Believing in Jesus

 Click Here For Sermon Video

John 20:19-29

What do we mean when we say “I believe in Jesus”?  First, what does it sound like to other people?  I know for a large segment of the population, when they hear somebody say “I believe in Jesus” they will think you are out of touch with Modernity and science and that you also believe the earth is flat.  They also don’t appreciate when Christians go around saying you can’t go to heaven when you die unless you believe in Jesus.  The coercive nature of doing that is counterproductive.  They will also expect that you’re going to play moral policeman and go judgemental on them.  People think those things because a large portion of the people in the last couple of centuries who have said, “I believe in Jesus”, have been just like that – anti-scientific, anti-questioning, coercive, and power hungry – rather than behaving as if they actually know and abide in Jesus.

Moreover, belief or faith in this age of science and psychology is a rough row to hoe.  Belief in something or someone you can’t see is thought to be ridiculous, delusional even.  If it can’t be seen, touched, measured, or proven by math, then it’s not real and your belief therefore is really just your fantasy or delusion.  But then there’s always that politically correct tag on, “if that’s what helps you keep your world together, then who am I to judge.”  Your truth is your truth and mine is mine. 

Oddly, looking here at John’s Gospel, this relationship between belief and having evidence to prove it seems to be what’s behind Jesus’ conversation with Thomas.  Thomas believed in Jesus.  He followed Jesus around and participated in Jesus’ ministry.  His belief in Jesus as the Messiah and what Jesus was about in initiating the Kingdom of God or in John’s Gospel “Eternal life” was likely shattered by Jesus’ death.  But then the others tell him that Jesus has been raised from the dead.  Being the type who needs evidence, Thomas is not going to believe it, until he sees it, until he can touch the wounds that killed Jesus in a Jesus who now lives.  

Thomas’ response is reflective of what Greeks and Romans thought to be true about this world.  They believed that bodily resurrection is impossible.  People don’t rise from the dead.  Indeed, why would you want to?  Why would you want a second go at this sick, twisted world?  They believed that physical matter, especially bodies, is bad, evil, and gross.  Things change, rot, and stink and hurt.  Spirit and spiritual, as are the gods, is the true good.  Becoming an immortal spirit should have been Jesus’ destiny to the Greeks.  If Jesus was God or the Son of God, he certainly would have gone to the spiritual realm after death, not come back to the physical. 

Informed by that Greek sort of mindset, Thomas exclaims, “I won’t believe God raised Jesus from the dead unless I see the evidence, i.e. touch the wounds on the physical body of the crucified yet now living Jesus.”  Jesus gave him the proof in what is probably the most humorous moment in John’s Gospel.  “Put your hand here in my side, Tom.  You’ll know I’m for real when you touch my guts.”  

In response to Thomas’ Greekness, Jesus’ response to him is quite Hebrew.  The Jews believed God created the world and that it was very good.  It’s just diseased by sin, a disease which culminates in death.  If Jesus is bodily raised from the dead, the disease is cured, sin forgiven, and death defeated.  Moreover, if it was God who raised Jesus from the dead, then Jesus is the Truth because God has validated him.  What God was doing in, through, and as Jesus is as sure and as real as the rocks that are the very foundation of the very good earth, as sure and as real as life itself and more powerful than death even.  

So, to believe in Jesus the Resurrected One, is to say I believe he is the heart and root of Creation and of life.  Participating in his ministry is what everything is all about, what life is all about.  To not participate in Jesus’ ministry, to not be his disciple, is to perish.  Jesus and his ministry are the root of purpose in God’s very good creation.  John started his Gospel with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh.”  That’s the way he started it and pretty much how he ended it.  Jesus is the root of reality, the source of life around whom we must orient our lives if we want to have true life.  Believing in Jesus is orienting your life around him and his life.

Well, now that you’re all thoroughly philosophized and looking like a deer in the headlights, let me tell you something more about what it is to believe.  In New Testament Greek, the word we translate as believe, “pisteuw” and the noun form, “pistis”, belief, is also the same word we translate as faith and being faithful.  It is a complicated word family because we really don’t have a good word in English to translate the concept the word family carried in the first century.  Being loyal is probably the most accurate way to translate it.  Believing in Jesus is being loyal to Jesus.

A few years ago, I spent a chunk of money on a thick book that I actually read that is probably the most comprehensive analysis of the “pist-” word family.  Something I find really cool, but realize you might not and that’s okay, is that pretty much every book, letter, engraving, sales receipt, and scribbling of a note that is in the Greek language from the several centuries before and after Jesus are now typed into a computer database word by word.  You can do a word search that’s pretty incredible with it.  You can type in the word “cup” and give it a couple days and it will provide you with a report of pretty much every known use of the word “cup” in the Greek world way back then.  The author of this book did that with the faith word in Greek and found some interesting stuff.  

One thing I found really interesting is that this word that we associate most readily with faith in God, with a religious religious context, was actually quite secular in its use.  Our dear word for faith, for belief, is the word they used to describe the relationship between crime lords and their thugs.  The very loyal thug in essence believed in their crime lord much the same way as Christians believed in Jesus.  It was a relationship rooted in owed loyalty and reward.  The crime lord gained the thug’s loyalty usually by saving their lives, and in an odd sort of way he included them in his family, he continued to provide for them and their families, and did them favours in response to their acts of loyalty.  Betrayal of this benevolence was punishable by death or something worse.  I bet you have never thought of God the Father as being God the Godfather?  Heh. Heh.

Back then a Christian saying “I believe in Jesus” meant more or less the same thing as a thug saying “I believe in Corrupticus Maximus”, his crime boss.  Believing, having faith, meant way more than simply believing in the existence of something you can’t see or touch.  Believing means being loyal with the totality of your life.  The thug wouldn’t have said “I believe in Corrupticus Maximus even though I can’t see or touch him”.  He would have said, “I am loyal to Corrupticus Maximus even unto death.”

But in all seriousness, God acts in our lives much like a crime lord would have to gain our loyalty but truly for our good.  God answers prayers.  God heals.  God is there with a still, small voice when we need to know what to do.  God acts to deliver us in the real muck of our broken lives.  Yet there’s more.  In, through, and as Jesus and by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit God has done something infinitely more.  We know and abide in Jesus.  We have a real and living connection with him.  We know ourselves to be the beloved children of the Father just as Jesus knows himself to be.  A crime Lord didn’t love his thugs.  Yet, God loves us as his own beloved children and we know it and feel it because of God’s faithfulness to us and because of the love we find in the presence of the Holy Spirit with us and in the way we love each other.  In Christ, God is way more loyal to us than we can ever be to him.  God doesn’t hold it over our heads that we owe him our lives and threaten us with death if we don’t do what he wants.  Rather, God works graciously in our lives until we have the love for him that Jesus has so that we live to please God simply because we love him and those he calls us to love and serve.  

To believe in Jesus is to be loyal to him with our lives because we know and love him because he knows and loves us so much more than we could ever love him.  Even when we prove ourselves disloyal to him, he doesn’t “get us” like a crime lord would.  Instead, he continues to be loyal to us and works to heal us of what caused the disloyalty.  Quite often that can be a painful thing to grow through but it’s always for our healing and for drawing us closer to himself so that we know and love him more.  

In closing, we truly are blessed because we don’t see him.  We love him and are loyal to him because of his saving and gracious work and presence in our lives and in our very selves.  He lives in us!  By gift of the Holy Spirit, he is in us working to reveal who he is to us.  We get to know him through and through and that is more than just touching some scars for proof of his existence.  Amen.

 

What Is Faith?

1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-29

Click Here for Worship Service Video

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.