Believe

One of the things I like best about walking the Camino in northern Spain is getting to know your walking companions and listening to their stories. One of my favourite walking companions was a young man from Alberta named David. He was what you might call a deep thinker, raised in an intentionally agnostic home with a Buddhist father and a Christian mother, and he had lots of questions about life.

On one of our walking days, he turned to me, and to my great surprise, told me that he was envious that I was part of a church community. “Why is that?” I asked him.

“Because you have a place where you can talk about stuff that matters. I don’t have that. There’s nowhere I can go to talk about the big questions of life.”

“What sort of questions?”

“The big ones, like “What does it mean to live a good life? What do I have to do?”

That’s a good question. In fact, it’s just the sort of question that people keep asking Jesus over and over again in the gospels.

You might recall that in the gospel of Mark, it’s a wealthy man who runs up to Jesus, throws himself on his knees and asks him the ‘how should I live my life?’ question. In Matthew’s gospel, it’s an expert in the law who wants to know what he has to do to live a good life. In Luke’s gospel, it’s one of the rulers. In each case, Jesus responds that in order to live a good life, you must keep the commandments. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength; and love your neighbour as yourself.”

But that’s not what he says in today’s gospel reading.

In today’s reading, the crowds have found Jesus again. Remember, he’d been with them all the previous day, teaching them, and then in the evening he’d fed them with the five loaves and two fish. The crowd had been so amazed that they’d wanted to seize him and make him king. Jesus had slipped away, escaping across the lake. But now the crowd has found him again. And Jesus wants to move them to a new level of understanding. Because it’s about more than bread. He says to them:

“You’re looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” Don’t focus on the bread, that’s just the sign – instead think about what the sign is pointing to, what it means.

The crowd doesn’t really understand, but at least they have the sense to ask the big question:

“What must we do to perform the works of God?” How can we live a good life?

And this is where we’re expecting Jesus to say, as he does in the other gospels, that they should love God and love their neighbour as themselves.

But he doesn’t. Instead he says:

“‘This is the work of God, this is how you live a good life: you believe in him whom he has sent.”

And that’s where we have a problem, because we don’t really know what the word ‘believe’ means anymore.

My favourite television show is Ted Lasso. It’s the story of an American college football coach from Kansas who is hired to coach an English Premier League soccer team. It’s a comedy, but a comedy with a deeper meaning, because it’s really about the power of decency, kindness and goodness to change the world, done in a subtle and humorous way that comes at us sideways, without being preachy.

In the very first episode, in one of Coach Lasso’s first acts as coach of AFC Richmond, he tapes a hand-made, one-word sign to the wall of the players’ locker room. That word is “Believe”.  Curiously though, he doesn’t explain it, in fact he doesn’t say a word about it. He just tapes it to the wall.

Now if you’ve grown up playing sports like me, or if you listen carefully to what the athletes at the Olympics have to say, you would probably assume that what the coach means is that you have to believe you will win. That believing you will win makes it more likely that you actually will win. But that’s not what Coach Lasso means when he puts up the sign that says ‘believe’.

And in a stroke of screenwriting genius, it won’t be until near the end of the three-season series that Ted will actually tell his players and us, the viewers, what the sign means. Maybe that’s because it’s only at that point, three years later, that the players who have lived the transformation that has taken place in their team and the viewers who have watched it happen, maybe only then are we ready to understand.

Believe isn’t about knowing what’s going to happen in the game, who’s going to win and lose, explains Ted Lasso. No one knows that, it’s not something we can control, that’s what makes sport interesting. No, believe is about something much more important. It’s about believing that “I matter, regardless of what I do or don’t achieve.” It’s about believing that each one of us deserves to be loved. It’s about believing in yourself and believing in each other. That’s what makes you alive, that’s what makes this team the best version of itself, and that extends well beyond what happens on a soccer field. That’s what it means to believe.[i]

And that moves us so much closer to what Jesus is talking about when he answers the “how can I live a good life” question by saying “believe”. It’s about relationships. It’s about trust. It’s about what and whom we hold dear.

But we’ve lost that sense of the word believe. When I look up ‘believe’ in an on-line dictionary, the definition I get is that to believe is to accept something as true. And by true, we usually mean factual. That’s how we tend to use the word believe in the 21st century. We think it means that we give intellectual assent to a proposed statement of fact. And if that’s how we’re thinking, then we have totally missed what Jesus is trying to say here in response to what is perhaps the most important of our life questions.

Sometimes it helps to look at the etymology of a word, to find out what its original meaning was, the meaning it held when the English translators of the Bible in the 16th century decided that believe was the best English word to translate the Greek word pisteuo. The English word believe actually has its roots in German, in the middle German word ga lauben. The literal meaning of the original German is “to hold dear”, or even, “to love”. It is where the Germans get their word “belieben” which means “beloved”. To believe in someone is to trust them, to have faith in them, to hold them dear, to have confidence in them, to love them. It’s the sense of the word that we still use when a parent says to their child, “I believe in you.”  It’s a beautiful, loving, relational commitment.

That’s what the Ted Lasso “Believe” sign means. More importantly, that’s what Jesus means in today’s gospel.

What must I do to live a good life? Jesus says, “believe in the one God sent”.  Trust him, hold him dear, have faith in him, love him, believe him. This is the foundation of our faith. Our faith at its core is about belief. In Jesus, God has shown us that God believes in us, that God holds us dear and loves us. Our response is to believe in the one God sent, the one who reveals God to us. That is to be the foundation and guiding principle of our lives if we want to live in a way that is good and meaningful.

Of course it’s not just about our relationship with Jesus. Because Jesus himself will tell us to love one another, Jesus will tell us to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. And when he does, because we believe in him, we will listen to him, and trust him, and have faith that when he asks us to do such things it is because he has our best interests at heart and holds us dear. Because he believes in us.

So believe in Jesus, the one whom God sent. Trust him, have faith, hold him dear. Then believe in yourself, hold yourself dear, believe that you matter and that you are loved by God. And then believe in each other. And to quote Coach Lasso once more,

“Oh man. To believe in yourself. To believe in one another. Man, that’s fundamental to being alive.”

This is what we do. This is how we live a good life, now and always.

Amen.

Homily Yr B Proper 18, August 4 2024, Trinity

Readings: 2 Samuel 11.26-12.13a; Ps 51.1-13; Ephesians 4.1-16; John 6.24-35

Image by duncan cumming

[i] Ted Lasso, Season 3, Episode 5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olPLvuvMcSE