The title of the lesson for this particular week, "The Struggle to Be Real," caught my eye because I thought perhaps it would follow along the theme of a story that my children demanded over and again—the story of The Velveteen Rabbit.

Disappointingly, the lesson of the Quarterly moved in a decidedly different direction. The theme of the lesson is that "The human heart is deceptive by nature" (Jer. 17:9). Even at our best we sometimes deceive ourselves and others." The solution the lesson sees to finding an effect path to authenticity before God is a devotional encounter with God through Bible study, prayer, journaling, and accountability to others.

However important such devotional acts are, they have little to do with the text of John. Those who fail to grasp the truth about Jesus in the Gospel of John are overwhelmingly those who lead an impeccable devotional life. The world of darkness Jesus enters in the story of John is not humanity at large, but precisely those who are Jesus’ own people. They are, that is to say, the kind of people who write Sabbath School Lessons and study them faithfully.

If there is one lesson we should get straight right from the beginning it is that being real is not a matter of struggling to be more real. According to the Bible, we are real by the very fact that God created us as children who share the divine identity. The sin of human beings is seldom an outright rebellion against God. If God truly loves us and seeks our best interest, then how could we knowingly rebel against being loved and fulfilled?

Karl Rahner comes closer to the truth when he suggests that sin is an incomprehensible no to God as the ground of our own being. In simple words, if being real means being made in the very image of God, then any denial of God is an incomprehensible denial of our own being. If we are to make any headway in understanding the incomprehensible power of sin, then this is the direction we must look.

I have gotten a bit ahead of both the text of John and the story of The Velveteen Rabbit. Let me begin with the story of The Velveteen Rabbit and then I will tie it into this week’s lesson from John 4:43–54.

In this story by Margery Williams, the Velveteen Rabbit was made to feel quite inferior to the other toys that were mechanical and full of modern ideas or, as in the case of the wooden lion, made by the disabled soldiers and thus given the pretense of being connected with the government. Only the Skin Horse, who was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches, was kind to the Velveteen Rabbit at all.

One day, the Rabbit asked the Skin Horse, "What is Real?" "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn’t how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It is a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt."

"…Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because when you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand."

Change the Boy into God, and the Velveteen Rabbit into human beings, and mechanical gadgets into the everyday things we desire to escape our hurts and loneliness, and the Boy’s love into God’s love for us, and you have the basic idea behind John’s Gospel.

Read otherwise, the Gospel of John is puzzling to the point of the exacerbation. From beginning to the end of the book, those who seek any sort of miraculous sign of Jesus’ identity are condemned. Yet throughout the book, without fail, belief in Jesus follows a miraculous sign.

Even in this week’s story, the royal official from Capernaum who took Jesus at his word, that his son would live, is said to have believed in Jesus when he heard that his son’s fever left him at the exact time Jesus said to him, "Your son will live" (John 4: 53). And before we condemn Thomas for questioning Jesus’ resurrection, in the climatic story of John, we should remember that the other disciples believed because Jesus had appeared to them as they cowered behind locked doors for fear of the Jews (John 20:19).

So what is the answer to this conundrum—that it is an evil and perverse people who demand miracles and signs, and yet belief comes by miraculous signs? I am not a New Testament scholar, so I may have the story all wrong, but what strikes me about the Gospel of John is that the problem the Gospel addresses is not the need for miraculous signs to engender faith—there is, in fact, no other way for faith to exist. The problem lies elsewhere.

It lies in being so concerned about our rules—such as not carrying a mat on the Sabbath—that we fail to rejoice when a man takes up his mat and walks (John 5). It lies in seeking bread and fish, that is, our own desires and very real needs, without ever recognizing the one who has the power to answer our prayers. Oddly, rather than recognizing Jesus as king, we would make him king by force, which is to say we would make him a servant of our own needs and wants (John 6).

The problem is that we may see a miracle and believe that it has happened, but we are afraid to testify to its validity because we are afraid that the leaders of the church will disfellowship us (John 9). Or it can even be that, like many of the rulers of Israel—like Pilate and even like Peter and all of the disciples except the beloved one—we can believe in Jesus’ ability to perform miracles and that he is who he claims to be, but we stand by and allow an innocent person to suffer at the hands of others because we are afraid of suffering judgment ourselves (John 18, 19).

There is no easy solution to our blindness of failing to see what is really real. We all desire miracles, but this side of the kingdom all earthly miracles fail us, for in the end we all suffer the pain and loss of death, regardless of how many miracles we witness. The stories of Lazarus and of Jesus remind us of this.

What counts in life from John’s perspective is the reminder that even in this dark world Jesus came into the world as the light that enlightens every person who comes into the world (John 1:9). What counts is the reminder that Jesus judged no man, so we should stop judging by mere appearances, and thereby make a right judgment (John 7:24). What counts is the reminder that none of us is a mere man or woman, but we are gods to whom the word of God has been given (John 10:35).

Such belief does not come easy. It comes only as the answer to Jesus’ prayer "that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you" (John 17:20). Ultimately, we become real only by this miraculous sign, that by the love of the Father through the Son, we come to know that we are all brothers and sisters of Jesus, and thereby sons and daughters of God (John 20:17). Nothing but the experience of this love makes one real.

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