Belonging Precedes Believing

John 10: 22 – 30.  Belonging Precedes Believing,  We must incarnate God’s love the way Jesus did. We need to be Jesus to one another.

Check out Simona Frenkel & Choir as they sing – Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.

It’s a late December day in Jerusalem. Jesus is walking in the portico of Solomon, an old and revered part of the Temple, and as usual, he’s drawing a crowd. This time, the people gathered around him have come to celebrate the Feast of the Dedication (better known to us as Hanukkah), a festival honoring the rededication of the Temple after its defilement by the Syrian Greeks in 164 BCE.

The people have come with a question.  And it’s a spot on:  “How long will keep us in suspense?  If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

As I consider this question from our Gospel reading, I have two reactions.  On the one hand, it feels odd to ask for clarity so soon after Easter.  Didn’t we just celebrate the plainest, clearest, most irrefutable proof of Jesus’s Messiah-ship just a few weeks ago?  How can we still be “in suspense” after the Resurrection?

But the question raised back then is spot on for today because it tells us the truth about how faith works.  Most of the time, faith isn’t a clean ascent from confusion to clarity, doubt to trust.  It’s a perpetual turning.  A circle we trace from knowing to not knowing from unbelief to belief.  From “Christ is Risen,” to “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

It’s what we human beings do.  It’s real life.  So, if you find yourself asking Jesus to “speak plainly” into the circumstances of your life on this third Sunday of Easter, then you’re not alone.  This is how it works.

If you are good.   If you are powerful.  If you are loving.  If you are real.  If you are the Messiah, then stop talking in riddles.  Stop hiding when I long for your presence.  Stop awakening in me holy hungers you won’t satisfy.  Show up, speak plainly, act decisively.  Take this world of swirling, dubious gray, and turn it black and white, once and for all.  Who’s right whose wrong?

But how does Jesus respond?  Well… not plainly.  And not— at first glance, very nicely.  He says with a discernible impatience in his voice:  “You do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep.”  Wow!

What does that mean, besides what it means?  What can such a stark, cut-and-dry pronouncement mean?

I suppose the easy dodge would be to assume that the sentence doesn’t apply to me.  After all, I’m a cradle believer.  I grew up in the church.  I know my Bible.  I love the liturgy and I say my prayers.  Surely I both believe and belong.

Except when I don’t.  The nagging trouble with Jesus’s indictment is that it does apply to my spiritual experience.  Not rarely, but often.  When I ask Jesus to stop keeping me in suspense, when I insist that he speak plainly, what I’m really saying is: “I can’t trust you.  You’re supposed to be my Good Shepherd.  I’m supposed to know your voice, but often I don’t.  So what now?”

At first glance, Jesus’s reply might appear to suggest that belonging to him depends on believing in him.  But in fact, what Jesus says is exactly the opposite: you struggle to believe because you don’t consent to belong.  In other words, belief doesn’t come first.  It can’t come first.  Belonging does.

And therein lies our hope and our consolation.  According to this text, whatever belief I arrive at in this life will not come from the ups and downs of my own emotional life.  It will not come from a creed, a doctrine, or a cleverly worded sermon.  Rather it will come from the daily, hourly business of belonging to Jesus’s flock — of walking in the footsteps of the Shepherd, living in the company of fellow sheep, and listening in real time for the voice of the one whose classroom is rocky hills, hidden pastures, and deeply shadowed valleys.  If I won’t follow him into those layered places — places of both tranquility and treachery, trust and doubt — I will never belong to him at all.

I wonder if Jesus resisted the crowd’s question that day because it was so pitifully inadequate.  What good would it have done if he’d stood up in the temple at their insistence and yelled, “Yes!  Yes, in fact, I am the Christ!”  Would anything have changed?

Suddenly, would his parables, his countercultural teachings, and his strange miracles have coalesced into a neat package his listeners could tuck under their arms and carry home?  I doubt it.  Jesus was a storytelling rabbi — far more interested in human formation than in formula.

Maybe, by refusing to “speak plainly,” Jesus was honoring human life for the incredibly complicated thing it is.  After all, one doesn’t “speak plainly” about the greatest mysteries of the universe.  Jesus came to teach us about truth, about love, and about eternal life.  One doesn’t simply profess belief in such weighty and mysterious things— one lives into them, questions into them, believes into them, grows into them.  One wrestles — and even in the wrestling, belongs. 

Living as we do on this side of the Resurrection, we know that even the greatest miracle in human history was not enough to stop Jesus’s followers from asking searing questions. Even the first eyewitnesses to the empty tomb struggled to believe.  Why should we — their heirs — be different in any way?

I suspect that Jesus’s answer was not what the people in the temple that day wanted to hear.  They wanted to believe from the outside. They wanted a version of proof that would not require them to step into the smelly sheep pen and muck around with the other sheep.

They wanted certainty without risk.  Truth without trust.  A Messiah who will provide but not provoke.  That kind of Jesus is not open for business.  The only knowing that matters is incarnational knowledge.  A knowing that happens within and among the flock. Why is this so?

Because belief does not precede belonging.  To “believe” in the Gospel means to trust, to lean, to depend, to throw my lot in with others who are trying to belong too.  It’s an orientation of the heart and the gut.  A willingness to stake everything I’ve got on the person, the character, the life, the death, and the resurrection of God’s Son.  It’s not abstract.  It’s learned, earned and nurtured through relationships.

It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want. What we want is the experience of God. That is the miracle that we are really after.  And that is the miracle that we really get.”

Sheep know their shepherd because they are his; they walk, graze, feed and sleep in his shadow, beneath his rod and staff, within constant earshot of his voice.  They believe because they have surrendered to his care, his authority, his leadership, and his guidance.  There is no belonging from the outside; Christianity is not a spectator sport.  Belong,Jesus says.  Chose to belong.  Belief will follow.  And that is our mission.  To get to know each other so well that belonging and believing have become one and the same.  Amen