Dear Friends,
Some things would be almost impossible to believe, if not for the fact that someone saw what happened and has told us what they saw. Scholar Richard Bauckham has observed that the same can be said equally of the events of the Gospels and of the Holocaust.
It is a striking, almost shocking, parallel – but a perceptive one. Who would believe the grotesque cruelties some of the Nazis perpetrated on Jewish people and others – if not for the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses who can say, “I was there, I saw it with my own eyes; this is what I saw…” Even then it is often hard to believe, and there are those who want to deny, or at least to play down, such accounts.
Similarly, who would believe the amazing things Jesus said and did, were it not for the accounts of eyewitnesses? They too can say, “I was there, I saw it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears.” For example, here is the apostle Peter reassuring his readers: “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty … We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven” (2 Peter 1:16, 19, NIV).
God is not asking the impossible of us. We are not being asked to believe ‘out of thin air’, without any evidence. But we are expected to believe what the eyewitnesses saw and heard.
Chris Hobbs.
Vicar