Being a pastor tends to mean that people look to you for answers. Biblical answers. Sometimes, they ask you stuff that you hadn’t really thought about or you can’t answer with any great certainty. One of the more powerful things I think pastors, elders and preachers can do is to say, ‘I don’t know’.

The obvious times this happens is when people ask us stuff entirely outside our purview. Most pastors have some background or training outside of their theological studies which probably gives them some knowledge and insight in those areas. So, when you hear me talk about history, politics, religion or philosophy, I am talking about areas in which I have some actual qualification. But if you hear me making pronouncements about pretty much anything else, it doesn’t necessarily mean I am wrong, just that I am speaking as an untrained layman and you need to weigh my opinion (and that is all it is) accordingly. The same goes for anybody else depending on what their background and training is.

But the tendency for many people to expect pastors to be omnicompetent leads many pastors to actually believe they are omnicompetent. They will gladly make pronouncements well outside of their area of expertise and offer ill-considered opinions on any topic as though they are biblical facts. They will apply the bible (which they might rightly claim to know) to areas that they clearly don’t know without any hint of uncertainty that they don’t necessarily know what they are talking about. It is much more powerful – particularly when we do want to make pronouncements on things where we are absolutely sure and certain we do know what we’re talking about – to just say, ‘I don’t know’.

But I think this can happen with the scriptures too. I periodically get asked by other pastors (and sometimes ask other pastors myself) what a particular thorny issue in a passage of scripture means. We may have read it, understand the broad brush, looked at the commentaries and still can’t figure out exactly what it means. Certainly not with the level of certainty that we’d want to stand in pulpit and insist upon it. All too often, the expectation that we must know can lead us to insist in our sermons that we definitely do know. It might sometimes be better to just to admit, ‘I don’t really know what this means’.

I hit upon one example in my sermon this Sunday. It was only a small thing. Jeremiah, against his best advice, is dragged off to Egypt by the Judean remnant who have consistently refused to listen to him but seem to want to be confronted by what he has to say. The question is, why do they take him with them when they have no desire to listen to him? And the answer I gave, just as remains my answer now, is that I don’t know! The text doesn’t explicitly say. I’m not sure it gives us any great inference either. I just know it happens. It isn’t, happily, vital to understand the essence of the text – it wasn’t a central issue – it was just a question to which the answer isn’t at all obvious. So I mentioned it in passing and admitted I didn’t know why and moved on.

The benefit of doing that is severalfold. First, we show our church that we are fallible. We are not little popes with all the answers; we are fallible people with a perhaps a bit more insight than the average person. It encourages our church to carefully weigh what we say – with all the due respect given to our qualification, training and time spent in the passage – without making us the definitive, infallible channel of God’s Word to them, which is neither helpful for them or for us.

Second, we show that the bible isn’t always easy to understand and it’s okay to find it hard. If the pastor doesn’t know an answer, it isn’t embarrassing or problematic that our people might not know an answer to something. Seeking help is normal and, if your pastor has to ask other people questions, it is okay for you to ask other people (and your pastor) questions. If even Peter – one of the Apostles who wrote scripture – said chunks of what Paul said was hard to understand, it isn’t unreasonable for us to find chunks of scripture hard to understand.

Third, it encourages our people to be active listeners and active learners. It encourages them not to uncritically accept everything said from the front but, like the Bereans, to weigh it. They are to learn how to understand the scripture for themselves and, when they do, to listen critically (without a critical spirit), to what is said. This can only be good for their growth, knowledge and maturity.

For all these reasons, sometimes it is good to just admit that we don’t know. Rather than ploughing on and insisting we know what we clearly don’t or offering falsely confident answers, simply saying we’re not sure why this says what it does, why this was the case, how this works in light of different things can be much more powerful and beneficial than being the guy at the front with all the answers.