Let’s have a show of hands: everyone who believes that there is a Constitution of the United States raise your hand. OK, good. Now everyone who believes in the Constitution of the United States raise your hand. Some of you might be thinking, “Wait. Didn’t he just ask us to do that?” Well, no. There’s a difference between “belief that” and “belief in.”
“Belief in” is an attitude toward a person or an institution, a sentiment or posture of trust, while “belief that” is just an attitude with regard to a proposition, one’s intellectual assent to its validity. One may believe that there is a Constitution establishing the government of the United States while not actually believing in the institutions and processes of governance that it creates and enshrines. That may be, perhaps, the source of some of our current social and political problems, but that’s another discussion for another time. With regard to our Christian faith, however, the intersection of these two different kinds of belief – “belief that” versus “belief in” – is at the heart of today’s lesson from the Gospel according to John.
Today is the first Sunday in November which means that instead of the normal sequence of lessons for Ordinary Time, we are given the option of reading the lessons for All Saints Day, which falls every year on November 1. So today we heard a reading from the Wisdom of Solomon (a part of the apocrypha in which we hear that the righteous are in the hand of God), a psalm reminding us that the saints pledge themselves to truth rather than falsehood, a bit of the Book of Revelation describing the “new Jerusalem” where God will make God’s home with the saints, and (oddly enough) to the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel.
Our Old Testament lesson this morning is a very small bit of the Book of Job, that really sort odd bit of Biblical literature that tells the story of a wager between God and Satan. Some scholars believe that it may find its origins in an earlier Babylonian work known as the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, that the Jews in Exile became familiar with the older Babylonian story and adapted it to their own theology.
