Jesus loves me, this I believe

Areader asked, after my recent confessional column about Jesus loving me regardless of my good or bad choices: “Does Jesus love me? How can I find that out for sure?”

I do not know how to answer those questions in a way that satisfies everyone. I often do not have answers that even fully satisfy me. But in an effort to honor what I take as an earnest inquiry, I can say what I believe. And why. And pray it encourages that reader and others in some way.

The short answer is something my mother taught me a long time ago. She said, “We can’t be sure of everything we believe as Christians. But even if it turns out not to be true, I would still be glad I chose to follow Jesus, because I think it is the best way to live.”

The older I get, the more grateful I become for parents who introduced me to Jesus—and a life of faith—in this way. While I remember as a child a desire for certainty that was not fulfilled by this approach, there was also freedom in it for me. I could trust my mother because she told me the truth. And like Jesus said in John 8:32, the truth sets us free.

Mama was humble enough, and secure enough, and respected me enough from the time I was a baby that she didn’t try to simplify an infinite mystery like faith into a sound byte. She didn’t pretend she knew the unknowable. I trusted her and learned I could also trust a faith like this because it was honest. My mother doesn’t demand certainty in order to believe, and to live by faith. I don’t either.

There’s a hymn we think of as a child’s song that says, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” I grew up loving that song and the Bible and still do. But life has given me reasons for believing Jesus loves me beyond “the Bible tells me so.” That’s the mystical element to my faith—this thing the writer of Hebrews defined as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.”

For me, that evidence looks like participating in a relationship with a person I can’t see but who undergirds the universe with love, and a sense that I am held in that love regardless of circumstances I cannot control as well as ones I create by my choices. It also looks like the ethic, and empowerment to act on the ethic, of extending such love to others. Which is the aspiration of following Jesus, though admittedly for me not always the achieved reality.

There are those who may call uncertainty heresy, or weakness in faith. I suspect those people are not intellectually honest, even with themselves. On the other end of the spectrum, I know there are those who think this mystical stuff is hogwash. That’s OK. I would just direct those readers to my mother’s recognition of such a possibility.

Because even if one believes faith is all hogwash—which I obviously do not—one still has the responsibility of choosing an ethic by which to live in this world. No one does not choose. Not choosing means one chooses what comes naturally, by default. One can certainly (and thankfully) choose to show love and grace to others without being a Christian. I know several atheists who live the ethic of loving like Jesus better than many of his self-described followers. But everyone chooses something.

There are also those, and I am one of them on my darkest days, who might argue that the idea the universe is undergirded with love is ludicrous. They/we would point to Darwin, racism, hate crime, war, holocaust, genocide, climate change, fascism, communism, capitalism run amok/greed, poverty, disease, famine, all the pain we inflict on ourselves and others— the list is seemingly endless—and say believers are in denial of the rampant evil that burdens the world.

But most of the time I would remind us of all the good I see that outweighs that. I’d cite Martin Luther King Jr., who believed the arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice. And because he staked his life on that belief, he led a movement that helped curve it in that direction.

I’d cite my other heroes, even the ones who wouldn’t necessarily call that cosmic love or justice (for what is justice without love?) Jesus. C.S. Lewis said—I am paraphrasing from “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle”— we may not all call it by the same name, but that doesn’t matter. What mattered to Lewis, and to me, is that love wins.

I think a pertinent question for people of all faiths is what does religious belief and practice matter, really, if it does not make us better at loving our neighbor?

But the reader’s question was not about how to love others. It was whether Jesus loves that reader, and how to find out for sure. The most honest answer I can give is that I believe Jesus loves my reader just like he loves us all, but I don’t know a way to find out for sure.

I hope it comforts the reader to know I do not find being sure a necessity.

Maybe this story can help further illustrate why. In the Siege of Sarajevo, May 1992, the city’s electric and water supply were cut off. Starving citizens lined up for bread at a community bakery. Twenty-two of them were killed by a mortar shell. Vedran Smailovic, lead cellist of the Sarajevo opera orchestra, was nearby and helped tend the wounded.

The next day he returned to the scene dressed in formal white shirt and black tails as if taking the stage at the opera house. He sat amidst the carnage on a white plastic chair, propped his cello between his legs, and played Albioni’s Adagio in G Minor as bombs went off all around him and bullets screamed through the air.

Some wondered if he was out of his mind. Others thought he was stupid. But there were those at home and around the world who saw something else in his actions.

Smailovic sat in a war zone and played his cello in honor of the innocent who were slain. He did not deny the ugliness of reality. He risked himself for it. He stood in stark contrast to death and presented a better option. He summoned light into darkness, created beauty out of the ashes. By faith, he believed there was something transcendent of what he could see, and he offered himself—his music—as a conduit for it.

I believe Jesus loves us like I believe the witness of the cellist of Sarajevo. I hope to be a conduit of that love. For me, as far as faith is concerned—faith that Jesus loves me, loves us all—believing is seeing.