Gospel: John 3: 7-15
Modern American Christianity has attempted to convince us that belief is merely the acceptance of the idea that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior. Or, it is the acceptance by the intellect of certain propositions regarding God and Jesus, or the recitation of some credal formula. Apparently, we can then go about with our adultery, human sex trafficking, abuse of immigrants, and the mass bombing of children and other acts of genocide around the world.
But belief in the sense Jesus intends it incorporates one's entire life and being. Belief is not about abstract ideas to which we give assent. It is an entire way of living. To believe is to live in hope and charity. It is to extend mercy and love to others in the same way that it has been extended to us by God. To believe is to live as Jesus lived as one who healed, liberated, and fed others, in living the Beatitudes of mercy, meekness, purity of heart, peacemaking, and empathy.
It is much easier to create vicarious practices of ritual that memorialize what Jesus did than to actually practice in our lives what Jesus did. How often have we made the life of faith more about these vicarious practices than about the actual work of mercy that defined Jesus' life and death! The challenge of faith today is this: will we be instruments of peace and mercy in the world, or will we be apologists for violence, war, and animus toward the poor and marginalized?
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