The Undeniable Happening

By Robert Meyers

[Page 105]

     There are two kinds of knowing: theoretical and experiential. It is easy to show the difference. If someone tells you what it is like to eat cotton candy, you learn theoretically that it is biting down on sweet air, a filling of the mouth with huge cottony pink wads that melt instantly away to leave behind only a honeyed reminiscence.

     But when you buy some cotton candy and eat it for yourself, your knowledge is forever after altered. You now know differently, and you know with a fulness which no theory or set of words can ever quite come up to.

     If you and another cotton candy eater try to convince a third man, who has never eaten any, what a delightful experience it is, you will likely reach the point where you will falter, look at each other, shrug, and say: "Well, eat some! You'll know what we mean."

     This difference in kinds of knowing is fascinatingly painted in the incident recorded in John 9. Jesus has healed a blind man on the Sabbath. The Pharisees, as usual, have been peeking from behind some whitewashed corner. They act fast, as men do who feel their goodness threatened. They bring the healed man before them for questioning. When he tells them what has happened, some of the Pharisees say of Jesus, "This fellow is no man of God; he does not keep the Sabbath."

     These Pharisees have relatives who stretch off in both directions, past and future. They are kin to all the religionists in the world who judge others by loyalty to ceremonies rather than by Godlike compassion. It made no difference that Jesus had just accomplished a high aim of their religion; he had violated a code in doing it. Results did not

[Page 106]

count. What counted was that their preciously guarded law, that thing which assured them they were better than other men, had been momentarily set aside in deference to a higher law.

     And what they could not bear, of course, was the lurking suspicion that the higher law might be available at all times, even to accursed Gentiles.

     We are the kinsmen of these Pharisees. It is still our habit of mind to take the external deed for the measure of internal merit. An old man reports that he has not missed communion one time in fifty years. We all exult. It seems to us a proof of the validity of his religion. The fact, however, may or may not be significant. It is proof certainly of regular attendance, of good health, and of a strange disposing of circumstances so that the man was never needed elsewhere on a Sunday more than he was needed in his pew. But our disposition is to say: "What a noble old Christian." Perhaps. Or the ritual may have ministered to pride only, or soothed a conscience that otherwise would have been troubled by a sense of unworth. One thing is certain: the Pharisees would have been happy if Christ had never violated a religious rite in order to elevate humanity above law.

     Even among them, however, there arose the inevitable division. A part of them said, "How could such signs come from a sinful man?" I understand this dichotomy pretty well. When I was a boy I used to worry often about how some people could be so compassionate and radiantly Christlike, yet use an instrument of music on Sunday morning and so seal their eternal doom. As one grows older and sees the fruits of the Spirit in all sorts of men whose theological views are different from his, the question refuses him peace until he finds an answer for it.

     The Pharisees did not want to debate that unsettling question, of course, so they evaded it. "Then they continued to question him: 'What have you to say about him? It was your eyes he opened.'"

     "He answered, 'He is a prophet.'"

     The excited man with new vision, perhaps not yet aware of how serious the case was going to be, names his benefactor a prophet. This seems the likeliest explanation to him of his good fortune. We must remember, however, that this was only theoretical knowledge, a deduction from experience. His mind must have worked like this: The man must be a prophet for he made me see. He must be a prophet. He labors to explain his actual experience by invoking theory, but watch carefully to see how later he gives up trying to defend his theory and falls back only upon what he is absolutely sure of.

     Things by this time are going rather badly for the interrogators, so they try a new tack. If a man will not cooperate, one changes ground and accuses him of character flaws. You are lying, they tell him; you never were really blind to begin with.

     This reminds me of how some of us used to feel when a man, improperly converted, said: "I am different now that I have come to know Jesus. I am less selfish, I live better, I am happier." But have you done so-and-so? we would ask, ticking off the proper requirements. When he said no, we did not accept it that he was really better now, or that he knew Jesus as he claimed. We explained politely that he was confused or mistaken or lying, and that if he would turn himself over to us, we would lead him to the true Jesus. We sought to replace his experiential knowing with our theory, so his logic would be straight.

