There was a third-grade teacher who spent a class period trying to explain the importance of belief in Jesus, as we hear discussed in today’s Gospel reading from chapter 3 of John’s Gospel. Finally, as a way to sum things up and to see if the kids had understood what he was trying to teach, he asked a couple of questions.
“So,” he said, “is just being a good person enough to have eternal life with Jesus in heaven?”
The class all shook their heads “no.”
“What about saying a lot of prayers. Is that enough?” he asked.
Again everyone shook their heads “no.”
“So,” he asked. “What’s missing? What has to happen for you to have eternal life with Jesus in heaven?”
Of course he was looking for the kids to say we need to believe in Jesus, as our Gospel says today.
But all the teacher got back was a bunch of blank looks.
Finally in the back of the room a light bulb seemed to go off in the mind of one of the kids and he raised his hand and said: “Teacher, I know what more needs to happen for you to have eternal life with Jesus in heaven—you gotta be dead.”
Perhaps not the answer the teacher was looking for.
But the Gospel today does challenge us on this point of belief in Christ, and what that means in terms of our eternal salvation. Jesus couldn’t be clearer—He says: God gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.
So what does believing in Christ, the Son of Man, look like?
As I reflected on that I was struck by how much believing in Christ is like believing in gravity.
We all know gravity, of course. It is the force that attracts objects to one another, that caused the apple to fall down on Sir Isaac Newton, not up. In a sense we fight with gravity all our lives. When we’re learning to walk and we lose our balance and fall—that’s gravity. And when we get older and things start to sag, that’s gravity too.
Anyone here believe gravity doesn’t exist? I thought not.
But the reality is that we don’t really understand gravity at a fundamental level. Scientists haven’t figured out the mechanism whereby it operates, how the forces are communicated between two objects that causes a gravitational pull to occur, what exactly is going on.
There are all sorts of complex, speculative theories about gravity and how it connects with other forces in the universe, some of which involve something like 8 dimensions and string theory and such. Maybe someday we’ll figure all this out, but the fact is that right now gravity as a force is shrouded in mystery.
That doesn’t mean we don’t believe it exists. We have lots of evidence for its existence. We can see its effects all around us, can measure how light waves bend as they pass a big planet and experience its gravitational pull. We can calculate the force and angle and speed it takes for a rocket to leave the earth’s gravitational field.
And we see what happens when there is no gravity. We see folks at a space station floating around aimlessly in zero gravity, knowing that if they weren’t tethered to something they’d float off.
And we know what happens when people ignore gravity. I have a granddaughter who some years ago, when she was 4 or so, decided to ignore gravity. She was sitting at the top of a backyard swing and decided she could fly. So, she took off—and ended up in the emergency room with a broken arm. We ignore gravity at our peril.
We recognize that we have to have gravity to exist—that our bodies can’t function properly long term without it. That’s why in every space show you ever see the ship or artificial planet has generated an artificial gravitational field of its own so people can walk around normally.
For all the distinctions made between science and faith, belief in Christ has a lot of parallels to belief in gravity. We have lots of evidence that Jesus existed, but the exact nature of his existence—His “mechanism of action,” to use a term of science—is very much a mystery, like that of gravity.
We can say He had two natures, fully human and fully divine. And we believe that, but what exactly is going on there, and how does it work? How can there be one person with two natures?
And then we get to the Trinity—to Jesus as the Son, the second Person of a God who is one God in three Persons. We can spin out a lot of complex, speculative theories about how that sort of a being operates, but fundamentally it is shrouded in mystery.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t see, and even measure, the existence of Christ, like we can measure the existence of gravity. We can see the impact a belief in Christ has on people’s lives, how they can change and grow and thrive when they come to believe in Him.
And we see what happens to people removed from Christ. Like folks in zero gravity, they tend to float around, pretty aimlessly, from thing to thing, untethered. And like folks travelling on a starship making their own gravity, people unconnected to Christ make their own artificial god-- -maybe it is wealth or power or sex or vanity—you name it.
We can even measure Christ’s impact scientifically. I read a report the other day of a study done in the days of the early Church which compared the longevity of people who were Christians with the longevity of those who were not. Christians lived longer, in a statistically-significant amount.
Why? Because they loved one another, and cared for one another.
Look around you and see hospitals, nursing homes, universities, facilities to care for the homeless—they all have their origins in the power of belief in Christ.
And there is one other characteristic which gravity and Christ have in common, and that’s this: the power of gravity is inversely proportional to the distance between the objects in question. In other words, the farther apart two objects are, the weaker the gravitational pull between them. In fact, an object out in the middle of the universe, with nothing else around, may not be affected by gravity at all.
And that’s true with Christ too—the farther we push Him away, the more we separate ourselves from Him—the weaker the pull, the attraction, and the more we’re on our own.
Maybe that’s what the Gospel means today when it says that those who do not believe in Christ have already been condemned because of their unbelief.
All of which suggests the importance of staying close to Jesus, feeling that gravitational pull. That’s why the Eucharist is so important—we can’t get any closer to Jesus than when we receive His body and blood.
And that’s why prayer and reading about Jesus in the scriptures are also so important as ways to bring us closer to Christ.
And let me suggest one last thing—this one courtesy of St. Francis de Sales. He suggests that whenever we are making a decision about what to do, we ask ourselves whether the thing we’re thinking of doing will lead us closer to Christ, or farther from Him.
Because our relationship with Christ, our distance from Him, is constantly changing, like the universe—nothing is static. We’re either getting closer to Him, or we’re moving away.
Our decisions push us one way or the other.
Like gravity, Christ is central to our existence, and we ignore that at our peril.