A contrary creed

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)

Details matter, and English translations of this well-known, little-understood verse of scripture obscure a detail that matters profoundly.

The Gospel of John makes a frequent distinction between believing ‘in Jesus’ and believing ‘into Jesus.’ It is obvious in the Greek original but disappears in most English translations.

Believing in Jesus is easy. Anyone can believe in Jesus. He lived, he taught, he was rejected and crucified. You can even believe that his death somehow offers forgiveness and an entry pass into heaven.

You can believe all these things without it changing even one thing about how you think, speak or act. You can believe them while holding all kinds of hateful, bigoted attitudes and beliefs about people you don’t like, like, say, people whose politics you detest or immigrants or non-binary folk or, well, fill in the blank.

This kind of ‘believing’ is what gives the Christianity a bad name and sends sensitive souls running for the church exit to escape the hypocrisy of indifference to—and often, complicity in—injustice and human suffering.

The debasement of what constitutes ‘Christianity’ in our current cultural crisis is rife with examples of Christians justifying indifference to the poor and suffering at home and abroad.

For example, millions suffer malnutrition, starve and die of preventable diseases in places where our nation was once an embodiment of compassion, all because our leaders sold voters on the gospel of ‘America First,’ a strange and selfish gospel imbued with the moral logic of a preschooler protecting his toys.

The chant of ‘America first,’ like ‘me first,’ is a contrary creed, a willful contradiction of everything Jesus taught and lived.

But believing ‘into Jesus’—and that is how this verse in the Gospel of John actually reads—doesn’t leave any part of your life and heart untouched or unchallenged by divine love.

Believing into Jesus is the continual and unending opening of one’s heart to the invasion of the love of Jesus until it permeates every pore. It is daily prayer, turning again and again to him that we may abide in the love from which nothing needs be hidden.

It is the daily return, morning by morning, to seek his face and know his heart that his way might become our way.

And it is also is refusing to turn aside when his love, like a searchlight, illumines the dark corners of our hearts or when it stings our egos, tearing down our protective facades to reveal our narcissism and selfishness.

Believing into Jesus is a lifelong journey into the love who frees us from ourselves for the sake of the world.

David L. Miller