Rethinking faith and works

Genesis 12:1-4

1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” 4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. 

Romans 4:1-5, 13-16

1 What then are we to say was gained by Abraham, our ancestor according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 4 Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. 5 But to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness.

     13 For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14 For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, neither is there transgression.

    16 For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us…

John 3:14-21

14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

   16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

One of the big questions in the NT, and in Paul’s letters especially, is just how and why the Gentiles, the non-Jews, get included in God’s people.  The OT tells the story of how God established a people, the Jews, and made a covenant with them, a covenant which entailed certain obligations of the people but also God’s promises to them.  It bears repeating that these folks were not post-enlightenment individualists;  they thought their status before God was determined by the people to which they belonged.   And how did you know to which people you belonged?  You follow the law which constitutes the people.  The purpose of the law was to create a people set apart - a holy people.  

There’s a long tradition of Christians misunderstanding Judaism because they misunderstand Paul, as if this was and is a religion about trying to earn your way into heaven by doing enough stuff to win God’s favor.   But Jews didn’t follow the law so much because they thought God would be pleased if they did or angry if they didn’t, but simply because following the law is what it meant to be part of God’s people.  Without the law, there was no people, and those who don’t follow the law don’t belong. 

But then something remarkable happened, as told in the book of Acts.  Gentile believers who did not follow the Jewish law believed in Jesus and received the Holy Spirit.  The evidence sure suggested that these folks were now included in God’s promises, but that raised all kinds of questions. We see in Acts that there were Jewish Christians who thought that these Gentile believers needed to become Jewish, needed to take on the sign of the covenant - circumcision - and follow the law. To be part of God’s people had always required these things, so it be should required going forward.  If you were a bookie taking bets in the first century about which way this would go, you would’ve put the odds on this side of the argument winning.  But remarkably, it did not.   

Much of Paul’s letters is spent making the counterargument that Gentiles do not need to become Jewish in order to become Christian, and clearly he’s often responding to opponents who denigrated this position.  One of the reasons I haven’t preached from Paul’s letters or even included in our readings is that his letters are much more challenging to understand than most of us realize. When we read a passage we’re usually dropping into a complicated, extended argument midstream.  His letters don’t lend themselves to digestible bites.  

When I was a teenager I was coerced into handing out Gospel tracts which always leaned heavy on Paul and invariably began with the assertion that everyone was a sinner and it was futile to try to earn your way to heaven.  They started there because they thought a precondition for receiving the Gospel as Paul preached was rejecting the false way, which all nonbelievers were assumed to believe in even though I don’t remember meeting anyone who actually subscribed to this view. 

But when Paul speaks against “works” he’s not worried about people laboring under the misconception that they can be good enough; rather he specifically means “works of the law”.  He’s arguing against the entrenched assumption that righteousness - membership in the people of God - comes by following the law.  And the boasting that Paul is concerned about is not a generic “look how good a person I am” but rather the assumption that Jewishness and all that it entails makes one superior to Gentile Christians.  

Paul was a unconventional reader of Jewish Scripture, to say the least.  The way he uses Abraham is a good example.  Paul observed that Abraham - Father Abraham, the one through whom God’s people were established - predated the law.   “For what does the scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’”  Here Paul identifies an older, even more fundamental, foundation for the promises of God.  Abraham and all his followers have always been included on the basis of faith.  

Because Christians have so often misunderstood the “works” Paul has in mind they - we - have necessarily misunderstood the nature of faith as well.   The contrast between faith and works turns faith into a kind of anti-work.  We are implored to believe even as we strain to avoid asserting that belief means actually doing anything at all.  

Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness, but it’s not like God spoke to Abraham, he agreed with what God said, then he continued with life as usual.  That Abraham had faith is inseparable from the fact that he left his home and went on a long, sometimes dangerous journey following God’s promises.  That is faith.  

The Gentiles whom Paul addressed throughout his letters did not simply “believe” in Jesus as a thought in their head or feeling in their heart.  To have actual faith in Jesus meant leaving the old gods behind, which necessarily meant dissociating themselves from pagan practices, losing friends and family, of becoming a pariah.  To endure that required true belief.  

In the Gospel of John the strong condemnation of unbelievers, many scholars agree, seems to reflect a later situation in the life of the community out of which the Gospel of John arose, where Jewish Christians had been kicked out of the synagogue for believing in Jesus.  They experience bitterness at having been ostracized when it is they have who have received the promised messiah while “the Jews” (although they are themselves Jews) did not. The belief that Jesus calls us to in the famous statement: 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life….”

…is a belief which carried a high social cost.  It did, could not, exist merely as inward attitude or conviction; it necessarily manifested itself in a way of life which then disrupted all their previous relationships.  

The faith or belief spoken of in the Bible is always one which carries a cost, which necessitates a new way of being in the world.  If it doesn’t do that, then it isn’t true belief, but something else.  

In this season of Lent, a good question to reflect upon is whether and to what extent you - we - are willing to suffer anything for our faith.  I find myself reluctant to make even the most meager sacrifices; I keep trying to justify opting out of the very modest disciplines I’ve adopted for the season.  There are many ways to give an account of this kind of personal failure, but the core issue, it seems to me, is that I just don’t really actually believe that these sacrifices will be beneficial.  It’s much easier for me to understand them as a loss than as a gain.  And this, I’m afraid to say, calls into question if I really even believe the Gospel of Christ, the very substance of which is the promise that faithfulness even unto death leads to life.  

You don’t necessarily need to follow me down that existential hole.  But if you do - or if you’re someone who doubts your faith or even the possibility of faith - the way out, I’m convinced isn’t to try to get yourself to believe something you’re just not believing.  The thing to do is be like Abraham who got up and lived a new life even though he surely had his doubts.  Faith is following.  Not only is faith without works dead - but true belief might only be possible when we get up and go where God has called.