If I were to say three numbers, “3:16,” what would you say?
Wow! Some of you didn’t even say “John 3:16,” you just started quoting the verse: “For God so loved the world . . . “
If there is one Bible verse both locked down and totally lapsed Christians might know, it is John 3:16.
Thank you, Tim Tebow.
John 3:16 is held up at half –time in sports arenas. It is flashed on cardboard placards on freeway off-ramps. Tim Tebow found a creative new place to assert John 3:16 when he scraped out the three numbers in the black-out smears he made on his cheekbones before every one of his college football games.
We all know John 3:16.
But let me try again. Who can tell me John 3:15? Or John 3:17? Or John 3:14? Or 3:18?
If you can, you are the exceptions that prove the rule. You are a minuscule minority. If you don’t know, it is not because your faith is fainthearted. Not because your Sunday school failed you. Not because of any form of faithlessness. If you don’t know what John 3:15 or John 3:17 say, it is because of a common disease that has affected many Christians. It is a malady perhaps best described as “versitis.”
No, I didn’t say “bursitis.” I said “versitis.”
Anyone remember “sword drills” in Sunday school? Or did you ever earn “jewels in your crown” in Awana classes? If so, then you have a good number of Bible verses committed to memory. Both “sword drills” and Awana prizes reward children for committing Bible verses to memory. But knowing individual Bible verses, as helpful, hopeful, and healing as they might be, does not mean that you know the Bible, the story of the scriptures. The whole story. The big story. The back story. Both the huge moments and the hidden asides. All of the components of God’s story are necessary in order to comprehend the whole, unfolding drama of the divine words and work that are found in scripture.
But because of our “versitis,” the Bible is too often, not “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” but THE GREATEST STORY NEVER told. Or THE GREATEST STORY HALF TOLD.
That’s why we forget, if we ever knew, that the great revelation of John 3:16 is part of the private, then more public discussion Jesus has with Nicodemus. In John’s gospel Jesus, at the very beginning of his public ministry, is approached at night, in secret, by Nicodemus, a respected and powerful member of the Jewish religious authorities. Nicodemus comes to Jesus, convinced that Jesus is “from God” because of all the wondrous “signs” he has witnessed him doing. Nicodemus believes Jesus is some sort of a prophet, a powerful messenger from God, because of the remarkable and miraculous healings and exorcisms Jesus has produced.
John’s presentation of Nicodemus here, and his later appearances in the gospel, all strongly suggest that he was probably a member of the Sanhedrin, the assembly of the most influential and powerful authorities among the Jewish religious hierarchy. In other words, Nicodemus would be on the “Top 70 Most Influential Jewish Leaders” of his day.
Yet Jesus’ first words back to Nicodemus are more than challenging. They are strikingly strange. Just before the verse we all know, Jesus insists that Nicodemus’ sign-driven faith is not enough. Instead that influential leader must give up all his identity which is based in position and authority in order to be born again “of water and the spirit.” Strange words and a strange directive to one who seemingly had as much to offer Jesus as Jesus had to offer him.
Jesus’ first challenge to Nicodemus only set the stage for the second, even more astonishing message that Jesus was about to reveal. Nicodemus, and all of humanity, needed to enter into a new relationship with God, a new spiritual “birth,” in order to become a part of God’s tremendous, unprecedented new work in this cosmos:
For 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.
Nicodemus’ problem was that his fledgling faith was fact based on faith based. It was based on his witness of the “signs” Jesus had done among the people. In other words, Nicodemus was saying to Jesus in effect, “If you prove yourself I’ll believe in you.”
Jesus’ next challenge to Nicodemus is his challenge to all future generations and his challenge to us this morning. Are you ready to be challenged? Are you ready to be confronted? Here it is: Jesus himself is the ultimate “sign.” Jesus himself is God’s greatest “sign” to this world. Jesus himself is the greatest “sign” of divine love and the possibility of divine forgiveness.
How many Nicodemites are there in every corner of Christianity whose versitis has caused them to be more committed to the words than they are committed to the Word Made Flesh? How many Nicodemites are there among us who are more committed to the religion of the word, and have made a religion of the word, than faith in the Word-Made-Flesh? This is why Nicodemus had such a hard time understanding what Jesus was talking about. "You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and do you not understand these things?”
