Now my soul is troubled and what shall I say, Father, save me from this hour?

No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.

Father, glorify your name.

Then a voice came from heaven.

I have glorified it and will glorify it again.

The crowd that was there and heard it said there had been a clap of thunder.

Others said an angel had spoken to him.

Jesus said,

this voice was for your benefit, not mine. All right, that is one of the weirdest and most under-appreciated little stories in the

Gospels. It's from John's Gospel, Chapter 12. And I've brought it up this week because we're still

talking today about faith. Last week I talked about the definition of faith that you get in the letter to the Hebrews that faith is the substance of things hoped for and I talked at some length about what that would mean at a philosophical level a kind of nuts and bolts technical philosophical definition,

that it has to do with the way your prior assumptions change and condition even your basic

experiences of the world, that there's no such thing

as an experience of the world that doesn't already come with some sort of

interpretation baked in, because sense perception, as the Greek philosophers knew well couldn't interpret itself.

And so now I want to get further into how that works in Christianity and in the various denominations and disciplines of Christianity that have emerged since the time of Jesus and since the Gospels.

And in order to do that, I wanted to start with the biblical text and I wanted to start with this story because I think it actually perfectly encapsulates what we're talking about.

It's an act of genius to include it and it's one of these stories that even if I had no other

convictions and no other evidence from around the rest of

antiquity I would be certain that this story really happened that this is true and my reason for

saying that is because the beginning of the story it starts around verse 20 I

didn't read it just now but I'm going to read it here there were some Greeks

...