Prospect
John 14:1-14
There is a bumper sticker I saw once that said “The Bible says it, I believe
it and that settles it”.
There are no fewer than 98 instances of the
verb “to believe” in John’s Gospel. There are invitations,
as in this Sunday’s Gospel, to begin to believe. There are as well,
descriptions of individuals and crowds who had, in fact, come to believe over
the course of the Gospel. Where the bumper sticker seems to be describing
someone who is the way he is and will remain so forever, belief in the New
Testament describes a more dynamic process. People come to believe
because of Jesus. They change their beliefs about God because of
Jesus. They are forever changed because of something Jesus has said
or done. Something has welled up within them in response.
It’s a word we use in common language in a number of
ways: “believing that” something is the case is a very different
thing than “believing
about” or “believing in”. We tend to be a bit
promiscuous about the things we “believe in” - ideas mostly - which we
inherited or have come to believe in as a way of making sense of the world and
identifying ourselves within it. Free Enterprise or Universal Health Care
or the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God - things that are “believed
in” tend to sprout capital letters with time. It is perhaps natural
that belief in God or belief in Jesus might be things we file away in the same
envelope. Are these not beliefs which define our families or perhaps,
even, our national communities? From these beliefs “in” something,
certain actions and attitudes will proceed which are consistent with such
beliefs. We would like to be consistent in our beliefs. That may be
why we stick bumper stickers on our cars - just in case something new and
unclassifiable comes into the room and we forget and change our minds.
And there’s the rub. Belief in the Gospel leads
to departures and changes - not the endless reinforcement of old slogans and
the adages we learned at our grandparents’ knees.
Are we flexible enough? Are we open enough to
believe?
Psalm 110
-
“Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool”
Psalm 110.1 is one of the most quoted lines in the New Testament. The
Davidic promise made...
17 minutes ago
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