Romans 4.1-5, 13-17; John 3.14-21
Life for you begun in the love of God—life that is deep, lasting, and endless—is at the heart of today’s gospel reading. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. God so loved the world.
This is the first explicit mention of God’s love in the Gospel of John, something that John emphasizes more than any of the other gospels. Yet it is remarkable that Jesus says anything about God’s love for the world because in other places in John’s writings we hear how the world is the source of unbelief and darkness—humanity estranged from God, then and now. The world is opposed to Jesus, opposed to his mission and ministry, even opposed to his followers in the church.
At one point Jesus says to his disciples, “If the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you.” That isn’t much comfort for those of us who follow Jesus. Yet the God who created the world out of love and delight refuses to give up on that world, or on us as people created in the divine image. “The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever,” says one of the psalms. And that is great comfort. “We are forgiven,” says Robert Farrar Capon, “not because we have made ourselves forgivable or even because we have faith; we are forgiven solely because there is a Forgiver.” We could rephrase that today and say, “We are loved not because we have made ourselves lovely but because we have a God who loves us.” And that love is seen fully in Jesus. Or as one of John’s New Testament letters says, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and gave his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” Yet John 3.16 is more than just a popular slogan. It is the ultimate expression of God’s character; the reason Jesus the Son was given and sent to the world: Divine Love. And God’s love meets us at the point of our need and brokenness, not our perfection. Jesus illustrates this in another place in the gospels when he says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” Healing, forgiveness, acceptance—the cross is where God the Father and God the Son work together, united in love and purpose to give the deep lasting life that we need in the very core of our being, life born of the Spirit.
And this love of God in, and for, our lives doesn’t depend on how good we are but comes to us even when we are at our worst. God’s love is for us not only on the days we are feeling particularly lovely, but also our bad; not to condemn, as Jesus makes clear today, but to save and rescue. The medieval theologian, St Anselm, said the world and we who are in it are like diamonds that have fallen into mud and muck. Created in the image of God, our original beauty is obscured by sin. Loveliness may be in short supply both in the world and in our lives, but that doesn’t mean we are unloved. Out of a desire to restore the beauty of creation and make things right, God comes down into the muck of sin and death in Jesus, brings the diamonds up, and restores their brilliance.
And there is so much muck. The Litany of Penitence on Ash Wednesday named pride, impatience, and the wrongs we have done—including indifference to the needs of others and contempt for them—as being among the many things that threaten to weigh us down and sink us. The Great Litany sung at the beginning of worship last week prayed that we would be delivered by God from violence and battle. Lent names the mud and muck of our lives.
Anselm calls the collective burden of all this the “weight of sin.” And this weight exceeds the sum total of our transgressions and omissions, the things we have done wrong or the good we have failed to do. Sin isn’t merely a line item in the Divine Bookkeeper’s ledger, a debt that can be paid off by personal resolve to do better or by restitution that balances the scales of justice. Sin is deeper than that. Sin (capital S, singular) is the ongoing condition of being alienated from God; sins (lower case, plural) are the symptoms of that deeper problem. Sins are more like bad fruit that comes from a blighted tree. Healing an infection, not just pruning away bad fruit, is what is needed; a physician for the sin-sick soul.
And neither the specific sins that we commit nor our deeper alienation from God has a place in God’s kingdom. But we who are created in God’s image do. We are not left in the muck and mire or sunk by the weight of sin. We are given a place in God’s kingdom through the love and grace of Jesus Christ. In today’s second reading, St Paul invites us to trust the One who justifies the ungodly, sets right the lives of sinners, and even gives life to the dead. Later in Romans Paul says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Still later he adds, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Paul echoes Jesus himself in today’s gospel, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved.”
This saving is at the heart of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in today’s gospel. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, Jewish, a believer. When Jesus speaks about “Moses [lifting] up the serpent in the wilderness,” he is calling to mind an Old Testament story that Nicodemus would have known. It is from the book of Numbers and takes place during the 40 years that Moses and the Israelites wandered in the wilderness. This is shortly after they had been rescued from slavery in Egypt. Yet instead of being grateful for God’s gift of freedom and life, the people rebelled against God—the infection of Sin seen in the symptom of rebellion. As a result, we read how poisonous serpents invade the wilderness camp and the people are dying.
God then asks Moses to take up a hobby, metalwork, and make an antidote of sorts to rescue and save the people; to cast a serpent of bronze, put it on a pole, and hold it up for everyone to see. Anyone who looks at that serpent-on-a-pole will live. That’s an unusual remedy, you must agree. Whether it would receive endorsement from the Department of Health and Human Services isn’t the scripture’s point. Jesus uses this story as a picture-perfect illustration of how God comes to the world and everyone in it. The world is snake-bit and diseased by Sin. Jesus himself, lifted up on the cross, is healing and life-giving. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent, so must the Son of Man be lifted up…God so loved the world.”
When we look at Jesus on the cross, we see the effects of sin, death, and evil that infects the world and each person in it. Yet more than that, we see what God has done about it. God’s passion for us and for the world is so steadfast and resolute that God gives the Son to the world in love, not to condemn but to save. It is as if God were saying in Jesus, ‘I will not give up on my people, unlovely as they can be, but will love them with my very heart.’
The cross is an act of love; it is what God does for you. God gives Jesus the Son in love for you, not leaving you to yourself but coming to you in your life, as it is, to lift you up in forgiveness, healing and hope. He is the physician for your sin-sick soul; and the Eucharist, where he gives himself to you in bread and wine is, St Ignatius says, “the medicine of immortality.” In the cross you are saved from the guilt of what you have done in the past and the shame of what might have been done to you; you are lifted up from the muck and mire that today weighs you down; even delivered from tomorrow’s headlines, whatever they might be.
To entrust yourself to the love of God is, as Jesus says today, to receive life that is endless—not just a future life beyond the grave and gate of death, though that is part of it; but a deep, lasting life begun today that, like the current of a river, bears us up now and carries us into our future with God. And it is received simply in the trusting, for “everyone who believes in him.” God the giver, Jesus the gift, with the Spirit now giving life meant for every single person— life that is deep, lasting, and endless—a new birth all over again that begins now and continues into our own great future with God. “God so loved the world.”
Write a comment: