What Does It Mean to Believe in Jesus?

by Joseph Stoutzenberger

So many of my friends were brought up Catholic or some other religion but now have no time for it. If anything, they look upon religions in a negative light and no longer consider themselves Christian. My Jewish friends are for the most part “culturally Jewish.” Their identity as Jews is linked to their heritage and their birth; they don’t have to believe anything to lay claim to being Jewish. On the other hand, to be Christian means to believe in something, or, more precisely, to believe in someone—Jesus. What does that belief entail?

Belief in Jesus means seeking to know and live his teachings, but that can’t be all there is to it. So much of what Jesus said is found in the teachings of other religious figures. “Love God and your neighbor as yourself” as a summation of the commandments resonates with what at least one other Jewish rabbi of the time taught. Five hundred years before Jesus, Confucius summed up his moral teaching in the saying, “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” A number of religions express that Golden Rule in one fashion or another. In short, people can accept the teachings of Jesus without being Christian.

Jesus’s miracles are certainly alluring, but they didn’t necessarily lead to belief in him. The dynamic is more believe in him and miracles happen rather than the other way around. It’s not as if all the people who encountered Jesus, presumably even those who witnessed his miracles, came to believe in him. According to the gospels, throngs of people were calling for his crucifixion during his trial, and no miracle happened to dampen their rejection of him. At that critical moment, there’s no mention of people who saw his miracles standing up for him. His being raised from the dead was initially experienced only by a select group of believers, not by previously disinterested strangers.

What, then, do Christians mean when they say they believe in Jesus? A key Christian belief is that Jesus lived his life in a way that revealed the nature of God. In John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that God is love. That love is expressed in the Greek word “kenosis,” meaning “emptying.” Jesus “emptied” himself, setting ego and self-interest aside, as lovers do, and told us that God is like that. Rather than a mighty God hurling lightning bolts and roaring threats in a booming voice louder than thunder, a more fitting image for a loving, emptying God would be a woman giving birth. The fifteenth century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich was not the first to refer to Christ as a “heavenly Mother,” and breast-feeding as an apt illustration of Christ’s love. Jesus on the cross empties himself even unto death, an act of love that Christians see as revealing his divinity, oneness with God, shining through.

This is what Christians mean when they say they believe in Jesus. In him, they meet the loving God. Pay attention to his teachings. Ponder his at times baffling messages in his stories. Delight in the accounts of his miracles and comforting words. In the end, take heart that God’s divine love found a home in a man who lived two thousand years ago in a small village not too far from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. That God, out of love, was emptied in Jesus. That God is love. That’s the Jesus Christians believe in.