To Have the Son

 

To Have the Son

May 8, 2021

 

The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

Chapter five of the First Letter of John has some challenging lines in it. We read:

 

If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his Son. Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son. And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. 1 John 5:9-12.

 

This text raises a host of questions. I want to address only two of them here. First, what does it mean to “have the Son?” Second, what is this “eternal life” that we supposedly have if we have the Son?

First, what does it mean “to have the Son?” The traditional Christian answer to that question surely is that to have the Son means to believe in Jesus Christ. You have the Son by accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. You trust that by doing so in this life you will gain a blissful heavenly life in the life after death. Most Christians would surely say that having the Son in this sense gives you eternal life, with eternal life understood precisely in that way, unending life with Jesus Christ in heaven after death.

There is however a colossal problem with understanding having the Son in that way. Far too many Christians both today and across the broad sweep of Christian history have seen Jesus as the one who punches their ticket to heaven after they die. These Christians typically pay little attention to Jesus’ moral teachings except perhaps to attribute to him things he never said like hate gay people and oppose all abortion. Often they support violent actions by their nations. In the United States at least they probably own guns and are quite prepared to take a human life just to protect their property. They may give some money to charitable organizations that seek to alleviate the plight of the poor, but they vote for politicians who will preserve the existing economic and political structures that produce so many poor people in the first place. They oppose politicians who pledge to reform those institutions so there will be fewer poor people who need charitable assistance. Many of these Christians believe that sexism, racism, and homophobia are God’s way, which in Christ Jesus we know that they most certainly are not. Do these Christians “have the Son” in any meaningful way? No, I’m afraid they do not.

I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again here to illustrate my point. It is said that a Christian missionary in India was speaking with a holy man of the Hindu faith. The Christian missionary quoted John 14:6 to the Hindu holy man: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” The missionary asked the Hindu how he responded to that verse. The Hindu man said, “O yes. That is absolutely true.” The missionary was nonplussed. As far as he knew the Hindu holy man with whom he was speaking had no intention whatsoever of converting to Christianity. He asked the man how he could, as a Hindu, say that that statement was true. The holy man replied that to understand this statement we have to ask what the way is that Jesus is. It is, he said, the way of peace, compassion, forgiveness, and love. That, he said, is indeed the way.

What does this story tell us about what it means to “have the Son?” We must ask: Which of these two men “had” Jesus, the Christian missionary who surely understood having the Son as believing in Jesus or the Hindu holy man who didn’t believe in the person Jesus as Lord and Savior but did understand and agree with all that Jesus was really about? To me the answer is obvious. The Hindu holy man was a better Christian than was the Christian missionary. Having Jesus isn’t about taking certain supposedly factual claims about him to be true. We can believe in Jesus in that sense and have our belief amount to nothing more than a sense of assurance about the fate of our souls after death. Such faith may not affect how we live this life at all. You can believe in Jesus while paying no attention to what he has to teach us about how God wants us to live. Sadly, Christians do that all the time. Understanding what Jesus is all about the way the Hindu man of this story did is truly what it means to “have” Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate.

Second, the First Letter of John tells us that when we “have” the Son we receive something called “eternal life.” Here we encounter one of the most misunderstood concepts in all of Christianity. This misunderstanding is of immense, and unfortunate, significance in the history of the faith. Ask most any Christian what “eternal life” means and you’ll get an answer that amounts essentially to eternal life is the never-ending, blissful life of the soul in heaven after death. That surely is what the Christian missionary of our story thought it meant. Tragically, Christians have engaged in spiritual imperialism all over the world because they have thought that unless a person “believes” in Jesus Christ they won’t get that eternal life but will get its opposite, an unending life of fiery torment in hell. Most Christians with more than a thinly superficial understanding of the faith (though surely not an in-depth one) will tell you that that is precisely what the Gospel of John tells us. They will recite to you John 3:16, the most frequently quoted verse in the Bible: “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.” Then they’ll tell you that this verse means that you must take Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior to avoid having your soul spend eternity in hell after you die.

Now, my main text for this post is from 1 John not the Gospel of John, so you may think that nothing in the Gospel of John could much inform the meaning of a verse from 1 John. You’d be mistaken. Scholars tell us that the Letters of John were written either by the author of the Gospel of John or by someone else from the same theological tradition. So if the Gospel of John tells us what “eternal life” actually means we can apply that meaning to the phrase in 1 John without reservation. And the Gospel of John does indeed tell us precisely what it means by the phrase “eternal life,” and it doesn’t mean what most people think it means. In chapter 17 of the Gospel of John we read:

 

After Jesus said these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. John 17:1-3 (emphasis added).

 

Note that the text does not say this is how you get eternal life. I says this is eternal life. In both the Gospel of John and the Letters of John eternal life is not about the fate of our souls after death, all the Christian claims to the contrary notwithstanding. It is about our lives here and now. It is life lived in the knowledge of God and Jesus Christ. To have eternal life is to know, really know, Jesus and God. It is to know God in and through Jesus Christ.

That is what we receive when we “have the Son.” We have knowledge of how God wants us to live. We have knowledge of what God considers right and what God considers wrong. We don’t accept anything in the Bible uncritically, for God gave us minds and never told us not to use them. We know, however, where to look for such knowledge. We look to the Son, to Jesus Christ, the fount of our knowledge of the Divine. That’s what happens when we “have the Son.” Let us always look to him for knowledge, insight, and wisdom. If we will do that we will know the blessings of the true eternal life, life in the knowledge of the one true God and of Jesus Christ, God’s Son. May it be so.