Skip to main content

What is a Christian?

John 14.15-21 (https://www.biblegateway.com NRSVA)
What is a Christian? This was an urgent question in John’s church because there were people who claimed to be followers of Jesus but who held very different views from John and his friends. John talks about them explicitly in his letters, and by the time these were written things were getting pretty tense. The church had split, with some members leaving to pursue a very different direction. The word ‘antichrist’ is banded about freely in the letters. It’s a term used solely by John, and only to describe his opponents. No one knows precisely what it means, but it’s not a compliment.
It was very important to John to be able to tell the difference between the real followers of Jesus Christ, and the people who - although they said they were Christians - were really ‘anti-Christs’ because they took a totally opposing view. John says that the true followers of Jesus are ‘they who have [his] commandments and keep them.’ These are the people who really love him. So being a Christian is about believing the right things, having Jesus’ commandments as our guiding principle, and then keeping them, or embodying them, in our daily life. 
Some of the anti-christian teaching which John identifies in his letters seems to have been that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross in the same sense that we die, because his real, eternal self was separate from his mortal, physical body. But we already know that John can’t accept this, because he believes that the most important commandment of Jesus is to love one another in the same selfless way that he first loved us in dying for us on the cross.
Loving one another in the same unconditional way that Jesus loves us sounds like a very tall order, but John prefaces this definition of a Christian by saying that God will give us an advocate or helper to encourage and support us on our faith journey. Technically the term John uses means ‘the counsel for the defence’, but here he seems to be using it in a more general sense of ‘adviser’. 
That this Spirit of Truth is the same Spirit that was in Jesus is made clear when he explains, ‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.’ So a Christian is someone who is empowered to live in a Christ-like way by Jesus’ own Spirit at work within them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his ...
14 comments
Read more

Giotto’s Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds

John 1.10-18 In the week before Christmas the BBC broadcast a modern version of The Nativity which attempted to retell the story with as much psychological realism as possible. So, for instance, viewers saw how Mary, and Joseph especially, struggled with their feelings. But telling the story of Jesus with psychological realism is not a new idea. It has a long tradition going back seven hundred years to the time of the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone. This nativity scene was painted in a church in Padua in about 1305. Much imitated it is one of the first attempts at psychological realism in Christian art. And what a wonderful first attempt it is - a work of genius, in fact! Whereas previously Mary and the Baby Jesus had been depicted facing outwards, or looking at their visitors, with beatific expressions fixed on their faces, Giotto dares to show them staring intently into one another’s eyes, bonding like any mother and newborn baby. Joseph, in contrast, is not looking on with quiet a...
1 comment
Read more

Luther and Loyola

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Within Christianity there has always been a tension between two poles. At one end of the spectrum stands Martin Luther, who said that Christian faith is about trusting in God to put us right - or make us righteous - through the saving death of Jesus. Luther came to this conclusion when he was a professor of New Testament studies in a little town in Germany called Wittenberg. One year he decided to teach his students about Paul’s letter to the Romans and that’s when it suddenly dawned upon him that Christian faith is all about trust. At the other end of the spectrum , stands someone like Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Society of Jesus. He spent a lot of his later life in crisis, first struggling to overcome severe wounds that he had suffered when he was a soldier and then during two short periods locked up in a cell by the Spanish Inquisition. He came to believe that the Christian life is a similar sort of struggle, a lifelon...
Post a Comment
Read more