Today’s Gospel is one of the most famous in our world today, for it includes the famous passage of John 3:16.9 (NAB)

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

However, these words may appear just to be nice words or even misunderstood words if we don’t do what is called define our terms. We know what the words say, but in this context what do the words mean? The term we have to define is the word belief. What does this mean? To seek that answer, we do not look into a dictionary, because the dictionary does not apply here. We need to see it explained in other ways and the best place to look is in the First Letter of John. To believe in the Son of God is to love Him and to love Him, according to John is to keep his commandments. In other words, if we are going to believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, then we are going to live as if we believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God. If we just believe in God and nothing more then our belief means nothing.

If we look further at these words we can see they are almost a contract. Everyone who believes in Him will not perish but will have eternal life. Indeed, elsewhere, Jesus also defines Eternal Life as that they know the Father and the One whom He has sent. This means our life needs to grow in its ability to define those terms. Believing in God academically is not what is called for. However, believing in Christ and having a relationship in Him that affects every part of our respective lives is.

This means not so much a life focused on avoiding sin, but a life focusing on responding to God’s love by seeking to love God and neighbor. That will lead you to avoid sin. Let me show you how.

Several years ago there was a campaign to lead teens out gangs, after much research they found that what is the most painful aspect of a teen in a gang is their mother seeing them arrested and in prison. They found that many teens would avoid getting sucked into gangs because they learned how much their activity would break their mothers’ hearts. Their relationship affected their behavior.

If we seek to believe in Christ and to love Him, then we must live in a way that reflects that, or we only believe. So sin comes in when we are living in a way that does not reflect a true love for God and therefore a true belief in Christ.

Hence, the reason why our belief must translated into actions and vice versa. Now all of us fail at this. However, we fail because we need to grow, if we recognize that need, we find life, if not we remain outside the realm of God. How do we grow?

Let me give you another example, when I was selling they tried to teach us that every “no” was a learning process to how to get people to yes. Let me translate this to our enterprise here.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says the following: But this “intimate and vital bond of man to God” (GS 19 # 1) can be forgotten, overlooked, or even explicitly rejected by man. Such attitudes can have different causes:. . . religious ignorance or indifference; the cares and riches of this world; the scandal of bad example on the part of believers; currents of thought hostile to religion; finally, that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call.

The way we grow in love is when things go wrong and we are left with a choice to embrace Christ or to reject him because things went wrong. Know that there is always a great amount of pressure to turn from Christ. Right now, there is a lot of social pressure to reject the Catholic Church. “We are liberated now you know. We don’t need to believe in God, we can be our own gods don’t you know.” Or maybe the pressure of work, home and family are such that we can easily turn from God, or maybe people are telling us that if we want to find a religion that gives us full acceptance, then we need to find one that is not Catholic. However, Jesus leads us to eternal life and to truth. Choosing himespecially when things go wrong  lead us to fullness of life in all eternity and our pathway is through believing and acting on those beliefs, even when everything is going wrong.

If you lost everything tomorrow, would you bring your struggles in prayer, or would you curse God. Would you see, your most painful experience as a way to grow in holiness or consider proof that God does not exist. These are the realities that  define the difference between the saint and the sinner. The one who loves Christ, loves Him and knows His love even when all goes wrong. The one who just believes in Christ will stop believing in him when he feels it is not to his advantage.

Let us go back to the prize, Eternal life in Christ. Yet there is another prize out there, our loss of eternal life. I have dealt directly with situations that show that the enemy seeks nothing more than our loss of salvation. So we have the choice to seek the prize, the method, live a life that reflects our love and belief. But there is back pressure to give up on that all the time. If we seek eternal life, then we seek it in a way that Jesus shows us how to live it. Giving our all for the one who gave His all for us. That is believing and loving God. The rewards are greater than we can find anywhere in the universe except in union with God. Here, Jesus’ call and response to us  is in kind.

God Bless You,

Fr. Robert J Carr

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