Daily Lesson for March 24, 2017

Today's Daily Lesson comes from John chapter 8 verses 33 through 37:

33 They answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?”34 Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. 35 The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you."

John chapters 8 and 9 have Jesus speaking about blindness and enslavement.  The blindness of the sighted and the enslavement of the free are his primary points -- points hostilely received by those who were absolutely certain that they could see and were free.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once famously said, " . . .there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns."

No truer statement has ever been uttered.

It is what we do not know that we do not know which makes us blind. It is what we are certain of is the sin in others which is often so deeply the occasion of sin in ourselves.  It is the certitude that we are free even Biblically justified to behave as we wish that ends in our own enslavement to sin.

We can think here of those who owned slaves in antebellum America or those who have used the Bible as a weapon against the LGBT community. I am a descendant of these enslaved slave masters and I was at one time actively complicit in creating a culture that was homophobic and anti-gay. And like my forebears before me I did so not out of a sense of unrighteousness but righteousness.

This is a cause for deep humility. As Jesus said, "Because you say that you see your sin remains."  The moment we think we see and know is the moment we are often most misguided. It is the unknown unknowns that get us.

Harriet Tubman is purported to have said, "I freed a thousand slaves; I would have freed a thousand more if they had known they were slaves."

I wonder which slaves she was talking about -- the chattel or the so-called free?