What Does Faith Feel Like?

Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1695)

Painting by Ludolf Backhuysen

When Jesus of Nazareth talked about faith, what did he mean? Did he mean positive thinking? Did he mean warm, comforting thoughts that help you get through life? Did he mean the definition skeptics and atheists frequently quote, "Believing something without any proof?"

Later on I'll post something about the actual nature and definition of the faith Jesus talked about. But in this article I want to give you my favorite practical example of what Jesus' faith was like for him personally -- the inside view so to speak. He constantly tried to hammer this kind of faith home and was surprised it was so hard for his students to get.

There are dozens of examples I could use, of course, but this one hit home with me one day a few years ago during a period of joblessness. This is the story of Jesus asleep in a fishing boat. It can be found in Luke 8.22-25, Matthew 8:23-27, and Mark 4:36-41

Boat

Try to enter into this picture in your mind:

After a long day of teaching the crowds Jesus decides to cross to another area on the Sea of Galilee. The disciples's boats were there so he hopped into one of them and instantly fell fast asleep on the cushion used by the man steering the boat. We know exactly what these boats were like because, remarkably, one from that same time period somehow survived to the present day and now is in a museum in Galilee. While great for fishing, these boats were very narrow and shallow. During a storm in the middle of the lake they could easily fill with water and go down.

Sea of Galilee Boat

Photo by Berthold Werner

So, sure enough, a storm does blow up. Rain pours down in sheets, the wind screams, lightning shoots down like hungry dragons, violent waves pour over the side and smash the little boat against other waves. The crew struggles just to keep their craft from flipping over and pitching them all into the lake. To seasoned fishermen it looks like they are goners (“Master, Master, we are about to die!”).

Meanwhile, Jesus is still peacefully sound asleep on the completely drenched cushion. Finally, as their last chance, they wake Jesus up -- rather accusingly as Mark tells it: “Teacher, don’t you care that we are about to die?!”

"Cowards"

Jesus seems a bit irritated. Or perhaps disappointed. He stands, essentially tells the storm to 'shut up' (which it does), then turns on whichever of his students had been able to cram into that particular boat and says...

Now, my trusty NET Bible translates this correctly but I'm using the obscure God's Word version here because in addition to being accurate it totally nails the meaning.

...and Jesus said,

Matthew: “Why do you cowards have so little faith?” (GW)

Mark: “Why are you such cowards? Don’t you have any faith yet?” (GW)

He calls them "cowards," (deiloi in Greek).  Jesus rebukes his apostles quite a bit in the gospels if you haven't noticed, but this is the only time he uses the term "coward" with these manly men. Seasoned fishermen though they were, they were terrified, while Jesus, with little practical fishing experience so far as we know, was completely unworried. And he was startled, even annoyed, that they weren't unworried too. Not that he expected them to lay down their oars and stop bailing the boat, but that they ought to have been unworried that God would let them -- and Jesus -- die.

The lesson I draw from this adventure is that for Jesus, faith (at least in part) = trust.  He had complete, robust, implicit trust in his Father, to the point where he could lay down in the center of a raging storm and fall sound asleep without a care in the world. Jesus' followers sometimes call this "childlike faith." If you had the good fortune to grow up in a loving home and ever curled up in your parent's arms and fell asleep while they read you a story, you have experienced something very close to what the faith Jesus described and lived feels like.

If you or I were on that boat with him would he have been incredulous that we didn't have it by this time too?

Theologian Thursday: Harkness on the Personal God

Dr. Georgia Harkness

Christians have a concept, taught by Jesus of Nazareth in places like Matthew 6.25 - 34, called "providence." This is the idea that God is not an inactive, remote, unconcerned being, but rather cares about and is involved in our everyday lives. Theologian Georgia Harkness talks about what that implies.

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Only a personal God can know or care what happens to persons. A deity conceived to be an impersonal force or process, or an abstract principle, or the totality of all that exists, or the sum total of human ideals cannot be personally concerned with individuals or their destiny. Such a God may be worshiped in the sense of being held in reverence; to such a deity some form of human adjustment can be made. But such a God cannot be prayed to or trusted to give providential guidance to any person's life.

A personal God is one of supreme intelligence, supreme goodness, and supreme creative and controlling power. One who grants the presence of an infinitely complex, yet ordered structure in the universe and the predominance of value of good over evil in human existence may be ready to affirm the existence of a personal God upon these grounds. Yet this is not foundation enough for a doctrine of providence. The Christian's faith in providence requires a further and to many minds a more difficult affirmation, for it roots in the conviction that the God who guides the stars and atoms in their courses also guides and cares for you and me.

Georgia Harkness
The Providence of God (Abingdon Press, 1960), pg. 18

Jesus is the Revelation

What does it mean to say, as Ignatius of Antioch did here two Sundays ago, and as the Christian Movement has always taught, that Jesus of Nazareth himself is the revelation? And not simply "a" revelation like the 10 Commandments or the words of the Prophets, but "the" revelation -- the ultimate revelation.

As you read through the Jewish scriptures you learn three very important things (among many). First, that God has decided to reveal himself to humans beings. He's been doing it from the very beginning (Genesis chapters 1-3) and certainly no one made him. Communicating with humans at all is a pure, raw, free choice by God.

