Do You Believe This?

The question is asked at a grave.

Martha comes to Jesus after her brother Lazarus has been dead for four days. Her grief is real and unmanaged. She says, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." Jesus responds with what becomes the Gospel’s most concentrated theological declaration: I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die. And then he asks the question that runs beneath every page of the Gospel from its first verse to its last: Do you believe this?

The question is not asked in a seminar room where propositions can be evaluated at a comfortable distance. It is asked at a grave, in the specific, unmanageable weight of actual loss, to a woman whose grief has not been resolved and whose circumstances have not improved. That is the location of the question. That is the location where belief is pressed toward what it actually is rather than what it presents itself as being.

John was written for people who were not there. The Beloved Disciple’s community watched the eyewitnesses die one by one. The generation that had seen was departing. What does faith look like when the generation that saw is gone, and the generation that has not seen must nonetheless believe? The Gospel answers: blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. Not a lesser blessing for a lesser faith. The same blessing. The same life.

The Gospel ends on a beach at dawn. The risen Jesus makes breakfast for disciples who failed him. He calls to them across the water: " Children, do you have any fish? They do not recognize him. He gives them direction for the catch, and when the nets fill, the Beloved Disciple is the first to know: it is the Lord. And Peter throws himself into the water.

Then breakfast. Then three questions to the man who denied him three times: " Do you love me? Three declarations. Three commissions. The failure is not erased. It is addressed — specifically, in the same number and at the same level of personal cost. The risen Jesus does not restore Peter by pretending the charcoal fire in the courtyard did not happen. He builds a new charcoal fire on the beach, and he asks his question in the same location where the failure occurred.

The question the Gospel has been asking since the prologue is the question it asks at the grave and at the breakfast fire: Do you believe this? Not as a general religious affiliation. Not as a cultural inheritance. In the specific, relational, whole-person sense that John means by the word believe. The Gospel holds the space open for your answer. It always has.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Do you believe this — not in general, but specifically, in the location of your actual life right now, with the specific losses and doubts and hungers you are carrying? What is the most honest answer you can give?

2. Jesus asks Peter three times: " Do you love me? The repetition is not redundant. It is the specific restoration of a specific failure. Where in your own life is there a charcoal fire that the risen Jesus is meeting you at — and what is he asking there?

TODAY’S PRACTICE

Read John 21:1–19 today — the breakfast on the beach and the restoration of Peter. Read it slowly. Notice the charcoal fire. Notice that Jesus already has fish and bread before the disciples bring their catch. Notice the three questions and the three commissions. Then sit quietly and let the same question land: Do you love me? Don’t answer quickly. Let it press where it most needs to press.

We adapted this plan from John Explained, part of the Bible for Modern Life Series. Want more content like this? Explore other books in the series at samuelwhitaker.net.