Shallow Belief

So when He came to Galilee, the Galileans received Him, having seen all the things that He did in Jerusalem at the feast; for they themselves also went to the feast. (John 4:45)

The Galileans received Him. Wonderful. That really sounds like good news at first, at least until you read a little more. But that reception immediately starts to be qualified with more and more external reasons revealing the increasing contrast with the reception Jesus received in Sychar.

The Samaritans received Jesus too. It says that many of them believed in Jesus even before they met Him, based only on the testimony of the woman who came excitedly racing into town just after noon one day talking about a man who could see right inside of her heart. That is still absolutely amazing to me, how a large part of a whole town could believe in Jesus based solely on the simple testimony of a woman they had likely looked down on with scorn previously.

Then after they met Jesus in person back out at the well for themselves, they invited Him into town and received Him with hospitality for two days. As a result of hearing His words to them and experiencing His presence among them many more believed in Him as their own Savior. There is no mention of miracles, no mention of anything at all except that He shared His words and His presence with them. That is not to eliminate the possibility that He did not heal their sick – that would just be acting like Himself. But by their own confession they testified that their belief was based solely on the words and presence of Jesus alone.

Now as I move into the next story the alerting flags fly up everywhere along these lines. It starts out by saying that they received Him. That sounds really good for a beginning, but then John has to immediately begin to add qualifiers upon qualifiers and Jesus Himself adds them. The focus seems to be completely on how much Jesus can do in order to elicit some level of belief among the Jewish people in Galilee. And Galilee was not known to be nearly as religiously intense as the people living nearer to Jerusalem in Judah. That is the area where Jesus had the worst problems with people coming to believe in Him all throughout His ministry.

In this verse it strongly implies that the Galilean's belief and reception seemed to be primarily based on the exciting wonders and signs that they had seen Jesus do not long before when they had seen Him in Jerusalem during the recent religious feast there. John had mentioned this very fact not long before. Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, during the feast, many believed in His name, observing His signs which He was doing. (John 2:23)

There it is again. Many believed in His name – just like the Samaritans, or is it just like them? It does say that many of the Samaritans believed in Him, but not because of any signs; they believed in Him based on His words and on coming to know Him for themselves. But as soon as Jesus gets back to His home territory and around the people where He grew up, they base their belief in Him only on the miracles and spectacular things they see that He can do. There is no mention of the spontaneous, unqualified kind of belief that was seen in the hearts of the Samaritans just talked about.

Not only is their belief linked to the signs and wonders that they saw happen when He was in Jerusalem but also the first miracle in Cana is brought up as another reason for them to believe. In reality these people had far more reasons to believe than the Samaritans had; they had the same evidence that the Samaritans based their belief on plus they had far more evidence, the evidence of miracles and amazing encounters with the skeptical authorities where Jesus revealed wisdom and insight that outmaneuvered the skills and tricks of the smartest people in the country to trap Him and embarrass Him.

The text does say that at least some of these Jewish people did come to believe in Him. But I can't help but wonder how the quality and depth of that belief compared to the open-hearted kind of belief seen in the previous story of the woman of Sychar. I believe that John is making this point as strong as he can by placing these stories in contrast as he has here. It becomes even more obvious as he shares the struggle of the father in the next verse to believe that Jesus can heal his son.

Why is it that it always seems to be the most religious people who have the most difficult time entering into healthy, spontaneous belief that does not demand sign after sign? That is not a rhetorical question because I happen to be one of those people myself. Jesus' relationship with the Jews all of His life was marred by this incessant demand for signs and miracles as a precondition for people to be willing to believe in Him. And even then their belief was often short-lived or tepid at best. It was almost like Jesus was forced to try to extract belief out of their hearts while on the other hand it was often the gentiles or Samaritans who demonstrated the most willingness and eagerness to embrace Him based on very little external evidence.

I cannot help but feel the convictions of this point aimed at my own heart. I was raised pretty much like these Jews were raised, familiar with the things of God, hearing about Jesus all my life but never encountering or appreciating His value in my life personally. My internal concepts of God growing up were strongly tainted with distortions and rooted mostly in fear while at the same time feeling forced to talk about Him with terms of love and respect. The dichotomy between what we were supposed to say in religious speak and what we felt in our hearts was so great that many of my friends gave up their profession of religion and left the church so they could feel real and more honest.

I actually respect that choice by my friends and am coming to feel more and more comfortable around them, though many of them find that a bit strange and still feel uncomfortable around me. They find it very hard to accept that I can remain an open Christian and a member of my church while still being accepting of people who want nothing to do with God or the church. But my heart tells me that they just may be far more ready to experience a belief in Jesus if they ever were to really catch a glimpse of the real truth about God as revealed in Jesus' words and His demeanor. These kinds of people are actually much closer to the Kingdom as Jesus put it than are most who claim to worship and follow God with all the religious accoutrement's of formalism and pious activities and right answers.

I actually find myself struggling more to feel sympathy and acceptance for the religious people around me than I have feeling resonance with the skeptics. I have to often pray for God to give me the eyes of heaven to see not only that I am actually deeply infected with hypocrisy myself without being able to see it clearly, but that those suffering the same condition that I grew up with are really deep inside longing for something more meaningful, more real, and that the religious exteriors they embrace are not bringing the satisfaction that they profess to have in their religious talk.

If I am to ever be an effective witness of the real truth about God and have any saving effect whatsoever in the lives of others, especially those who are blinded by religion as I have been for so long and that I still struggle with, I am going to have to allow the convictions from these passages to have the strong effect of transforming my own heart first. I have to allow the Spirit of God to convict me and not jump to applying this to everyone else while sidestepping the painful exposures that these verses can have to pry open the painful places in my own heart. Like the disciples who had such a hard time 'getting it' while following Jesus for over three years, I have to have the fog cleared away from my own mind and allow the passion of Jesus to ignite my passions and cleanse the stuff in my own inner self to allow Jesus to use me to better represent what He wants to share with others through my life and influence and testimony.