A second thing we find is that God has revealed himself via history. We might prefer, in our theological fantasies (if there are such things), that God had imparted all of his truth in a single, dispassionate, abstract, crystal-pure burst of light. Instead what we know of God, his goals and plans, his moral standards, what he requires from us, and what we can expect from him have all been communicated to us through his words and actions on the 'stage' of historical events. The Bible is the inspired (i.e., written in a partnership of God and humans) record of those actions and what they mean. There was a time when the Bible had not been written, but there never was a time when God was not revealing himself.

Story Telling

And third, we learn that in revealing himself, God told a story. There is a story arc to the Bible. It begins with God being the origin of everything. It tells about the humans he created to reveal himself to, their disobedience of God, and the fundamental disharmony that fell on the world as a result -- a disharmony later called "sin." The story goes on to tell of a great flood in reaction to sin, and then of a man named Abraham who was selected to live up to a unique commission:

"I will use you to bless

    all the people on earth."

(Genesis 12.3, ERV) 

From there we learn of the nation descended from him with the same commission and how they ultimately failed and were crushed by foreign nations. But not before producing a singular King whose dynasty was destined to issue in a man who would rescue Israel and the world, deal with sin, proclaim a new law "written on people's hearts," and inaugurate the Kingdom of God. The one, in other words, who would finally fulfill that commission. As the 1st century neared this rescuer came to be called "Messiah" -- "the specially commissioned one," the man with ceremonial oil poured on his head, as was done to kings and priests. In Greek, Messiah is "Christ."

So when we say Jesus of Nazareth himself, in his own person, is the Christian revelation, we mean he is the climax of all that had gone before as God had revealed himself to humanity. Jesus is the spear tip of all God had been doing to set things right since the beginning of time.  Or as St. Peter realized, he is, "the Messiah, the Son of the Living God," 

One Other Point

There is one other point: As Jesus went about doing his job as Messiah it became increasingly apparent that things said only of God or done only by God in the Jewish Scriptures, were being done and described of him. "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father too," (John 14.9 ERV).  Very early on the life and actions of Jesus were realized to be those of God.  Messiah turned out to be much more than was even expected, and those who looked for him expected quite a lot.  

I've pointed out previously that the vast bulk of the Apostle's Creed is just a summary of Jesus' life. There is a reason for that.  Jesus himself  is the revelation because his words, life, death, and resurrection are the best possible way to grasp what God is really like. He is the ultimate self-revealing of God.

After 50 or 60 years of turning this over in his mind St. John described it concisely, "No one has ever seen God. The only Son is the one who has shown us what God is like. He is himself God and is very close to the Father," (John 1.18 ERV).

"...One Heart and One Soul..."

Irenaeus of Lyon

Meditation for a Sunday Morning

"There is one body and one Spirit, and God chose you to have one hope. There is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. There is one God and Father of us all, who rules over everyone. He works through all of us and in all of us."

(Letter to the Ephesians chapter 4 verses 4 - 6, ERV)

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Irenaeus was a leader, thinker, and writer in the early Christian Movement. He had grown up in the church at Smyrna (in today's Turkey) led by Polycarp, a legend in the early church. Polycarp had been a student of John the Apostle himself, and he passed on stories and teachings from John and other "elders" in the Movement. Irenaeus absorbed it all with the fabulous mind he had. As an adult he moved east to Lyons, France where he cared for the Movement's outpost there and handed on the 'deposit of faith' as he had heard it from Polycarp, who had received it from St. John the Apostle who received it from... Well, I imagine you can see what makes Irenaeus so important in the history of the Christian Movement.

In his guest-blog today, Irenaeus describes what was in the revelation Jesus entrusted his Apostles with, and how carefully it was handed on.

Now the Church, although scattered over the whole civilized world to the end of the earth, received from the apostles and their disciples its faith in one God, the Father Almighty, who made the heaven, and the earth, and the seas, and all that is in them, and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets proclaimed the dispensations of God—the comings, the birth of a virgin, the suffering, the resurrection from the dead, and the bodily reception into the heavens of the beloved, Christ Jesus our Lord, and his coming from the heavens in the glory of the Father to restore all things, and to raise up all flesh, that is, the whole human race, so that every knee may bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth, to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Saviour and King, according to the pleasure of the invisible Father, and every tongue may confess him, and that he may execute righteous judgment on all.

The spiritual powers of wickedness, and the angels who transgressed and fell into apostasy, and the godless and wicked and lawless and blasphemers among men he will send into the eternal fire. But to the righteous and holy, and those who have kept his commandments and have remained in his love, some from the beginning [of life] and some since their repentance, he will by his grace give life incorrupt, and will clothe them with eternal glory.

Having received this preaching and this faith, as I have said, the Church, although scattered in the whole world, carefully preserves it, as if living in one house. She believes these things [everywhere] alike, as if she had but one heart and one soul, and preaches them harmoniously, teaches them, and hands them down, as if she had but one mouth. For the languages of the world are different, but the meaning of the [Christian] tradition is one and the same. Neither do the churches that have been established in Germany believe otherwise, or hand down any other tradition, nor those among the Iberians, nor those among the Celts, nor in Egypt, nor in Libya, nor those established in the middle parts of the world.

Irenaeus of Lyons (early 2nd century – c. AD 202)
Against All Heresies book 1 chapters 10 sections 1 - 2 (written about AD 180)