While John 3:16 has become iconic, it has also become a distraction from the message Jesus shares about the love of God.
and freeing us to learn how to live
Lent 4B | John 3:14-21
What is love?
We’d all use similar words to describe the concept. We’d speak to adoration and devotion. Personal sacrifice. Attachment to another person. Even the vague notion of desire to be near them.
We would discuss the love between a couple. And of parents and children. It would turn to extended family and chosen family: friends, neighbors, church.
Of course, someone would remember that we’re in the middle of church so maybe we should also remember that we love God. I also have little doubt that we would also bend over backward to name how our non-Christian brothers and sisters know love, too. That love is a nearly universal language.
Expanding the definition of love
And we’d probably venture into the challenging territory of what we might call “tough love.” When somebody does something for us that feels painful, but is for our own good. Something like an intervention can come from a place of love, even as it causes distress.
Other examples are even harder to recognize as love, even as they come from that place of love for them. Like cutting someone off in the midst of addiction or ending a relationship for our own health.
This territory isn’t so cut-and-dry, is it? That first stuff is undeniably love. But this other stuff feels…different.
Perhaps because it is. I think we’re taking our love bucket and trying to make everything fit into it—rather than examine what parts aren’t about love. Like safety and health.
Rather than specifically interrogate the contents of our love buckets, what if we simply started from the originating sense of love? What if we consider as love what is undeniably love? It would mean that sometimes our actions aren’t the epitome of love. They are, at best, derivative of it.
The challenge of sacrificial love
This brings us to the challenge of that famous verse: John 3:16.
“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.”
Our ears pop out at that introductory phrase: “For God so loved the world”: don’t they? Here it is: the epitome of God’s desire for creation in a nutshell. Lay it on us, Jesus:
“…that he gave his only Son”
Wait a second…gave? This sounds oddly sacrificial.
“…so that everyone who believes in him…”
Wait, just the believers? I thought this was for the world.
“…may not perish but may have eternal life.”
At this point, our love radar is going crazy trying to understand what Jesus is talking about. Because we know how this story ends, and that doesn’t look like love. Jesus on a cross doesn’t look like love. Even the idea of sending your son into creation knowing he will die—that doesn’t feel anything like love.
We’re wandering into that challenging territory now, aren’t we? And there are people who live there and love to define love as the opposite of what it looks like on the surface. They like to talk about loving someone by hurting them. They like to say This hurts me more than it hurts you. But nobody’s buying it! They look pretty happy about it!
We’re all jumping to Good Friday and now we’re like, I guess that’s where it gets its name. Up is down. Death is Life. So I guess bad is good and hate is love.
Wow, have we jumped to a whole bunch of conclusions!
We constantly misread this verse because we’re assuming Jesus is talking about being the sacrificial lamb. And that his death is the whole of the story. It’s not. And we know that from reading the very next verse.
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
God’s love sent Jesus into the world to save it. And specifically not condemn it.
This is the move we ascribe to God: to save or else condemn. In part because Jesus himself referred to God as judge. So some people must go to the good place and some to the bad place. These are God’s only choices.
But Jesus totally undermines that arrangement we’re taking for granted. He says God has come, not to condemn, but to save. Period. The judging is about saving.
He goes even further by naming the condemning as self-imposed. God doesn’t need to condemn anybody because we’re all constantly condemning each other! Condemning to life tortured by poverty and fear.
It’s like we’re all sitting in the dark, lights off. No candles or TV going. Just sitting there. Oh, there’s power. It’s just we’re not flipping the switches. We’re not breaking out our phones and sharing flashlights. We’re sitting in the dark pretending like that is the only way. Like we actually like it this way.
Like causing pain to our neighbors is a form of love. And as if God loves us for it.
Freeing us to live
What if we stopped trying to make things make sense and just listened instead? What if we stopped treating this one verse like it summarizes a particular vision of the gospel? A vision that is cross-centric.
Instead, we listen
“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. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
And we return to those ideas of love that are without a doubt love. That evoke generosity and compassion and honesty and joy.
We take those things and we hear an entirely different message.
God loves us so much, that we could know true love through Jesus. And know it now. Remember, “eternal life” is in the present tense. Which means it is about now, not never-ending hypotheticals. So every time you see the phrase eternal life replace it with vibrant living.
God so loved the world that God gave us a way to truly live.
We don’t need to bend over backwards to make this make sense! We just have to shed the excuses we use to protect our precious present life. With its hierarchies and dysfunctions. And a love bucket so large it tries to rehab hate and gossip and meanness and even violence into full expressions of love.
Jesus comes to help us get rid of that junk and embrace his way of love. He simply invites us to flip the switch. The power’s on. We can.
Just flip it. And let there be light.