Sunday’s Gospel reading was a mighty long one; forty-one verses in total. It deals with a man who had been born sightless, and had been healed by Jesus. This drove the religious authorities mad. One the one hand Jesus had worked this great miracle, and so must be from God. On the other hand, he’d done this on the sabbath, and so he had broken the religious law. How could someone who had done that be from God?
So the Pharisees interview the man’s parents to make sure he had really been born blind. Finding out that he had, they then turned to the man himself. They said: “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” His answer is instructive:
“Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
In the end God is someone we know not something we know about. This man had met with Jesus and simply told others what he had experienced. His meeting with Christ was for him an event which cemented his beliefs. He didn’t know about the theological debates of the Pharisees, he simply knew Jesus. As a lady in our old church in Bristol used to say: “I know in my know-er”.
This also plays in to how we speak to other people about out faith. We are not expected to be able to give all the answers to all the questions, but we can bear witness to what we have experienced.
We can all say ‘one thing I do know’.
