“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.” (John 3:17, Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent)
It’s strange, isn’t it, how people fix their attention on some things and not others? Have you ever seen someone holding up this sign [John 3:17] at a football game?…Me neither. It’s always the verse right before, John 3:16. Let me read you N.T. Wright’s translation of both of them together: “This, you see, is how much God loved the world: enough to give his only, special son, so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age. After all, God didn’t send the son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved by him.”
“This, you see, is how much God loved the world…” Remember how the Gospel of John started: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” John today is emphasizing both the degree to which God loves the world and the God expresses that love. God doesn’t “condemn” the world… God doesn’t “tolerate” the world…God loves the world—loves the world so much that God sent the Eternal Word, through whom everything that is came into being, into the world as one of us.
“So that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.” It’s sad and tragic, really, that so often when people use John 3:16 today as the epitome of Christian faith, as the one verse to broadcast to the world at major events, they seem to have a simplistic misunderstanding to Nicodemus when he was talking with Jesus. “You must be born from above,” Jesus said, and Nicodemus, not understanding, asks, “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus says again, “You must be born from above.” The Greek word is anothen, ἄνωθεν, which means ‘from above’ or ‘from top to bottom.’ The same word is used in the Good Friday readings saying that the veil of the temple that separated us from the Holy Presence of God was torn, ‘from top to bottom,’ from above. You have got to be born from above, from the top down, from top to bottom—completely renewed. Jesus is telling Nicodemus that to see the Kingdom of God requires a complete change in his way of life—a renewal to what it should be…a complete renovation…a return to a child-like way of trusting in God only and completely, and not in ourselves.
“So that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.” Everyone who believes in him…You know how, in The Princess Bride, Vizzini keeps using the word “inconceivable” and finally Inago turns to him and says, “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means?” I feel that saying that all the time when Christians use “belief,” and this John 3:16 verse, like a hammer. It seems that some Christians understand “faith” or “believing in Jesus” to be simply what you do with your mind. In John’s Gospel, believing and doing are inseparable. Being born from above and believing in Jesus are not so much something you do with your mind but something you do with your heart, and your life—all of it. To believe in Jesus is to have such complete trust and reliance that you live partly in God’s new age even now.
“After all, God didn’t send the son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved by him.” In talking to Nicodemus, Jesus refers to Moses lifting up the serpent—this is an ancient story in which the Israelites were being killed by snakes, and Moses made a bronze snake and put it on a pole. Those who were bitten would look up at that snake and know God’s protection and would not die. The analogy Jesus makes is that just as that serpent was lifted up on the pole so that people could see and be saved, Jesus himself would be lifted up on the Cross so all could see, and believe, and have changed, reborn lives, and be saved.
There are several ways to think about this saving work of Jesus, lifted on the Cross for us, and in our culture we have unfortunately fixated on just one—the one called “penal substitutionary atonement.” We give that way of thinking all our attention, thinking that it by itself gives us a full and complete understanding of the mystery of Salvation by Grace alone. The variations of penal substitutionary atonement go something like this: “The sin of humanity was so great that only God could make up for it… It took an infinite amount of good being sacrificed to tip the scales in our favor so God could forgive us…God had to give the devil his due and pay our ransom…”
Instead of that way of thinking, I offer this, which is much more in the spirit of today’s reading from John: God didn’t sacrifice Jesus to take out God’s rage and anger on Jesus rather than on us—The Lamb of God is not offered to God as our substitute, but the Lamb of God is God’s own self offered to us, reconciling us and the world to God, exposing our idolatrous system that promises order, safety, peace, and protection through violence. The Crucifixion should reorient us from a transactional theology of retributive justice and blood atonement and payment, to a theology of sacrificial love.
If we insist that God’s economy is like ours, then the crucifixion must be transactional. We racked up a big debt of sin that we can’t pay off. Jesus—who as God’s Son is sinless and the perfect sacrifice—is the only one who can provide a payment big enough. But God’s economy is not the same as ours, and it is not transactional. God loves us—God has loved us from the beginning, God loves us now, and God will always love us, forever. What God wants is for us—for all of creation—to be in a loving relationship back with God (and with each other). Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are an affirmation of God’s radical love towards us—the ultimate message from God, face-to-face, in person, that cannot possibly be misconstrued: power, force, coercion, retribution, and violence are not the ways of our loving God. God, in Jesus, acts in love and forgiveness and sacrifice, even to those who killed him on the cross—even to us—and shows that the ultimate victory is found in God’s love, victory even over death.
On the Cross, the world is transformed, and us with it; God’s way is the way of love for your enemies, the way of praying for those who persecute you and forgiving them—God showed us that, once and for all, in Jesus, on the Cross. The ancient story that began with selfish disobedience in the Garden of Eden, continued with the brutal murder of one brother by another, and then, on and on, with tribe battling tribe, with division and blame and hatred and greed and fear and retribution, came to its logical and final conclusion—we finally succeeded not just in killing each other, but even in killing God. God didn’t require Jesus’ death—we did.
But there is another side to that story: In the Garden, when Adam and Eve had turned from God and were hiding, God came searching them out; the mark of Cain was given to him not to mark him as condemned, but to protect him, showing that God’s love was still with him. In all of the history of Israel, God was faithful, God’s lovingkindness and mercy never-failing, even when Israel was unfaithful. So it is, finally, absolutely, with the cross—in the Cross—on the Cross, Jesus doesn’t save us from God—Jesus shows us God. On the cross, Jesus—Emmanuel—God With Us—shows us a God of love and forgiveness, a God whose nature is love in such fullness that Love is even willing to sacrifice itself to prove to us what we refuse to understand. And, on Easter Day, Love shows us a God of such power that even death can’t win—only Love wins. That’s the final message of the cross, the message we’ll hear and sing with two dozen Alleluias! on Easter Day—only love wins.
“This, you see, is how much God loved the world: enough to give his only, special son, so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age. After all, God didn’t send the son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved by him.” Look at Jesus on the Cross, know his love and forgiveness, be born from above, and be saved.
