sense,” everybody knows this, there is no doubt about this:

At the moments where you feel most righteous, most knowledgeable, most sure of the justice of your cause, most indignant, most certain;

Take a breath, take a moment of meditation and pause, lay aside your assumptions, stop to consider the things that you might not know, center another human being.

In this time, when everyone is certain about everything.

Remember that the first part of the motto “often wrong, never in doubt” is often wrong.

If this life and this Lenten journey is about liberation, know that liberation comes not from sure and certain knowledge, but from God’s Truth.

Our knowledge and God’s Truth, while often compatible are not the same thing.

A little bit of doubt in your own way of seeing goes a long way.

Jesus shows us that to have a little bit of doubt or knowledge of our own limited sight is actually true sight. In humility is our hope for a better world.

It is certainty and arrogance that brings blindness.

Now that you know, live as children of the light.

Often wrong, often in doubt, always with mercy, curiosity, and humility.

Amen.