Tag: belief

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11. Believe

Belief activates the spiritual senses and enables us to see. St Paul talks in his Letter to the Romans about justification by faith. Grace is freely given, we cannot earn it. All that Jesus requires of us is that we believe in him.

What we do not see, we have to believe. And paradoxically, it is the act of believing that then enables us to see, when our spiritual understanding is unlocked and our spiritual senses are awakened. Believe in order to see. What the Pharisees (Pharisee = far I see, or so they think!) wanted was to see in order to believe. In Matthew 16:4, when asked to show them a sign from heaven, Jesus gave them short shrift: “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (see how closely the word sign is connected to sin, addition of g).

Belief activates our spiritual senses and enables us to see beyond the mere appearance of things. This is why, I think, the word believe so obviously contains be and live. We become fully alive when our vision is not limited to seeing what will satisfy our physical needs.

This is the reason for the break-down in communication during the wonderful encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John, chapter 4. When Jesus says if she knew who she was talking to, she would ask him and he would give her “living water”, the woman is perplexed. She doesn’t realize that Jesus is talking about spiritual sustenance – not physical sustenance, which always requires us to come back for more (something the system knows and relies on for its continued existence).

He doesn’t even have a bucket (again, this reliance on external objects, objects we can pick up and use), how is he going to give her this living water? Jesus replies, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them [what he means is those who put their trust in him] will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

These are extremely important verses. “A spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” Now, that is surely something worth having. We know that when we drink water from the well, we will be thirsty again, and so we are tied to it, to something external. But what Jesus is talking about appears to be something that comes from within us: “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” It is something whose provenance we cannot perceive.

I think he is talking about belief. The bucket that will enable us to receive this living water is belief. It is all that Jesus requires of us – that we believe in him (even though we do not see him with our physical senses). He wants us to see/hear the message that he is transmitting and to plant the seed of that message in the earth of our heart (the soil of our soul). We are to become like the seed of an apple, which falls into the ground and sleeps for a while before bursting forth anew as a shoot that, in time and with proper care, will grow into a tree, as language tells us.

And so it is that three chapters later – in John, chapter 7 – Jesus decides to attend the Festival of Booths in Jerusalem. The message – about doing the will of God, about doing good and healing people, even if it is on the Sabbath – doesn’t seem to be getting across. When he says that he won’t be with them for long (because he is going to be crucified!!!), they understand he is planning a visit to Greece. It comes to the last day of the festival, and Jesus is feeling pretty frustrated. He cries out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’” (Jn 7:37-8).

There it is again – that phrase “living water”. It means that when we believe in him, our life will take on new meaning, we will no longer be limited by the parameters of time, we will be working on a different timescale, or actually on no timescale at all. We will be diving into the white spaces between and behind the words on a page and finding new meaning. We will be entering the words themselves, admiring their structure, as if a word was a church and we could enter it, light a candle, look up into the dome, and even walk around the church three times on Easter Eve, before the light of the resurrection has dawned. We will begin to bear spiritual fruit, not just physical fruit we can eat, touch and confirm, but the fruit of obedience, which is not to put ourselves first in a world of competing egos, but to seek the common good, which might even involve some kind of personal sacrifice, but is incomparably richer and leads to true wealth (the wheat in the Parable of the Tares, which has ears and can hear). This “living water” can only come out of a believer’s heart, of a heart that is open, of a heart that is alive and beating, not one that is closed and withered, that only thinks about itself.

Jesus quotes scripture: “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Except that the word in Greek is not “heart”, it is “belly” (κοιλία). In Genesis 3:20, we learn that Adam named his wife Eve “because she was the mother of all who live”. This is explained by a footnote in the NRSV Bible: “In Heb Eve resembles the word for living.”

So, the verse Jesus quotes could be reduced to belly (“Out of the believer’s heart”) and Eve (“shall flow rivers of living water”). And what do belly and Eve give us? Believe.

Jesus’ message – that all we need to do is believe to become fully alive, to be and live – is contained in the words he speaks. Language is pure theology, a vade mecum for the human who seeks a higher meaning. We just have to have the eyes to see it.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 11/15

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Meekness

‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.’ This is the third of the Beatitudes that Jesus teaches his disciples in Matthew, chapter 5. ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.’

I have just been on the island of Thassos in the north of the Aegean in Greece. A rich and beautiful island with what is reputed to be the best marble in the world. There is an old Roman quarry in the settlement of Alyki in the south of the island. The land is fertile, pomegranates abound, as well as millenarian olive trees that produce an olive oil that is thick and tasty. Of course, being Greece, there is plenty of tourism, with attractive, isolated beaches catering to the needs of those who come here for a rest.

But what struck me this time was the abundance of animal life. On our first day, swimming off the beach of Trypiti round to a gap in the rock that leads to a small harbour, I spotted a flash of blue with a tawny underside. Could it be a kingfisher fishing by the sea? That is certainly what it seemed. I hadn’t seen one since I was a child and visited the RSPB reserve at Minsmere in Suffolk. Two days later, I saw the same flash of blue while swimming off the beach of Atspas – the same or another kingfisher. Off the same beach, we spotted dolphins, circumflex accents dipping in and out of the ocean. Cormorants stood like statues on the rocks, keeping an eye out for fish or simply gazing at the view. Others skimmed the waves in low flight, these ones certainly fishing, competing with the ferries that to and froed in the distance.

There were plenty of goats, some sheep, cats filling the gaps in balconies, dogs being taken out by their owners, there are no pavements, so they walk in the road. One night, we came across a hedgehog, all pins and needles, it curled into a ball. Later, when I went to search for it again, it had disappeared, motored off into the night at surprising speed.

One of our favourites was the donkey in the next-door garden, a beautiful animal with a grey-brown coat, a dark brown line marking the transition from its head to its body. It would serenade us in the morning and evening with a series of sharp inbreaths and loud outbursts. It had gentle eyes, oceans in themselves, ears that swivelled delightfully (and not always in the same direction) and yellow teeth it liked to bare in front of us. After several days, I got the impression it really was greeting us when we got up in the morning and returned from the beach in the late afternoon.

‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.’ I have the impression that animals know when you believe in God, they react differently, they see you no longer as a threat, but as a possible friend. They notice you, and you notice them. You view the world differently, it is no longer there for the taking, as it is so often treated, when we view ourselves as authors and draw lines. We are just passing through, after all, and we begin to delight in the simple things of life, which are the most important. It is as if the animals realize we have (finally!) come to our senses. They are waiting for us to realize. Perhaps they have never lost their spiritual sight, as we have, but they must endure whatever we might throw at them while waiting for us to repent, to change our attitude, to see things (to see them) in a different light. Then they come to us, they share with us, they communicate with us.

So, for me, ‘blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth’ is exactly true. When we are meek, we believe. When we are proud or stubborn, we refuse to believe and rely on science (which is only the study of God’s creation and what we have learned about it), on what we can prove. This is the problem with belief. Belief gives sight, belief changes the way you view things, but how can you believe if you haven’t seen God or had an experience? There’s the conundrum. Belief gives sight, but sight gives belief.

I always remember Apostle Peter walking on the water. While he believes, he walks towards Christ; only when he hesitates, when he doubts, does he begin to sink, to lose his equilibrium. God just wants us to believe. Nothing else. And to those who believe – to the meek – is given the whole world.

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com