Today’s passage has Jesus talking to the Jews during the feast of Hanukkah, during the Feast of Lights specifically, and they are questioning Him about His works and miracles.  And Jesus takes a really interesting approach to answering their charge, and I don’t know that I have noticed it before.  The Jews seems really interested in personal assaults on Jesus; they are trying to get Him removed to their lives.  But, as we’ve discussed, what we never really see them doing is denying what He has done.  In other words, they never claim that His miracles are just illusions, or that He isn’t healing people, feeding thousands, or any of that...they are always attacking His claims to be God’s Son.  They are making personal attacks, not attacks on the facts that are plain to see.  And today, Jesus calls them out on that.  He does this directly in v37-38.  Interestingly, prior to this, they are about to stone Him, and then they shift to just wanting to arrest Him.  It is so telling, and so subtle, how they change in these stories.  You stone someone who is a disgrace, for whom you have no respect, for whom you have an opinion of being a trashy person...but you arrest someone when you don’t know what to do with Him and just want Him out of your hair.  That subtle shift, I think, is a little telling.

And we do the same thing...many people today attack Jesus, the Bible, with a line of logic that this can’t be true, and that philosophically we imagine a God because we are relational beings and we are just filling a psychological void; there are lots of reasonable-sounding explanations about why we might create religion and create God in our minds, when in fact He may not exist.  The thing is, what WE argue as Christians is that something happened...we aren’t making a philosophical point to support our faith, but an historical point.  We believe the EVENTS of the New Testament are true.  And, but extension, IF those claims that Jesus lived, died, and was resurrected are true, if we agree on that, THEN we can talk about the rest of what’s in the Bible.  But if we can’t agree on that, then there isn’t a discussion to be had.

Here the Jews are making the philosophical argument and are avoiding the facts that Jesus has done these things, right in front of their eyes...and they aren’t denying it.  It just reminds me of one of my favorite mantras as it relates to spirituality: when I focus on what’s undeniable, my faith soars, but when I focus on what’s unexplainable, it fades.  There are plenty of “unexplainables”, and it is fun to play in the realm of trying to solve some of those...but, we have to be grounded in the “undeniables”...that’s where our faith is rooted, and we must not sidestep those in our faith journey.