From the Gospel according John:
There was a royal official whose son lay ill in Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Then Jesus said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my little boy dies.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and started on his way. As he was going down, his slaves met him and told him that his child was alive. So he asked them the hour when he began to recover, and they said to him, “Yesterday at one in the afternoon the fever left him.” The father realized that this was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” So he himself believed, along with his whole household.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – John 4:46b-53 (NRSV) – August 15, 2014)
John uses the word “believe” three times in this short passage: once quoting Jesus about witnesses to his acts of power and twice regarding the royal official’s state of mind. What, precisely, does John mean by doing so? That is one of the ponderable but unanswerable questions about scripture, the precise meaning of a biblical author.
John wrote in Greek and in each of the three cases here the Greek word used is some form of the verb pisteuo, which is also occasionally translated as “faith” and as “trust.” It does not usually carry a strong sense of intellectual assent to a doctrine or concept, although our English “believe” certainly does. Jesus, most likely, did not actually use a Greek word in his statement; more likely he spoke Aramaic in which (as in Hebrew) the word for “believe” is ‘aman and, like the Greek, it does not carry a strong association with intellectual concurrence to a proposition.
When we read or hear John’s testimony in English, therefore, we have to appreciate both the ambiguity of the original and the rather different thrust of our modern understanding of the word “believe”. What we especially must not do is hear John’s “believe” in the same way that we use the word in the creeds.
Of course, when I make such a statement I am immediately confronted by the realization that I have not the slightest idea what you mean by the word “believe” when you recite the Nicene Creed! Even more so, I am confronted by my own lack of clarity when I recite the creed.
Recently, my friend and colleague in ordained ministry, Presbyterian elder Mark Sandlin, published an essay on his blog The God Article entitled “Jesus Is Not My God” in which he confessed to being a heretic by beginning with the declaration, “I am a believer. Mostly. I believe that there is probably a god . . . .” Mark then followed up with, “I also believe there might not be a god. . . .” So how is Mark using “believe”? I think (notice I avoided using the word “believe”) that he is saying that he can intellectually assent to those propositions.
That’s not, however, how I understand the word when it pops up in the Nicene Creed which, as a liturgical Episcopalian, I recite publicly at least once each week, or the Apostle’s Creed which, as a practitioner of the Daily Office, I recite twice each day. I regularly say that I believe that there is a God, that that God created everything, that God had a Son and that Jesus the Anointed One is that Son, that Jesus was born of a virgin, that Jesus was killed on a cross, that he rose from the dead, that he went to heaven and that I expect him to return.
When I do so, however, I am not limiting myself to merely assent to the factual accuracy of those statements. In fact, I’m not even concerned with facticity when I make these statements of belief. In the discussion in the comments about Mark’s “heretical” essay, I said this:
I have no problem whatsoever saying the traditional creeds (Nicene, Apostle’s), every single word of them – virgin birth, death on cross, resurrection, expected return, the whole kit-and-kaboodle. (Did I spell “kaboodle” correctly?) That’s because I understand that “believe” doesn’t mean “assent to the scientific [or historical, I will now add] factual accuracy” of the statements set forth. “Believe” means I trust that these things mean something — usually something more than I currently understand and certainly something a lot more important than mere scientific [or historical] factual accuracy.
I don’t (I hasten to add) disbelieve the factuality of the statements in the creeds, don’t get me wrong, but if it turned out that Mary wasn’t, for example, a virgin, I would still recite the creedal words without a qualm. They are metaphoric; they are symbolic; it’s what they say about Jesus, not what they say about Mary, that is important. Or suppose someone actually were to find and verify a bunch of bones as being the remains of Yeshua of Nazareth; I would still assert my belief in his resurrection. Why? Because his truth, his gospel, the good news that God loves the human race was resurrected in, made alive by, and continues to sustain us in his church.
Whatever Jesus and John may have meant by the word “believe” in this story of the healing of the royal official’s son, that’s what I understand it to be in the creeds. I trust in the importance of what the creedal assertions point us toward. Far from being answers, the creedal statements are starting points for further spiritual exploration; they raise more questions than they answer. And I believe (I am using the word intentionally) that exploring those questions is a healthy and health-giving spiritual activity.
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
Shechem was known as Sychar in Jesus’ time. Near that land that Abraham had bought for use as a tomb, just a short walk south from the traditional location of Joseph’s tomb, is a well that belonged to Jacob. At that well, Jesus stopped to ask a Samaritan woman for a drink; part of the story of that meeting and Jesus’ conversation with the woman (the longest of all the conversations recorded in the Gospels) is today’s Gospel text (John 4:27-42). 
The second tomb is that of Fr. Justinus, the priest who took over the church from St. Philoumenos and continued his work of restoration. An accomplished artist, Fr. Justinus wrote all of the icons which now decorate the nave, sanctuary, and crypt, including an icon of the martyrdom of St. Philoumenos. Fr. Justinus’s tomb is empty because he is still alive. He built his tomb himself and it is placed just outside the front door of the church; he walks past it everyday coming from his residence in the neighboring monastery to the church. It is a daily reminder of his (and our) mortality and of the dangers he (and many) face in the on-going violence or threat of violence that characterizes the Holy Land today.
I wasn’t going to mention this, really, but the mind makes strange associations and when I read the Gospel lesson this morning, particularly this line about the wind blowing where it will and us being unable to tell its origin or its destination, the image that came immediately to mind is an automobile turn signal.
There is a very strong possibility that at least five people in this nave today are suffering from depression. Not just garden variety, feeling a little bit down, depression, but from clinical depression that is being (or should be) treated with medication and therapy. Psychiatrists see more people suffering from depression than people suffering from all other emotional problems combined. It is currently estimated that one in every twenty Americans has been medically diagnosed is currently under treatment for depression. If all of those patients were formed into some sort of organization it would be more than twice the size of the Episcopal Church. 
“In the tragedies in Iraq, Western Africa and Gaza, the waters of chaos are overwhelming us. My personal response right now is to keep my eyes on our Lord. My prayers ascend for all. Save us Lord.”
Psalm 91 (along with some verses out of Isaiah) is the basis for Michael Joncas’s 1979 folk hymn On Eagle’s Wings, which (I think) is one of those songs that people either love or hate. I learned recently that a young relative (for whom the 1970s are ancient history) has threatened to haunt anyone who sings it at her funeral. Having officiated at too many requiems where the song was included in the music, I sympathize.
This morning, I woke up from a dream, grabbed the notepad on my nightstand, and scribbled some notes for a poem. 
Every time I read this tale from John’s gospel, I am caught up short by this apparently pointless question. It seems such a non-sequitur, a request for irrelevant information. What could it have mattered where Jesus was staying? John doesn’t bother to give us an answer. We don’t know where this event took place. John never tells us a town and though the two disciples are permitted to come and see where Jesus was staying, the information is never given to the reader. A useless, irrelevant question made important in the dialog but never resolved for the audience — my college writing instructors would have torn this story apart.
