A Living Hope

How can you possibly believe in Jesus? An ordinary man from first-century Palestine is God’s word in the flesh, one with God from the beginning of time? One person embodies God’s love for the whole world, past, present, and future? He endures the worst death imaginable, yet he rises from the grave to give us hope that death is not the end?

None of this story conforms to the way we understand reality. Human lives are finite and contextual; none of us transcends the limits of our time and place. We exercise only our own agency; none of us can speak or act on behalf of God. And, dead people certainly don’t come back to life. Jesus is a cultural relic, isn’t he– a legend people cling to out of habit, or fear, or delusion? How can you possibly believe otherwise?

The crowds that flock to Jesus in our Gospel from John today are intrigued by him, but they too are hesitant. So they pepper him with questions: “Rabbi, when did you come here?” “What must we do to perform the works of God?” “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you?” Who are you, they demand to know, and what exactly is your relationship to God? Give us some clarity, otherwise how can we possibly believe?

As it turns out, belief is important: “This is the work of God,” Jesus replies to his questioners, “that you believe in him whom God has sent.” God relates to the world in various ways– creating and sustaining us, holding us accountable, forgiving us, renewing us– and we in turn relate to God through “belief.”

The question is, what does it mean to believe? In the most common sense of the word, belief is a function of the mind. To believe means to affirm the truth of a proposition. The phrase, “I believe in Jesus,” means “I acknowledge that Jesus is in reality the crucified and risen Son of God,” or “I am convinced that the information about him is factual.”

But, belief involves much more than intellectual assent; it’s as much a matter of the heart as it is of the mind. In Latin, the word for “believe” is credo, the origin of the word “creed.” Credo means “I set my heart upon,” or “I give my loyalty to.” In medieval English, credo was translated as “believe,” similar to the German word belieben, which means “to prize, treasure, or hold dear,” the root of which is Liebe, or “love.” In its most basic sense, then, belief is relational. It’s not so much an assertion of correct knowledge as it is a profession of trust and faithfulness, like a marriage vow.[1] So, “I believe in Jesus” means “I cherish Jesus,” “I devote my life to him,” “I pledge him my loyalty.”

That definition breathes new life into the last verse of our Gospel today: “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’” To believe means to embrace, to trust, to hold tight to Jesus as the chief sign of God’s love for the world. Or, in keeping with his famous bread metaphor, it means to hunger for God’s word of hope, to feast on God’s gifts of grace, and to be strengthened by the bread of life for loving service to others. Jesus is not an idea to accept or reject; he is daily bread, manna from heaven, the food that never perishes. To believe in him means to sit down and eat.

That’s the invitation Sofia and David will receive in baptism today: “God, who is rich in mercy and love, gives us a new birth into a living hope through the sacrament of baptism.”[2] “Living hope” is a beautiful way to describe the gift of God for the people of God. The life of faith, of course, is not a set of prepackaged answers. The truth is that we’ll never fully grasp Jesus, that we’ll always have more questions than answers. But the good news is that we don’t need to wrap our heads around Jesus in order to receive him. We need only come to the table week after week and reach out our hands. And if truth be told, wouldn’t you “rather experience [communion with Christ] than… understand it?”[3]

Friends, to believe in Jesus, the one whom God has sent, is to experience him. It is to encounter him in sacred story, to be fed by him at a weekly meal, to catch a glimpse of him in the faces of friends and strangers alike, and finally to become bread for a hungry world. So, come to the table, all you who hunger for the bread of life, come, taste and see that the Lord is good![4]

[1] Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion, 117.

[2] Evangelical Lutheran Worship, Assembly Edition, 227.

[3] John Calvin, as cited by William H. Willimon, in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3, 313.

[4] Psalm 34:5.