One Thing I Know

Sermon — March 15, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner.
One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”” (John 9:41)

I’m always reminded, when I hear this Gospel story, of the classic TED Talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story” by the Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her talk is all about what happens when we reduce another person to a single, set understanding. She grew up in a middle-class family in Nigeria, and she tells the story of going to visit the village in which one of her family’s servants lived. She’d been taught to pity these poor people, whose lives in the countryside were so dire that they’d had to leave and come into the city to cook and clean for a family like hers. But when she went to the village, she found that the servants she had pitied were local heroes: they were the ones who’d made it in the big city, and come back in triumph to share their wealth. She’d been told one story the poverty of “the help”; but that wasn’t the only story of their lives.

She discovered the same thing in reverse when she came to America for college, and found that the same story of poverty and pity she’d been told about her family’s servants was the story that Americans had been told about Africa as a whole. Her fellow students didn’t know Nigeria from Somalia from Sudan. They had no idea that her parents were university professors, not starving farmers or bedraggled refugees. They saw her and they heard her name and they thought “Ah, Africa. I know what that means.”

But the irony of the single story, of course, is that the more we think we know about people’s stories in advance, the less we’re able to understand about their lives when we meet them face to face. The more we think we know them, the less that we can see them.

This pattern is at the heart of our Gospel reading today. From the very beginning of this long story, we can see that both Jesus’ disciples and his skeptics think they know the story. They just need to fill in the details. So for example, Jesus’ disciples ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2) They know (or rather, they think they know) that to be born blind, as opposed to losing one’s sense of sight in an accident or due to an illness, must be a sign of some hidden sin; and they wonder whether it was his parents’ fault, or something he did. (As a fetus, apparently? Who knows.) Jesus answers them, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” And he makes mud, and wipes it in the man’s eyes, and he can see, for the first time in his life.

And this is an amazing thing. But it’s at least as amazing that at the very moment that he gains his sight, his neighbors seem to lose theirs. “Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg?” they say. (9:8) “No, no,” some say, “it just someone who looks like him.” And he sounds like him and says that he’s him. But it can’t possibly be him. He’s not blind, any more, and he’s not sitting there and begging. So although he looks absolutely identical, they cannot see him. Or at least, although they see him, they cannot recognize who he is. The power of the single story that they claim to know about him already is so strong that it leads them to defy the evidence of their own senses.

So they bring him to the Pharisees, and the Pharisees are… surprised, or amazed, or outraged? It’s hard to tell. The Pharisees think they know how things work. God commands us to keep the Sabbath holy by refraining from work; washing is one of the 39 categories of forbidden work; therefore commands us to refrain from washing on the Sabbath. By washing his eyes with mud on the Sabbath, they think, Jesus has broken the commandment of God; he is by definition a sinner. But of course, this raises the awkward question: “How can a sinner perform such signs?” (9:16)

They can’t quite figure it out. So they call the man’s parents, who defer to the man. They call the man, and they tell their one story about Jesus again, “We know that this man is a sinner.” And the man simply replies, “I don’t know whether he’s a sinner. One thing I do know: I once was blind, but now I see.” (9:25-26) And they don’t believe him. So they ask him again, and when he tries to explain, they dismiss him: “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” (9:34) As soon as his experience of Jesus doesn’t line up with their preconceptions, they fall back on the old story about him.

Both Jesus’ disciples and the Pharisees come in with flawed preconceptions and rigid ideas. The man’s neighbors refuse to believe what they see. His parents shy away from speaking the plain truth out of fear. Other than Jesus, only the man himself handles the situation well, and the reason is clear. He refuses to cling to a single story about himself, or about Jesus, and he challenges those who insist they know the truth.

He is a model of humility: “I do not know whether he is a sinner,“ he says. “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” (9:25) Even after the Pharisees push him, he doesn’t respond with aggression—he invites them to recognize that they are just as ignorant as he is. “Here’s an astonishing thing! You don’t know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.” (9:30) Implicitly: maybe you could be a little humbler, like me. (They don’t take that particular advice very well.)

“I came into this world for judgment,” Jesus says. And when we picture “divine judgment,” many people picture a vengeful deity smiting people from the sky; or maybe people standing before St. Peter, hoping and praying to get into heaven. But that isn’t what Jesus means. “I came into this world for judgment,” he says, “so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” (9:39) He comes to invert our vision of the world. To scramble the stories that we think we know. To teach us, as Socrates would say, that the beginning of wisdom is to know that we know nothing.

Imagine what a different story this would be if the people in it simply saw what was happening in front of them, and responded. The disciples would ask what Jesus was going to do for the man, rather than ask for a judgment on what the man or his parents must have done. The neighbors would celebrate with him, rather than denying who he was. The Pharisees might wonder what it meant for a man to be healed on the Sabbath, rather than knowing that it meant that the healer was a sinner. They might even listen to what the man had to say, rather than dismissing his experience out of hand.

And the same is true for us. We tell so many stories about ourselves, and about the people in our lives: in our families, and in our city, and in our world. And there’s an invitation here to release the stories that we think we know about the people around us, and to resist retelling them when they turn out to be false.

This invitation is waiting for us everywhere. And I don’t like to point fingers, so I’ll only speak for myself; you can translate this into your life. The invitation is waiting for me when the story myself about how I always end up doing everything around the house prevents me from seeing all the work done by my wife. (If you’re listening online, I love you.) The invitation is there when I’m griping and grumbling to myself about how one of the cars in an intersection is blocking the crosswalk, and then I suddenly realize that they’ve stopped and rolled down the window because they saw me and wanted to say hello. It’s there for me when I’m reminded once more about the incredible complexity of a country like Iran, where there are people who mourn Ayatollah Khamenei’s death and people who celebrate it; where there are those who pray for the downfall of their government, and people who will fight for it, and oh so many people who just want their families and neighbors to be safe.

When we tell and retell the same stories about one another, we become unable to see one another as we really are. But Jesus came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see; and his dearest wish is for us to look upon one another, and to see one another—not as flattened characters in the same old stories we tell—but as the beloved children of God who we really are.He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”