Today we are getting to peek into a conversation Jesus is basically having with the Jews who have challenged what he has just done with this man from yesterday’s reading; healing him on the Sabbath.

What is interesting about this, at least to me, in reading this morning is the way both Jesus responds and the way these Jews actually challenged him.  Remember from yesterday, what they DIDN’T claim was that Jesus didn’t heal this man.  In fact, they don’t ever claim that Jesus’ miracles or actions weren’t true, or at least I can’t recall any times when they do this.  They never attack anything Jesus has actually done, but they attack his methods, his timing, his claims.  That is actually very interesting...let’s think about that for a moment.  Here is a group that is highly motivated, perhaps more than anyone else in history, to discredit Jesus.  If people were alive to recount the stories of Jesus 15-20 years after his death, and to record these events that we are reading almost 2000 years later, why weren’t there some equally as influential writings to discredit these claims?  There was ample motivation, evidently, to produce those writings...where are they?   We have no shortage of other writings that popped up that history has shown to be only partially true and that lack some of the corroborative support that the gospels mustered, but we don’t have anything that I am aware of that truly attacks these claims.  There aren’t famous writings that are historically supported that discredit these miracles from eyewitness accounts that would say, “No, that water was never turned into wine”, and “No, that man didn’t get up and run out of the temple after Jesus healed him...I saw him laying there the next day”, and “Wait, that’s not true, I was there and Lazarus wasn’t ever dead, that was a trick”.  We don’t see these claims.  There was plenty of motivation from the Jews to discredit Jesus, obviously...why don’t we see them?

And then, looking at how Jesus responds to the Jews in the reading today...Jesus is going right at them.  He is making very clear claims as to His identity, and He is holding nothing back.  And they had to be furious...Jesus is making claims that clearly place Him in a context that the Jews were very uncomfortable with, and Jesus did with several times throughout His ministry.  His identity, or at least His claimed identity, was so clear to them that they finally figured that they couldn’t do anything but just get rid of him.

Today reminds me that it is so important to think critically about the attacks our faith gets.  We can feel like our faith is undermined by science with a simple statement that we hear on the news like, “Scientists discover a bone that is 10,000,000 years old, placing us one step closer to understanding the human history and the process of our evolution”; and I feel that way sometimes too!  So, I am not declaring victory over doubt!  But, we have history on our side.  I can’t tell you anything about that bone, but I can tell you that there have been plenty of motivated people that could and would have produced something over the last 2000 years to refute the clear claims of scripture as to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  There were plenty of motivated people to refute what Jesus did in terms of miracles and signs...and for some reason they have nothing.  We should be confident that history is on our side.  We should be confident that God will reveal a story, in time, that somehow ties all of this science and history together in a nice, neat, fashion.  Until then, we can just live in awe of what we know, what we don’t, and what’s to come.  Curious Christianity...that’s a healthy place to be in our faith.