To believe in God requires faith, and that faith is a gift from God.
Faith is God’s gift to us, and with faith, we respond to God’s call to be His People.
So to be a Christian is certainly a higher calling and it is a call to be like Jesus Christ.
To be like Jesus is to follow His way of love, which is essentially the way of the Cross.
In the gospel, we see that the way of Jesus is indeed a difficult and challenging way.
When the people of the Samaritan town would not receive Jesus, His disciples wanted to retaliate.
His disciples, James and John, want to call down fire from heaven to burn up the Samaritans of that town in order to punish them.
But Jesus turned and rebuked them and they went off to another village.
Jesus had taught about love, to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us and to bless those who curse us.
It would be easier to love those who love us and do good to those who are good to us.
But the call to be a Christian is a higher calling to live and love like Jesus, a calling that is above the ways of the world.
Let us ask Jesus for His blessings so that we will be faithful to our Christian calling and to be witnesses of His love and forgiveness.