Preached on Sunday, March 15, 2026, the Fourth Sunday in Lent, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Little Rock.

The man said, ‘I do not know whether [Jesus] is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see. (John 9:25)

By the time the man in today’s Gospel finally says these words, he has already been questioned again and again. The religious authorities keep circling back with their investigations. They want clarity. They want a tidy theological explanation. They want him to settle their debate about Jesus. They expect him to take sides in a complicated dispute about law and Sabbath and authority.

But the man cannot do that. When they ask him whether Jesus is a sinner, he answers with remarkable honesty: “I do not know whether He is a sinner.” He refuses to pretend that he understands everything that has just happened to him. But after admitting what he does not know, he adds something else: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

It’s a very small confession, really. It’s not a carefully reasoned defense of Who Jesus is. It’s simply a statement about what has happened to this man born blind. The authorities want certainty about categories and doctrines, but the man offers something different. He offers testimony. He does not attempt to explain Jesus or resolve the debate unfolding around him. He simply tells the truth about what Jesus has done for him.

Just this is often where faith begins. We sometimes imagine that faith is primarily about mastering a system of ideas or solving difficult questions. We imagine that the faithful person is the one who can answer every objection and explain every mystery. But the Gospel paints a quieter picture. Faith often begins not with explanation but with recognition. Something has happened. Something has changed. Even if we can’t explain it, we can’t deny it either.

For the man in this story, the change is literal. His sight has been restored. But John’s Gospel is always working on more than one level, and this story is about vision in every sense of the word. The man is slowly beginning to see Who Jesus is. At the beginning of the chapter he refers to Him simply as “the man called Jesus.” Later he calls Him a prophet. By the end of the story he will fall before Him in worship. His sight—both physical and spiritual—unfolds gradually, step by step.

That is often how faith grows for us, as well. It rarely arrives all at once, fully formed and perfectly understood. More often, it grows quietly through experience. Something happens in your life that you cannot entirely explain, but you know that grace has touched it. Perhaps it was a prayer that steadied you at a moment when you didn’t think prayer would do much good. Perhaps it was forgiveness that became possible when resentment had seemed immovable. Perhaps it was the quiet but unmistakable realization that, even in a lonely moment, you were not as alone as you once believed.

You still may not yet have clarity or understanding. You may still carry questions––very good questions at that. And yet, you might still be able to say just one honest thing about your life with God. You might be able to point to a moment, or a season, or a turning point and say that something has changed. Once you couldn’t see grace. Now you can.

There’s an irony running through this entire story from John’s Gospel. The people who are most confident in their religious knowledge are the very ones who cannot see what is happening. The Pharisees know the law. They know the traditions. They speak with great certainty about Who God is and how He works. Yet they cannot recognize the work of God standing directly in front of them. And meanwhile, the man who began the story in darkness, the man who knew just one thing, is the one whose eyes are opening.

That irony suggests something important for us. The great danger in the life of faith is not that we do not know enough. The great danger is that we become so sure of what we know that we stop paying attention to what God is actually doing. The man in the Gospel never pretends to know more than he does. Yet he also refuses to deny what has happened to him. Instead, he simply holds on to the one truth that he cannot ignore.

Perhaps, that’s all some of us have to offer today: not a perfect explanation of God, and not a complete or polished theology, but simply one honest acknowledgment of something Christ has done in our lives. Maybe it’s something big, or maybe it’s something small, but regardless, you certainly know that it happened, and that’s all you have to offer––and that’s enough.

The remarkable thing is that Christ receives even that offering. He takes it and runs with it. In this story, Jesus does not wait for the man to produce a perfect confession before revealing Himself. The man brings only the small truth he knows, and that small truth becomes the beginning of faith. In the same way, our own life of faith begins when we bring the little that we have come to know about God’s grace, trusting that there might be even more to see. Amen.