The
words “belief, believe, and believing” are on my “bad word” list when it comes
to trying to understand the biblical concept of faith. “Belief, believe, and believing”, they fit
well with Western Culture’s philosophical assumption that matters pertaining to
God are simply ideas to be accepted or discarded according to personal whim. Religions have beliefs and we choose to
believe them. Religions also place
demands on our conduct and we call that believing.
For
example, I can say that I believe that in love God created everything. I can live like I believe that in love God
created everything. I’m sure you folks
have seen many destructive farming practices based purely in a belief in profit. I’m sure you’ve also noticed that farmers who
believe that in love God created everything treat their land and animals a bit
differently. What we believe does have
profound effect on how we live.
But,
biblical faith is even different than simply believing ideas about God and living
accordingly – fundamentally different.
Abraham believed in God and I’m sure he had his religious practises
too. So what? Everybody back then believed in gods of some
sort or another. Abraham is not called faithful and the father of the faithful until
when according to God’s promise he left everything to go to the land God would
show him where God would make a great nation from him, and through this people
God would deliver his creation from its bondage to sin and death.
Faith
is basically being faithful in a relationship.
Faith is the basis of marriage.
Marriage is a covenantal relationship that requires faithfulness for it
to be a marriage. One of the reasons so
many people simply cohabitate rather than marry and why so many marriages fail
is that our culture has relegated marriage to the realm of belief. People believe in marriage. They accept the idea of it, but when it comes
to being faithful, well that’s hard work at which we fail miserably and then
it’s so easy yet quite expensive to say, “well, it was a good idea that I don’t
believe in anymore.”
Biblical
faith as Abraham demonstrates is active participation in the covenant
relationship through which God is putting things right in his creation that he
loves. It is living in the new reality
that God is bringing about by bringing all things under the Lordship of Jesus
Christ by uniting all things to Jesus by the Holy Spirit. The end result this work of God’s is the
renewal and healing of his creation. And
like marriage it is all about relationship.
Looking
at John 3:16, when Jesus there talks about believing “in him” it helps to think
of the “in him” as a place; as the sphere of reality in which we are in
relationship with him through the Holy Spirit sharing in his relationship with
the Father. This is what Jesus calls
“eternal life”. At John 17:3 Jesus says
as much. It reads, “Now this is eternal
life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you
have sent.” This means that eternal life
is not going to heaven when I die. It is rather knowing,
being in relationship with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and to one
another and the rest of creation accordingly.
John
3:16 does not say, “In this way God loved the world: he gave his only Son so
that all who believe the right things about him won’t go to Hell but will go to
Heaven when they die.” That’s the way it
so often gets preached but that is not what it means. John 3:16 rather means: “In this way God
loved the world: he gave his only Son with the result that all those who are
participating in a covenantal relationship with him in him are absolutely not
perishing according to this world’s futility but are rather experiencing
eternal life, i.e., communion with the Father through Jesus the Son in the Holy
Spirit now and forever.”
So
what are we to have faith in? Well, at
the beginning of his Gospel John says that Jesus is the Word of God become
flesh. This means that Jesus is the
becoming human flesh and blood of that which God spoke to create the universe
and give it order. To say that in a simply
more complicated way, human being was and is supposed to look like God the Son
in-fleshed in the creation. That’s what
Jesus is and in him is where this reality is coming into being. When Jesus died on the cross he opened up an
entirely new reality that is free of sin and death that his resurrection was
the first act and glimpse of, and this reality will come in its fullness when
he returns and Creation is made new.
When Jesus says “all who believe in me” that’s what he means. The new reality, the new humanity, he has
opened up in his very self by passing through death and now included us in by
the gift of the Holy Spirit.
We
are sharing the Lord’s Supper this morning.
This meal points towards this reality in Jesus. It is a sign and foretaste of it. We have been accustomed thinking of Holy
Communion as this solemn ritual when we “believe” we should reflect on our own sinfulness
and how unworthy as we are Jesus died for
me so that I can go to Heaven and I’m supposed to be overwhelmed with
thankfulness, but…we wind up not feeling it, not so much.
Let’s
try picturing this meal a bit differently.
Picture it as faithful participation in the new creation reality he has
opened up in his self. This meal is what
faith looks like. Jesus is here. This Bread and this Wine are the signs of his
life given for us and to us by which we are fed and nourished in this new life
he has given us in the Holy Spirit until he comes and on that day we will
feast. But for now, little by little he
is feeding and nourishing us with his very self and like Israel in the
wilderness we are coming to know and to depend on him. This meal is the sign and symbol of the
life-giving relationship that the Trinity has given us in Christ Jesus. God’s people gathered around this table,
sharing this meal of new life in Christ Jesus, bound together by the Holy
Spirit, and mysteriously being made new – this is what faith looks like. Amen.