“Emmanuel” means “God with us.” In fact, “with” is God’s middle name, according to Minnesotan Teri Hyrkas. Jesus’ simple presence on earth, the greatest transformational truth. Jesus’ “withness” is the greatest witness of God’s love for and God’s hug of this world.
There is a worldwide “Free Hug” movement that is wonderful to behold. College students and other young adults go to city courtyards and village squares around the world and hold up signs offering “Free Hugs” in the language of the culture they are in. Sometimes they video what happens when they offer “Free Hugs” to people, and how difficult it is for some people to receive a “Free Hug.” Here is my favorite “Free Hugs” video from Sondrio, Italy. [If you can find any way to show this three minute video clip, you will not be sorry. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hN8CKwdosjE – (note: Sometimes youtube.com shows objectionable content after the video linking to unrelated videos. You may wish to stop the video a few seconds before the end.)
For God so . . . . . . [people will complete your sentence and say “LOVED THE WORLD.” Try again]
For God so . . . . . [people will again complete your sentence like they did before. Try again]
For God so . . . . [this time say loudly “For God So HUGGED The World.]
If God can “SO HUG” this world, why can’t we?
If God can “SO LOVE” this world, why can’t we?
How strange it is that we take it as a sign of maturity, or sophistication, or learning, when we let the complexities of life suck all the simple joy out of our first loves. First loves are simple and sweet.
Discovering a talent for taking apart and putting back together mechanical things.
Delighting in measuring and mixing, cooking and creating in the kitchen.
Finding the magical nature of numbers and equations.
Being transported by the beauty of art or the sounds of music.
All those “first loves” are special, yet simple.
Later, when we’ve studied mechanical design or chemical engineering, mastered culinary skills, wrestled reality into numerical logic systems, or acquired technical skills in art or music, we may still have great passion for a chosen field. But it is a love complicated by complexity, nuanced by knowledge. The simplicity of our “first love” is over-ridden by all the knowledge and skills we have worked so hard to glean and gather.
It is the same with our faith. If you were lucky enough to be raised in a family of faith, if you were fortunate enough to be home-schooled in Christianity, one of the first lessons you learned as a child was, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Simple statement. Simple love.
Then we start messing around with it. We decide to rationalize our faith and see if it meets the canons of reason and science. Like Nicodemus, we decide to look for specific “signs” that “prove” divinity, that “prove” God’s existence and existential concern for us, that “prove” divine purpose and design. We analyze texts and study historical content. We compare competing theological concepts. The story of the church, or a moment in history, or the development of a denomination, or religious politics and policies, become the focus for our faith and the structure of our spirit.
In other words, we become mesmerized by the “signs” and science and forget our “first love.” We lose ourselves in the complex rather than get “lost in wonder, love and praise” of the simple.
Did you ever hear the story about the plight of the centipede? It’s the best warning I know about the “paralysis of analysis,” and the dangers of a Nicodemite theological sophistication. The centipede, this insect with 100 legs, has no problem walking until you ask him how he does it. Then when the centipede starts thinking about putting down one foot in front of the other 99, it is immobilized. It can’t move.
Or in the words of any old ditty about the caterpillar:
A caterpillar in the sun
Was happy, till a toad begun
To ask, ‘Which leg comes after which?’
And left her wallowing in a ditch
Considering how to run.
No one should take delight in leaving anyone in the ditch, laughing when their legs wave helplessly in the air. We must help people move beyond complexity to rediscover the simplicity of faith that trusts in God while never ceasing to explore the complexities of truth in a theology that grows richer and more profound the deeper it goes.
3:16 reminds us that after we have studied and struggled, pried at our doubts, prayed on our knees, that no matter how complicated and convoluted the challenges that face us there is still a simple and unshakeable truth. Beyond all our rationalities and irrationalities, beyond all the validating proofs and evidences, there remains, on the other side of complexity, a child-like simplicity: “For God so loved . . . .”
You might even call this simplicity on the other side of complexity a simplexity. The simplexity of faith is this . . . can we say it together . . . . “For 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.”
COMMENTARY
Throughout John’ gospel, familiar Jewish themes and traditions are given surprising spins as they are reframed by an author who stands on the other side of the resurrection event. For example, John’s prologue presents the Genesis creation story, but transforms the very nature of divine creativity by asserting that “In the beginning was the Word.”
