Lent 4, Year B | John 3:14-21
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 10, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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One thing we know for certain about the author of John’s Gospel is that they loved wordplay. The characters are constantly misinterpreting one another. It happened during the cleansing of the Temple in the previous chapter,[1] and it’s already occurred in this conversation between Jesus and a Judean elder named Nicodemus. Only a few verses before our reading starts, Nicodemus, who seems to be genuinely curious about this new teacher from the backwaters of Galilee, thought Jesus had been talking about being “born again” while his phrasing indicated something more along the lines of being “born from above” or “from within.”[2] There’s also a good bit of exchange between the objective and volitional “no” throughout this passage—the idea of “can’t” versus “won’t”—which the original audience may have caught but often slips past us as modern readers.[3]
We join the scene at what appears to be a pivotal point in the discussion—and the start of some extremely popular Bible verses. Immediately after Jesus references the need for the Son of Man to be lifted up like Moses lifted the snake in today’s Hebrew Bible reading,[4] we run into a conflation of some of the most religiously-charged words in our language: belief, salvation, eternal life, etc. Unfortunately, much like John’s characters misunderstanding one another, I find that we frequently misinterpret what these terms mean, leading to mistaken assumptions about what the Bible actually says. So this morning we’re going to work our way through a few of them in hope that we can begin to hear Jesus a little more clearly. We’ll start with verse 15 and his reasoning for why “the Son of Man [must] be lifted up:” “that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”[5]
I sometimes feel like I address this too frequently, but at the same time, I don’t know that we can emphasize it enough: to “believe” is not to assent to or agree with someone else’s assertion. That’s what the word means today, but when the Bible was first translated into English, to “be-lief” was to swear fealty—to pledge allegiance. This is one of those cases where we kept the term but lost the meaning, leading to generations of confusion where magical thinking and even delusion masquerade as viable religious practice. So let’s be clear: God doesn’t particularly care about your opinions or what you think; God cares about how you live and to whom you are being faithful.
“Eternal life” is another troublesome phrase. “Life” here isn’t limited to the idea of simply not being dead. It appears to function something along the lines of “qi” or “ki” in Eastern health and philosophical practices. It’s more along the lines of what we might term Vitality—an energy that not only keeps something from dying but goes far beyond, empowering us not simply to exist but to act and think and love and feel—to experience the fulness of what it truly means to be alive. It’s the sort of underlying power that overflows in youth and continues to move and direct us throughout our lives. It empowers the individual self but is something that exists beyond and apart from any one living being. It’s the kind of “life” that keeps finding a way, taking root and continuing to grow, adapt, and even thrive, no matter how harsh or seemingly impossible the conditions might be.
“Eternal” also doesn’t carry quite the same meaning that we read onto it. An “eternal” item may very well endure through time, the way we think of something being “everlasting,” like the Hebrew Bible frequently describes God’s covenants. But that lengthy existence has less to do with planned or expected longevity and more to do with the original quality; the duration is simply a byproduct of how well-built the item is. Think of an old car or other equipment from the early 20th Century. With proper maintenance and care, those machines can still perform the same jobs today as they did more than 100 years ago. The people who created them weren’t necessarily planning for their products to exist forever. They were simply trying to make something that would maintain value by accomplishing its job reliably. The object’s endurance comes from the care they put into designing and manufacturing the thing so well in the first place.
“Eternal life” then becomes something greater than an individual being or personality’s continuing individual existence. This “life” endures not out of some measure of self-perpetuation but because of the depth and quality it brings with it in the first place. I like to think of it along the lines of “boundless vitality”—an energy so powerful and beautiful and bewildering that it continues to move and flow and even grow no matter how much someone might draw from it. The Son of Man needs to be lifted up “so each being faithful to him might have [this] boundless vitality.”
The next verse might just be the most famous in the Bible: “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.”[6] Again we see that belief/faithfulness and boundless vitality/eternal life, but here we need to address a few other terms.
