One of my all-time favourite movies is The Princess Bride. There’s a character in it named Vizzini who overused the word “inconceivable”. He used it so much that another one of the characters, Inigo Montoya (himself known for saying, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”) had to make the accusation, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Sometimes we can use a word and use a word and use a word so much that in time we forget what the word actually means and instead it means what we want it to mean. For Vizzini, well, he thought of himself as a very brilliant strategist who could best anyone in a game of wits. If he made a plan and something happened that wasn’t in the plan, then it was inconceivable; meaning if he did not think of it, then it was inconceivable.
We Christians also have a word that we use a lot about which we could and should receive the same accusation. We use it so much that it has taken on a meaning to us that is different that what the Biblical writers would have it to mean. The word is faith. We use the word faith so much that maybe we have to accept the fact that we don’t now what it actually means or should I say what it meant to the writers of the Bible.
We tend to think of faith as believing certain things or putting our trust in something. We believe there is a God. Christians have beliefs about God that differ from the beliefs that people of other “faiths” have. We trust that God loves us and will provide for us. When bad things happen we have faith or believe that God has his reasons and we trust he’ll work good from it. Here at Easter we profess that we believe God raised Jesus from the dead is a historical fact and that that event is crucial to our faith.
Well, in the last ten or so years in the realm of New Testament studies there has been a number of people doing historical and language work on what the word we translate as “faith” means. If you wondering, the noun form is pistis and the verb is pisteuo. These scholars have taken the time to do the very tedious work of finding every known occurrence of it we have from the first couple of centuries of the church in both the writings of the church and from general culture. They found that the word wasn’t used very much to mean belief and trust the way we use it.
These scholars found that the word applied to how one behaved in a relationship and that our words loyalty or allegiance are better words to use to describe what faith is in the Bible. Faith primarily means being faithful rather than just believing and trusting. Faith is what soldiers do when they serve their countries and follow the chain of command. Faith is what civil servants do when they serve the country and its citizens. And my favourite, faith is how the relationship works between thugs and their crime boss.
Faith isn’t just believing or trusting in the existence of things we can’t see. Faith is participation in a relationship to which we are committed whether it be with God or with spouse or with parents or friends or an employer. Faith isn’t like our simply saying I believe I have a job. Faith is that I have a job and therefore I will be loyal in my obligation to my employer. Faith isn’t simply believing I have a wife. Faith is that I have a wife and I will be loyal to her.
Well, when you look at the New Testament and ask what did its writers mean by faith, you find that faith isn’t just believing stuff or trusting. The best way I can sum it up is to say that faith is our participation in the sphere of reality in which God is making his promises come about. Faith is our participation in the sphere of reality where God has called a people to himself through whom he is and will work out his purposes for his creation.
We like to think that faith is how we get saved (Believe this about Jesus and go to heaven). Faith is not how we get saved. Faith is our participation in the salvation that God has brought about in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit; the salvation that God Big Banged into real history by raising Jesus from the dead. Faith is our participation now in the New Creation that God sparked into being by and as the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead; the New Creation that he will bring to its fruition when Jesus returns and this Old Creation will be changed to be “full of the knowing of God as the waters cover the sea” (Is. 11:9).
It says here in 1 Peter 1:3, “God in his great mercy has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Crist from the dead.” Faith is our living now that new life that is marked by a living hope – not a wishful thinking hope - because God himself has stepped into our lives and marked us with the presence of his very self, the Holy Spirit, so that we now want to live for him as followers of Jesus Christ. Faith is that we find ourselves having an inexplicable allegiance to Jesus and desire to live for him and live like him.
To use an offhanded example here, a few months ago a virus common to bats somewhere in Asia mutated and jumped species to an exotic rodent that was captured and brought to a wet market in Wuhan, China. There, the virus did it again. It mutated and jumped species but this time into humans. A global pandemic has ensued. It is a deceptively contagious respiratory virus. You can have it and not know you have it and you are contagious days before you start showing symptoms. Its effects can be very mild to very severe. To some it is lethal, particularly the elderly and those weakened by other medical conditions. Regardless, pretty much everyone on planet earth has had to make dramatic lifestyle changes to live accordingly. The corona virus has created a new reality in which we must live differently to prevent its lethal spread. Something very small and seemingly insignificant happened and has changed reality for everyone and things will be different now and we have to live accordingly.
I know that’s a bad example, but using that image of something small changing everything; roughly two thousand years ago God the Son jumped species, so to speak, and became human, the man Jesus of Nazareth. God did this in a backwater region of the Roman Empire known for its tendency to revolt. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, he took our two primary diseases of Sin and Death to himself and died setting in motion their eventual death and our cure. God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit raised this Jesus from the dead and thus started something new, a New Creation; and, one could say a Global Pandemic of new life, hope-filled life, has ensued. Creation is now changed. Humanity is now changed. People have changed the way they do life because of this new birth into a new life. This new life is contagious. Not everybody gets it, but hopefully, at the end, everyone will. Those who got it display symptoms from mild to severe, but at the very least they find they have the sense that they are beloved children of God and that things are different. They have a hope and a joy. That sense of being loved by God develops into a love for others that changes the way people relate to one another. This pandemic of the love of God is the cure for God’s good Creation particularly for broken, hurting humanity.
Faith isn’t just that we believe God raised Jesus from the dead as a historical fact or something. Faith is that we are participating in that reality, the real course of historical events, that have ensued since Jesus lived, died, and was raised. Faith is allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ and loyal participation in his kingdom reign being manifest now in us as we live as hope-filled people who are prayerful, compassionate, and gracious. Amen.
