believe in Jesus

What does it mean to believe in Jesus? In this week’s readings from the eighth chapter of the Gospel According to John (NABRE), Jesus talks to the Jews who believed in him about freedom. This passage contains a fascinating suggestion about what it means to believe in Jesus.

In a previous column, we examined the three different past tenses of Greek verbs and their aspects. In the Gospel According to John 8:31 (NABRE), the phrase “those Jews who believed in him” uses the perfect tense, which represents a completed past action that continues into the present time.

The grammatical implication of this passage is that believing Jesus is not  something that occurs a single time but rather is a continuous action that we must keep doing over and over. Do you believe today as much as you did when you first believed?

related topics: belief; faith; justification; light; little faith

you also may like our study of the Gospel According to John
The Gospel According to John: An Encounter with Grace & Truth, a 25-lesson Catholic Bible study with an imprimatur, examines the Fourth Gospel’s view of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, with special emphasis on the institution of the sacraments of the Church as the means by which Christians are purified and made holy. This recently revised study includes maps and additional commentary, and takes a closer look at the way in which Jesus relates to individual men and women. Click on the book’s cover to view a sample lesson.

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