     The Pharisees now call in the parents, whom I always think of trembling before these important men but supported by a stubborn courage. "Is this your son? Do you say that he was born blind? How is it that he can see now?" Quite a battery of questions for humble peasant folk. Observe carefully how they separate their answers.

     "We know that he is our son," they reply first. No doubt about that. Experiential knowledge. "We know that he was born blind." No doubt about that, either, not when they remembered that

[Page 107]

first searing agony when they knew he would never see the sun rise or look on their faces, nor when they reflected over all those years when they had watched him daily bruised for his innocent crippling.

     But they do not intend to be trapped in debates about theory. "But how it is that he can now see, or who opened his eyes, we do not know." How cleverly they avoid the trap set for them. How much cleverer they are than some of us, who spend lifetimes arguing theory while blind brothers and sons of ours stumble around in search of a healing touch.

     Because they feared the Pharisees, who had already said that anyone who recognized Jesus as Messiah should be banned from the synagogue, they said, "Ask him; he is of age; he will speak for himself."

     So for the second time the Pharisees summoned the man who had been blind and tried to intimidate him. "Speak the truth before God. We know that this fellow is a sinner." It was an invitation into theoryland. The healed man turned it down. "Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know," he replied. "All I know is this: once I was blind, now I can see."

     This stubborn bravery and clearheadedness reaches across the centuries to move me. This simple soul knew what he knew. My savior may be all sorts of things, he seems to say, but of one thing I have absolute assurance and upon that thing I stand: before he came, I was blind. Now I can see.

     Maybe our approach is all wrong. We begin with theory, training our preachers in theology, opening our sermons with a battery of texts that prove theoretical propositions. We explain the theory of reconciliation, the theory of atonement, the theory of the Trinity, the theory of the Spirit's operation. Since there is always a market for sanitarily canned or neatly packaged products, some people buy. Soon we have a congregation.

     And in that congregation are men who say that no one belongs among them whose theories are not right. They explain exactly how others must believe in God and Christ. There can, they affirm stoutly, be no visions for those who reject their theories.

     If a man of poetic mind stands up among them one day and says:

     And must I say that God is Christ
          Or Jesus God in human guise,
     When I can say He has sufficed
          To bring the light to shadowed eyes?
     I do not care to speculate
          Of things mysterious to the mind;
     But O the rapture, early, late,
          Of light to eyes that once were blind,

they first bring him in before their tribunal for interrogation, and finally they cast him out. For he is, as you see, weak in theory. He does not understand exactly how it is that God and Christ are one, or how it is that Jesus was man and yet God at the same time.

     But one thing he does know, experientially: Jesus has brought light to his blinded eyes. Jesus, whom he is willing to speak of with a capitalized pronoun to affirm his reverence, has flooded the dark rooms of his heart with radiance and creatures of the night have scurried from that light.

     Every man, we perceive astonishingly, may really be a preacher. He would speak like this: "There are many things about religion, about the nature of God and Christ, which I do not fully comprehend. But in the pages of the New Testament, and in the lives of friends, I have met Jesus of Nazareth. I have fallen in love with Him, and with His teaching. I believe His is the way to live. I have tried it. It works. I have never felt so whole, so complete. I wish you might encounter the same friend, the same happiness."

     If two who had met Jesus in this way later sat down to discuss the complexities of His nature, just how much man and how much God He was, exactly how one is to view the Comforter He promised, precisely in what way He may be said to have ascended, and what His second coming means, would it rupture their friendship and destroy their happiness if they found themselves in no agreement?

     Not, dear reader, if they had met Him. Children in a family always disagree in

[Page 108]

some of their interpretations of the spirit and conduct of their father, but the deeper level where they have known in common a living person is undisturbed and this fact, this true experience, this undeniable happening, colors their lives forever.

     (867 Spaulding St., Wichita, Kansas).