Believing Children
Christ is among us!
Beloved, I’d like us to briefly consider John 3:16 this morning—that most famous of passages that we see referenced at sporting events around the country, but with little understanding of the the significance or fullness of the verse. In fact, it is somewhat interesting that over the past few years, the signs at these events have been abbreviated from reading “John 3:16” to just “3:16”. Certainly, for those of us living in the Christ-haunted South, as O’Connor termed it, the reference is not lost, even with the minimization. But this minimization shows more than just lack of space on a poster board. It is actually indicative of the minimization of the word, “to believe.”
Let us begin to correct that problem by examining the word, “to believe”. The Greek form of the word is πιστεύω “to believe” which is itself derived from the Greek word, πίστις which means “faith” or “trust”. Any number of meanings can be applied to the word John uses here in this famous passage: to believe, as it has been translated here. But it can also mean: to trust in, to put faith in, to confide in, or to rely on. So, taking a closer look, we can begin to see that believing in God is something a bit more complex and deeper than a simply thinking something is true.
This word, πιστεύω, here in verse 16, is also in the present active participle, which stresses an ongoing activity, not simply a one-and-done event. It is not the moment of saving faith, but rather a continuous state. Imagine an “again and again in peace, let us pray to the Lord” here in the Scriptures. It is not the one who did believe, nor the one who will believe, nor even the one who does believe, but rather the one who is believing. So a more literal translation might be:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only begotten Son, so that the one believing in Him should not perish but have eternal life.
It is crucial that we make this point because, for John, and for the whole of Christian Tradition, the belief in God that leads to eternal life is active, and this means that it is more than simply an intellectual exercise. It is the entrance into a way of life. That we may become believing ones constitutes the very reason John writes his Gospel and stresses the deity of Christ. Some form of the phrase, “to believe” occurs 99 times in the Gospel of John. That is over 3 times more than the word appears in the all of the Synoptic Gospels combined.
And why should this surprise us? Many who discover exercise regimens, ways of eating, making money, or ways of relieving stress, cannot wait to share it with our family and friends so that they can benefit from them as well. John pours everything he has been given as an eyewitness and friend of Christ, all the love, all the fervor, all the glory because he knows that Christ is the light of the world, the life of the world, the salvation of the world. Christ is everything, and John wants us to not only know it intellectually, but to trust in Christ, to put faith in Christ, to test him and see that he is true, to confide in Christ and to rely on Christ. In short, the type of belief John constantly calls us to is one, which leads us to forsake everything to follow Christ.
For us today, maybe even among the Orthodox, we view belief as what Fr Lawrence Farley, in his book, The Gospel of John: Beholding the Glory, describes as, “the psychological and volitional act of placing one’s trust in something.” This intellectual exercise is then radically separated from anything to do the body that goes into that belief like baptism, fasting, or even communion. We see this transition most deeply as a result of the Reformation wherein belief and faith became associated only with internal things, internal realities, and the pulpit was moved to the center where the altar once stood, and the altar is pushed back, or to the side, or removed altogether. We stopped facing Christ, and began facing one another. The sacramental (that is to say, the mystagogical) life was diminished, and only the sermon—only the argument—remained. The transmission of the divine energies (i.e. grace) of God through material things was forgotten as the rhetorical arguments and the fervor of the preacher were deified. And the invisible act of “faith alone” became salvific rather than keeping the commandments. This intellectualizing of belief does not touch the heart in a real way. The Apostle James (2:19-20) warns us:
You believe that God is one! You do well! The demons also believe, and they shudder. O ignorant one! Will you not recognize that apart from works, faith is dead?
James uses the same Greek root word here for “faith” that John uses for “belief.” Think of it! He is telling the reader that your belief is meaningless if it does not lead to action. A purely, invisible, belief in God is dead and without life, if it does not inform how we treat the world and each other. We pray, beloved, that the Holy Spirit is everywhere present and fills all things. We believe this. Yet, what do we do to ourselves and others in the presence of God? We believe and profess that the whole of creation proclaims the glory of God—in other words, the creation proclaims Jesus Christ, yet how do we treat it? We believe and we profess that every human being bears the image of God, yet how do we minister to them? We believe and we profess the words of the Almighty who says, “Vengeance is mine. I will repay”, yet we hold onto unforgiveness. We believe and profess the words of our Lord who said, “seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, then all these things will be added to you,” yet we horde and trust in financial security rather than give to the poor and needy.
It is clear, then, from the Scriptures that belief encompasses a lived life, a “way” of experiencing, thinking, contemplating, acting, and becoming in the Lord Jesus Christ. Christos Yannaras writes:
We draw near to God by means of a way of life, not by means of a way of thinking. A way of life includes every function of growth and maturity—it is the way, for instance, which forms the relationship with our mother and father.
-Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology
Let us revisit the verse again:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only begotten Son, so that the one believing in Him should not perish but have eternal life.
A continual believing.
I don’t know about you, brothers and sisters, but that seems impossible to me. We are not accustomed to belief involving our active service and dedication, particularly in a culture and world which divorces the intellect from the body and activity—divorcing thinking and doing. And so, we will no doubt fail many times in our effort to be believing. Sometimes our actions will line up with our intellectual confessions and prayers. Sometimes they will not. It may seem to us a nightmare from which there is no awakening in which we are like Sysiphus rolling that huge boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down again. Rather than a boulder that we must push up the hill again and again, we fall to sin and the passions again and again. But we must not despair because that is not our fate. That is not our punishment. That is not our condemnation because the most precious Lord has given us the gift of repentance. He has made it so that we can get up and greet the new day in freedom, in grace, in his light and in his life. As we are to be believing ones, he is the merciful one, the compassionate one, the loving one, the deifying one. When we fall to unbelief, he raises us up again and again. This too is part of being the believing one: the beautiful gift of repentance. Indeed, it is the only way that any of us can believe.
The one believing in God will return to the benevolent master through repentance again and again after his numerous falls and failures. The one believing in God will ask for and accept his forgiveness—not fearing punishment, but rather expecting an abyss of di vine mercy.
Let us, brothers and sisters, become believing children. Amen.