This is an alarming statement, and it is not the only one of its kind in John's gospel. It has been understood to mean that only those who profess belief in Jesus' name are automatically condemned to hell. This kind of interpretation, though, is seriously flawed, in part because it takes for granted a disastrously superficial understanding of what is meant by "believing," and in part because it takes for granted an equally disastrous misunderstanding of what is meant by "the name."
Our [first] reading draws a clear distinction between intellectual belief, the belief we profess, and the kind of belief that we live by. That is a central theme of the Epistle of James. "But someone will say, you have faith and I have works. Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith" (James 2:18). Luther did not like that Epistle. It in fact goes on to say, "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone" (2:24), a direct challenge to the usual misunderstanding of a very familiar statement by Paul (Romans 3:28).
When Paul wrote that we are justified (not "saved") by faith, he used the word
pistis. The first meaning given for this in the standard New Testament lexicon is "faithfulness, reliability." The second is "trust, confidence, faith."
[1] Paul was not talking about the faith we profess, but about the "trust or confidence" that comes from a heartfelt effort to live by what the Lord is trying to tell us. This is summed up quite concisely in
Secrets of Heaven (§3451): "If people actually believe that charity comes from faith and live in charity toward the neighbor, then even though they are not 'in truth' as to doctrine they 'in truth' as to life. This means that they are in the church, in the Lord's kingdom."
This calls to mind the very straightforward question that we find in Luke: "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and not do what I tell you?" (Luke 6:46); and this in turn calls our attention to function of the name. In Shakespeare's time, and still today, no one would quarrel with the assertion, "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet," but in gospel times, names were taken much more seriously. The standard lexicon comments, "The period of our literature also sees . . . in the name something real, a piece of the very nature of the personality whom it designates, that partakes in his qualities and his powers."
[2] The devout Jew would not pronounce the actual name of the Deity in reading the Scriptures, but would substitute the a word meaning "my Lord." In rabbinic literature, we find simply "the name." In the words of
Secrets of Heaven (§144), "In regard to the idea that
naming things means recognizing their nature, it needs to be realized that the ancients took a name to mean simply the essence of the thing, and
seeing something and naming it to mean recognizing its nature." Evidently, it also meant making direct contact with that nature, with those "qualities and powers," and as the Lord told Moses at Sinai, "You cannot see my face, for no one shall see and live" (Exodus 33:20).
If we put this together with the realization that true faith is the kind of confidence that we actually live by, "believing in Jesus' name" means taking to heart the qualities that Jesus embodied. That may sound abstract to us, but in the Gospels we are dealing with people who had actually encountered Jesus, who had felt the full force of his person, the depth of his understanding of their hearts, the beauty of his care for their souls—in the words of the lexicon, "something real, a piece of the very nature of the personality."
That was exactly what Jesus was urging Philip to see in our New Testament reading. "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). It is even clearer in what he said to Thomas: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). The name stands for the quality, the essence, the very life. It stands, then, for the way, the way we must live. It obviously does not mean that he is the only one who follows or exemplifies this way. In fact, he very shortly makes what may be the most challenging statement in the Bible: "I tell you in truth, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and in fact will do greater works than these, because I am going to my Father" (John 14:12).
This kind of radical statement is typical of the Gospel of John. It is in that Gospel that we hear Jesus speak of eating his body and drinking his blood. It is in that Gospel that he claims to be the vine, the light of the world and to offer water that will satisfy thirst forever. It is in that Gospel the he speaks of being born again, of some having already passed from death into life.
John's Gospel, then, moves the discourse to a different and deeper level, and that makes a critical difference. The literal level is "the outside of the cup and the plate." The plate can look perfectly clean when the inside is full of "extortion and excess" (Matthew 23:25f.). The literal level, the world of appearances, is the world of the sheep's clothing that can be worn by ravening wolves (Matthew 7:15). When we move to the deeper level, though, the spiritual level, there are no more deceptive appearances. There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed (Matthew 10:26). The light will expose the deeds of the evil (John 3:20).
It is on this level, then, and on this level only, that it is legitimate to speak of good and evil in absolute, black-and-white terms. This is why it is such folly to take the Book of Revelation literally. It is clearly, explicitly, set in the spiritual world, where the final separation between good and evil takes place. As long as we are living in this world we are in between heaven and hell, making up our minds which way to turn. As long as we are in this world, too, we are constantly taking in impressions through our physical senses; and the messages we get about each other's souls can be almost impossible to decipher. To impose the categories of the Book of Revelation on this world of deceptive appearances is to lay claim to knowledge and insight that we simply do not have. In the last analysis, it amounts to claiming divine wisdom for ourselves, and it is hard to think of a surer way to close our minds to receiving insight from the Lord.
Swedenborg's work on the love of marriage closes with a story in which some angels asked to be shown what this world was like. They were enabled to look down, it says,
. . . and all they could see there was darkness. Then they were told to write these mysteries [about the love of marriage] on a page and let the page down to earth—they would see something strange and significant. They did, and watched the page with the mysteries written on it travel down from heaven. As it went, it gleamed like a star while it was still in the spiritual world, but when it settled down into the earthly world the light dimmed. The lower it went, the darker it became. (Marriage Love 533)
The Gospel of John is trying to lift our thoughts up out of that darkness, up to a level where there is more light. That is a level of our own minds, right here and now. It is the level from which we get those best insights that occur to us now and then, that just seem to come out of nowhere. We rarely visit that level consciously, but we have a way of visiting it. ". . . if our thinking is withdrawn from the body," we are told, “. . . we are sometimes visible in our [spiritual] communities because we are then in the spirit. When we are visible, it is easy to tell us from the spirits who live there because we walk along deep in thought, silent, without looking at others, as though we did not see them; and the moment any spirit addresses us, we disappear.” (Heaven and Hell 438)
With all this in mind, then, let’s come back to our text. Let's try to get some kind of image of "the way," of the path of truly heavenly living, an image of understanding and being understood, an image of loving and being loved, an image of being wholly alive and at peace. That is Jesus' name, the word that was made flesh, the light that came into the world. That is what his disciples were responding to when they heeded his call to follow him. Simon Peter said, "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68). They "believed in his name" not in some intellectual way, but in their hearts, and they were willing to give their lives.
"Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe in him are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God." What is this condemnation? "And this is the condemnation: that light has come into the world, and people loved darkness better than light, because their deeds were evil" (John 3:19).
Rest assured, the only way disbelieve in Jesus' name is to hear it and reject it, to see the beauty of the way, the truth, and the life, and say no to it.
[1] William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich,
A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 668.
