I've officially decided the dumbest thing the church as a whole can do is take a stand on sin, other than sin (the general) is bad. Allow me to explain.
We read the Bible, many of us read it a lot. We are familiar with the narrative, the stories, the people, and yes, we consider ourselves familiar with the law. We study it. We meditate upon it. We search it in times of trouble for help, we rejoice in it in times of joy. We meet together in large and small groups multiple times in a week to be taught more about it. We gather in stadiums and convention centers to hold pep rallies around it. We read the Bible. But, it would be dangerous for us to claim to understand it completely.
In John 9, we have the story of Jesus healing a man born blind. The bulk of this chapter is about how the community and Pharisees responded to this particular miracle. I feel like sometimes the Pharisees get a bad rap. These were the men committed to knowing and applying the law. I've no doubt a portion of that group did so out of a thirst for control and power. That's true of any group of leaders. It is also true that any group of leaders has people who genuinely are trying to do the best they can. These were the experts on the law. Their lives were committed to law in a way that most of us will never understand, much less experience. I hear and read Christians say, "God clearly says," or, "the Bible is clear about." It makes me simultaneously cringe and giggle. John chapter 9 is why.
It just so happens that this miracle was worked on the Sabbath, the day that the law clearly says no work should happen. The law was very clear. Everyone who knew anything about the law understood this one. Well, everyone apparently, except that Son of God guy. Not only did Jesus do the work of a miracle on the holy day, he sent a blind man off walking to a pool. Not only did the man go, but he came back. Now, the man going may not have been a problem, we don't know how far he went. See, the Pharisees wanted to help people avoid sin so much (I'm sure it was because they loved the people to much to leave them to their sin, sound familiar?) that they broke down the law to it's simplest, although not necessarily intended, forms. So, the man would have had a decent idea if he was walking too much on the Sabbath. Either way, Jesus did some pretty major work on a day meant clearly by God for no work.
If you haven't caught on to where I'm headed with this, take a breath. If the law was clear, as the people were absolutely CONVINCED it was, then Jesus clearly broke the law. So, how do we read this? Did Jesus clearly break the law clearly defined in scripture, or, is there a freaking chance that maybe the law wasn't (and still isn't) as clear as we think it is?
Here is where this gets fun. After the community chases the family of the healed man, and get no answers to satisfy their desire to uphold the law, and then chase down the man himself and put him out of the temple (again, sound familiar?), Jesus comes back to the man. The man acknowledges who Jesus is and worships him. Then, Jesus says something interesting, "For judgement I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind." The Pharisees overhear, and respond by asking if they are blind, too. Then, the verse that makes me think we have got to stop taking a stand on sin. Jesus responds, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains."
Somewhere along the way, we forgot that the original sin was disobedience in the form of taking the knowledge of good and evil for ourselves. We didn't know about the law, we didn't need it. We took that knowledge that we were never supposed to have. Isn't it possible that maybe we weren't supposed to have it because we couldn't understand it? I can still remember all kinds of math formulas from high school and college, I can even apply them. But don't waste your time trying to get me to explain them. I never understand why they worked (or, in my case, often didn't). I'm starting to think the law is the same way. I can absolutely apply it, I can even understand the most basic of it (love God, love your neighbor). But I could never understand it enough to take a stand on it, I could never understand it enough to force someone else into my misunderstanding of it. I think this is why the Pharisees have become the great villains. We see what happens and react very negatively against anyone trying to be an expert of the ways of God. We hurt and break at the damage caused by (good intentioned) people trying to enforce something that is beyond them to understand, so much beyond them that they can't even realize how much they don't understand it.
John 9:41 scares me. "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains." What if our insistence that we clearly understand the law is the very thing that condemns us? The first sin was claiming the knowledge of good and evil, are we just committing that over and over again every time we say we understand what Paul was writing enough to keep women out of the pulpit, or homosexuals out of not only our churches but the lives they choose completely separate from our churches?
What if, we are so small compared to the glory of God, that we can't even understand the law enough to know what sin really is? I know it is bigger than just our actions and inactions, it is a brokenness that permeates everything in this world. And, the church should absolute acknowledge that brokenness and move towards what is whole. What is whole? Reconciliation. That is what the New Testament teaches is our ministry (2 Cor 5). Not to make a valiant last stand against the sin of the times. How could we? We don't understand sin enough to avoid ourselves.
But, we do know one thing. If you keep reading in John, into chapter 10, Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd. He says that we know one thing, we know his voice. Not his law. Not his miracles. We know his voice. We know that there is a good shepherd, a good god, we know him and we know he cares for us. This was a divisive teaching. Many believed, many said Jesus was crazy. I think this is why the church hesitates to just teach that we know Jesus, and we know he loves us. It is easy to rally big numbers around a cause. It is easy to keep attendance up by preaching how we saved unlike those sinners. It really is, it is scary how easy it easy to rally people around a rule that they have no trouble keeping.
It is much, much harder to say we don't get it. We don't understand this big book that we have committed ourselves to learning. That kind of honestly, while appreciated, doesn't tend to instill confidence. Then, to start teaching that the important thing, the only thing we can really know, is to know the Shepherd is not nearly as emotionally rousing as teaching how you too can be strong and important enough to beat this particular sin. The difference here is teaching people to just know Jesus and trusting that Jesus will do the work of dealing with sin vs teaching people that they can be good enough to be one of us, too.
The foundation of the Gospel is that we couldn't be good enough and it didn't matter because God was going to be good enough for us. The moment we start teaching anything else, when we start claiming the we aren't blind and understand it, we name ourselves guilty. It is a false gospel.
