May 2 Easter V
Children learn early on that one of the most disarming questions in all the world is, “How do you know?”, especially when it’s asked with the proper inflection: “How do you know?” This is clear proof that we’re all born philosopher. Because the two bit word for the study of “How do you know?” is epistemology. And when one kid makes a truth claim like “Superman is more powerful than Batman”, as soon as another kid asks, “How do you know?”, they’re a couple of philosophers who will soon be doing epistemology.
If the two are equals with regard to their debating skills we know how the conversation ends. After competence with grappling hooks has been argued against the ability to stop a charging locomotive, after the inability to fly has been weighed against vulnerability to kryptonite, after all the evidence has been spent, the argument about “How do you know?” deteriorates into “Well… I just do. I know my superhero is stronger just because he is.”
It turns out that “How do you know?” is a hard question to answer. Pressed far enough on some topics at least, we all reach the point of “Well, I just do”. And it’s not much fun. Because we tend to think our way of seeing the world is rational, logical, even provable if we really put our minds to it. But down at the bottom of our view of the world is a hunch that feels a lot like, “How do I know? Well, I just do.”
Christians have long been interested in proofs. Theologians like Aquinas and Anselm offered their proofs of the existence of God. But Ambrose—interesting how many of these guys had names beginning with “A”. Not sure what that proves. Anyway, Ambrose said that it did not suit God to save people by arguments.
Jesus seems to be on Ambrose’s side. In our gospel reading today, to the question of “How do you know whether people are his disciples?”, Jesus says that you’ll know them by their love for one another.
Well, what kind of proof is love? How in the world is love proven? How in the world is love even measured? Is it measured by the number of loving acts they do to each other? And are big acts of love weighed more than little ones? Is there a point system that values things like an encouraging word and the forgiveness of an enemy? And wouldn’t there need to be some kind of additional sincerity scale?
If you’ve ever been pushed to prove that you love somebody who’s suspicious about it, you understand the problem. There is no objectively verifiable, unassailable evidence for love. There are any number of possible motives for anything we do. A dozen roses might be an expression of love. Or they might be a guilt offering, or a request for an indulgence, or down payment on a future favor. They might even be an attempt to heap burning coals on an enemy, as St Paul said that acts of kindness can be. There should be a significant point reduction in the love rating for the intention to heap coals on someone’s head.
Asked to prove our love, sound arguments don’t prove to be much help at all. In the end, love can’t be proven. Love must be trusted. I have to trust the heart that sent the roses for love to come through. How do I know you love me? Well, in the end, I just do.
So how do we know who the Christians are? If we’re building an epistemological table for an answer to this question, love seems to make for awfully flimsy legs. Why did Jesus take proof for our Christianity out of the realm of provable things? Maybe one reason is because of the way that love must be trusted. Maybe love matters to Jesus because trust matters too. And if there was an objective system to prove how Christian someone is, I could make the calculations all by myself, without ever risking any trust and love of my own.
The Latin word “credo”, from which we get the English word “creed” is usually translated “I believe”. And when we talk about belief, we immediately think in terms of a mental assent to a fact. We think in terms of provable things. Some proofs are harder than others. But if we don’t believe something, we just need more or better evidence.
Now the great thing about this kind of belief is that I get to do it without getting too involved. I get to sift through the evidence in the safety of my own head and arrive at a conclusion. And this is how we tend to think of belief, even when we’re saying the creeds in church. “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” is just one more truth we may or may not have been convinced of after considering the evidence.
So our religion is a personal matter. That’s what we’re told, isn’t it? Our faith is seen something we each decide on for ourselves, by ourselves. We weigh the arguments for the existence of God, for the divinity of Christ, for the truth of the resurrection. We each weigh the merits of each, and we each decide whether they are believable.
If I believe, I’m Christian. If I don’t, I’m not. It’s pretty simple.
But a better translation for “credo” than “I believe” is “I trust”. When Christians say the creeds, we are not saying that we each simply assent to an important collection of religious facts. We believe in one God. Check. Maker of heaven and earth. Check. Jesus Christ, the only Son of God. Check. Eternally begotten. God from God, Light from Light. Well, that stuff too, I guess. Check. No, saying the creed is not meant to be this kind of process. We’re not saying that we simply believe these religious facts in the same way we believe in gravity or the Loch Ness Monster. When we say the creeds together, we’re saying that trust is alive in our lives. We trust God, and we trust the peculiar way Christians have talked about and approached the mystery of God for 2000 years.
Trusting doesn’t mean that we can’t ever question or wonder about things like the names of God or the virgin birth. Trusting means that something in us knows deeply that these things matter. And trust is never something that’s settled like a proof. Trust is something that must be nurtured and must grow among people. And if we’re honest, if we’ve come into the Christian faith at all, it’s not because we figured out on our own that it must be true. It’s because someone somewhere inspired our trust. It’s because some group of people had something wonderful and rare going on in their relationships with one another. Maybe we couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but we wanted to live that way. For some reason, we started to trust.
Credo as trusting makes a lot more sense, given what we just read in the gospel of John. Jesus doesn’t say that his disciples will be known by a list of facts that they believe. They’ll be known when people see love moving around among them. And when Jesus insists that his disciples will be known by their love, he’s moving the debate out of the realm of proof, and into the realm of trust. Because that’s where love happens. Love happens in the parts of ourselves where our trust lives and moves. Down where the answer to “How do you know?” feels a lot like, “I just do.” But down where such answers are matters of life and death.
So if we take Jesus at his word, if people really will know that we’re followers of Jesus because of the love and trust present in our lives, cultivating trust and love is the first step in evangelism. Cultivating trust and love has to happen before any meaningful good news that the Christian faith might have to offer the world can be passed on. And arguing someone into faith makes as much sense as talking someone into falling in love.
Cultivating trust has a nostalgic, maybe naïve ring to it. We live in a world so bereft of trust. Trusting is how you get yourself taken advantage of, we’re told. And this is true. Trusting in this world means that eventually someone will betray that trust. Someone will use that trust to hurt you.
Jesus agrees. But Jesus just doesn’t give us any other options. In fact, he says pretty clearly that following him isn’t a good strategy to get the world to treat you better. The world didn’t treat him very well you may recall. You will get hurt if you open yourself to trust and love. But is living all alone, needing nothing and no one in a world of only what’s provable, is this kind of living really living at all?
Sometimes the answer to “How do you know?” is “I just do.” Which means that to get to the heart of the matter, I’ll have to enter the risky world of trust. Jesus said his disciples will be known by their love. Which means that to get to the heart of Christianity, we have to enter the risky world of trust, and that our life together as a Christian community will only matter to this world if our love inspires a little trust in the people we encounter.
Love is what Jesus left us with to spread the good news of God’s grace. Is it enough? We can’t really know for sure. I guess we’ll just have to trust him on this one and give it a try. Amen.