A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Lent 2A and 3A
The text: John 3:18-4:4
God’s love and God’s wrath
The famous line about God’s love for the world (3:16) is followed by the reminder that God doesn’t seek to condemn it (3:17). Which, let’s be honest, doesn’t sound much like what Nicodemus was asking about.
Jesus, it would seem, has left that nonsense behind as he dives into the nature of God’s love and wrath.
Jesus seems intent on splitting hairs we’d rather keep joined, however. God loves the world and doesn’t condemn the world, for it is already condemned. So the dispute, then, is actually focused on our part in the equation. It is either we who seek the love of God or it is we who seek his wrath.
Few of the Christians I’ve known actually want to dwell in this distinction. We’d rather focus on God’s blessing or condemnation. That is for God. And meanwhile, we are working here, toiling away at life, receiving our best life now or generously making a difference in the world.
Meanwhile, the grace of God is God and what we do is our business, thank you very much.
To this, God’s wrath is no more our doing than the height we grow to. Of course, this doesn’t seem Jesus’s point. But I’m also not sure many of us would ever get there. Not without also ascribing the problem of evil either to God or to us.
We are super reluctant to say that our agency and God’s are connected in this way.
John the Baptist Returns
The narrative of the story moves to Jesus and John the Baptist, both baptizing many people at the same time. The two remain theologically connected, as Jesus rises and John recedes. A shift that John still welcomes as part of his job.
This is certainly even more remarkable now than it was at the beginning, as John’s decline in influence should create more jealousy. If he weren’t so connected to the Kin-dom work. And he were more like us.
Then, after a little more about God’s love and wrath, we get Jesus’s response to his rise.
John 4
Chapter four begins with four verses we won’t read in church this week, but maybe we should.
“Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John’—although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized—he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria.”
John 4:1-4
Jesus’s relative “success” in “doing better” than John [Obviously our potential projection, right? But also, can we help it?] and his receiving that news sparks the return trip.
There’s something there, isn’t there? The evangelist offers it to us like it is obviously important. Yet it also feels like a math problem missing one of the factors required to solve it.
Perhaps there are actually two factors. One it offers (the disciples actually doing the baptizing—an idea that should not go unnoticed) and one it may imply. That the fame of Jesus is spreading to people who shouldn’t be hearing about him yet. Like, say, the powerful. So it is time to head back.
He obviously isn’t in a hurry, however. Since he’s taking them through Samaria…where he’ll lounge around a well and tell his disciples that they’ll be staying awhile…