In this week’s gospel reading John takes a well-known miraculous scene from Israel’s past, the healing of those Israelites bitten during a plague of snakes (Numbers 21:4-9). The bronze serpent Moses lifted up on a pole brought healing and new life to all those in the camp who looked upon it. The snake, the very symbol of punishment and death, was transformed into a life-restoring force for those who witnessed it.
Now John takes that familiar image and presents it to Nicodemus and to his readers in a new context. John’s assertion is that just as the serpent was “lifted up” (“hypsoo”) “so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” In John the Greek “hypsoo” always denotes both a physical lifting and a spiritual exaltation (John 8:28; 12:32, 34), even as it does here in its first usage.
It is hard for twenty-first century readers to hear John 3:14-16 with the same ears as first century Jews and Jewish Christians. For us the serpent on the stick is a strange, even bizarre image, taken from a rarely read book of Old Testament scripture. But for Jesus’ listeners and John’s first readers, the startling and strange text here is that prefaces the most familiar and beloved passage of the church: “For 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.”
The declaration of 3:16 makes it clear that this “Son of Man” who must be “lifted up” is the same as the “only Son” of God, and in John’s gospel John the Baptist has already identified Jesus as this “Son of God” (John 1:34). This astonishing “Son of Man” must be lifted up for a very specific reason: so that those who “believe in him shall have eternal life”(v.15). While the bronze serpent could only heal and restore the Israelites back to their physical life, the one who is son of man/ Son of God is lifted up so that the people may attain “eternal life” (“zoe aionios”) or “life in the age to come.” That this “eternal life” reaches beyond physicality is reinforced by the assertion in v.16 that believers “may not perish,” if they believe “in him.”
From the other side of the resurrection Jesus’ words are clear. His “lifting up” on the cross, his death and resurrection, crushed the power of death once and for all. But for first-century listeners, the divinely mandated restorative powers of a snake on a stick was far more comprehensible. For those listeners John 3:16 is full of unfamiliar ideas. A Jewish audience would feel comfortable with the notion that as God’s chosen people they were recipients of God’s love. But the assertion that God extended this divine love to “the world” or “the cosmos” in its entirety was strange and even unseemly.
Indeed, the rest of the world was viewed in terms of its wickedness and God’s righteous judgment upon that wickedness was celebrated. For John to now declare that God loves his world so completely, so wholly, so tenderly that the divine “gave his only Son” in order to offer all who believe “eternal life,” moves the motivation for the earthly presence of the Son from one of judgment to one of salvation. This is one of the most significant theological shifts in the Jesus story. Saving the world from death, from “perishing,” not doling out judgment, is revealed as the impetus behind both the incarnation and the “lifting up” of the Son.
John’s text continues to examine this startling new mission. As if anticipating the objection, verse 17 blatantly denies that the Son’s incarnation was for the sake of judgment: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn (krino) the world.” While elsewhere Jesus does, indeed, speak of “judging” the world (9:39), the theological fact here is that the world already stood condemned by its wickedness long before the Son came “into the world.” While the day of reckoning had not yet occurred, the surety of condemnation was without question. It was only with the event of the incarnation that any doubt was raised about the world’s final judgment.
With the coming of the Son a new situation arises, a new choice is possible: “Those who believe in him are not condemned.” Those who choose not to believe “are already condemned,” as they continue as full participants in a broken, sinful world. Long before the official day of judgment the fate of those who refuse to believe is already sealed.
The final image John leaves with his listeners in today’s text challenges them to stop looking at the world as divided into any established set of “haves” and “have nots,” and instead to look at the differences between “light and darkness.” Back in his prologue John clearly asserted that at creation it was the Word that brought “light” and “life” to all divine creativity (1:4-5). With the incarnation the light now comes fully “into the world” (v.19). Yet while the presence of this incarnated light, this Son of Man/Son of God, is welcomed by some, many choose the darkness over the light. For those who remain in the darkness, the shadows hide their evil deeds from being exposed by the light.
But for those who choose “what is true,” that is, those who act faithfully and believe, the light holds no fear of judgment. Those who live their lives, whose actions are done “through God,” “come to the light” so that these actions may be clearly seen by the world.
This final assertion holds a beam of light up to the opening lines of this entire section (John 3:1-21). It is Nicodemus, for all his interests and inquiries, who still chose to come and see Jesus “at night,” under cover of darkness.