John 6:41-46 “At this the Jews began to grumble about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’? Stop grumbling among yourselves,’ Jesus answered. ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: They will all be taught by God. Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father”

What do we think we know? Have you ever shared a story you received by email or social media because it seemed sensible, only to find out later it was an urban myth? Those of you who are old enough to remember, were you taken in by the Y2K scare at all? There were all kinds of apocalyptic predictions about the fall of civilization when New Year’s Eve 1999 gave way to New Year’s Day 2000. Computers were supposed to be confused by the year being rendered “00″ in their systems. Would they think that we had gone back to the year 1900 and crash? I don’t remember hearing of a single problem.

Examples of relatively smart people believing relatively dumb things due to incomplete information can be multiplied many times over. The history of science is full of such stories, right up to the present day. Theology and faith are no exceptions. My way of trying to understand Jesus’ two natures as God and man through my teens and early twenties turned out to be an ancient Christian heresy called Apollinarianism. I learned about my error in a college class on the Nicene Creed. I wasn’t trying to be a heretic. I just wasn’t familiar with some of the Biblical material yet that made my idea wrong. I’m not saying we can’t know anything, but, as Donald Rumsfeld once observed, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” A little humility is always in place, no matter how much we think we know.

That was the problem for the people grumbling at Jesus, wasn’t it. You know the answer to their question, “How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven?’” because you know the Christmas story. Joseph was only his stepfather. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. But that wasn’t widely known by most people during his lifetime. Maybe they should have asked. Then their refusal to believe in Jesus wouldn’t have been made worse by their spiritual ignorance.

Jesus hints at this in his response to them. Maybe if these people had looked more carefully at what the prophets wrote about the Messiah; maybe if they had learned what God had told them in the Old Testament Scriptures; maybe if they had come to Jesus with open hearts and minds and asked him, he could have explained it to them, since he is the only one who had actually seen the Father. But they hadn’t been taught by God. They hadn’t listened to the Father. They hadn’t learned from him. They hadn’t come to Jesus. So they lived with their spiritual ignorance and they refused to believe in Jesus.

We aren’t saved by how much we know. Simple little children often have a stronger, healthier faith than their smarter, skeptical parents. But spiritual ignorance and biblical illiteracy still get in the way of faith for many people today. It leads them to take offense at things they only think the Bible teaches. It leads them to see Bible contradictions that don’t really exist. There are too many examples to try to create a list.

But the solution doesn’t start with pointing the finger at them. It starts with listening to what God the Father says in his word ourselves, learning from him, and coming to Jesus in faith. Then we will be prepared to confront spiritual ignorance, in love, for people who refuse to believe.