We would expect the word we see as “love” here to be “agape,” and it is. We often think of agape as “unconditional love,” but like life and eternity, there’s more to it than that. This kind of love isn’t necessarily something you feel for someone else. It’s something you do for them. It’s “goodness” or “usefulness” turned into a verb. This is the kind of love Jesus tells us to have for our enemies; we may never like those opposing us, but we can always continue to be kind and respectful and attempt to provide for the other person’s good. It’s the kind of love that the Apostle John tells us God is:[7] the basis of God’s existence within our reality—a love that gives and seeks out the best for the other at all times and under all conditions, a love wherein God’s presence manifests.
The object of God’s agape is “the world,” which is less of a reference to our planet—although God does indeed care for and about Creation—and more of the idea of human society in general. The same society we so frequently fear—the “others;” the people and ideas and cultures and practices that we find strange or confusing or even unsettling—this is exactly for what or whom God actively does good in hope that it might not “perish.”
“Perish” is unusual here not necessarily because we misunderstand the term but because of how the action is taking place. The way this verb is structured, the action isn’t external; this is something happening either to or for the sake of the one performing the action. So this “perishing” doesn’t refer to some sort of outside power causing harm. It isn’t something that’s happening to a person through an external source, like time eating away at an individual’s vitality. This is a self-focused act of destruction, a ruining or loss that both arises from and consumes the one doing it. The same is true of the condemnation referenced in verse 18. Both the perishing and the condemning here are self-initiated and self-focused efforts.
Returning to Jesus’ original statement, we now see the Son of Man lifted up “so each being faithful to him might have boundless vitality. Indeed God has such active devotion toward human society that he gave his one-of-a-kind son so that each who is faithful to him won’t destroy themself but have boundless vitality.”[8]
Enter what might be our most misunderstood word of all: “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.”[9] If you’ve been in the church for any length of time, you’ve probably heard some describe the concept of “salvation” as being rescued or delivered from a hopeless situation, which is the way we tend to use the English term. But we also “save” an item for later use or, jumping back to our earlier example, “save” an old car from the scrap heap. But no one who “rescues” an old car plans to bring it home just to let it rust away to powder. The car isn’t really “saved” until it’s restored.
This goes back to the concept behind “eternal.” A car might have been really high quality and built to last, but without proper care and maintenance, it’s going to break down or fall apart long before it actually can’t continue to work. However, if the right person takes an interest in that old car, they’ll begin to put money and effort into fixing it up. With a lot of hard work—pounding out dents, replacing rusted out parts, turning and scrubbing and painting and polishing—they can restore the vehicle not simply to working condition but to its original color, style, and beauty. That’s the sort of thing the Bible is talking about with “salvation.” It isn’t simply grabbing someone out of the jaws of danger but the process and care and wonder of restoring them to their full humanity, pounding and sanding and retrofitting until the Image of God shines as clearly in their life as it did on the sixth day of Creation.
Going back one last time we read, “just as Moses lifted the snake in the wild, the son of man must be lifted in the same way so that each being faithful to him might have boundless vitality. Indeed, God has such active devotion toward human society that he gave his one-of-a-kind son so that each who is faithful to him won’t destroy themself but have boundless vitality. Indeed, God didn’t send the son into human society so that he might condemn that society but so that through him human society might be restored. One being faithful to him doesn’t condemn themself, but one who refuses to be faithful has already condemned themself because they have refused to be faithful to the name of God’s one-of-a-kind son.”
Time prevents us from continuing.
So having gone through all that, what exactly is the point? What can we take away from this and begin to use in our lives?
First, we need to recognize that God’s interaction with humanity contains far more significance than we’ve been led to expect. God doesn’t simply offer us the reward of approval or rescue or perpetual existence in exchange for some sort of mental agreement with what people tells us the Bible says. God’s gifts are on an entirely different level than we’ve ever imagined. The love is more comprehensive. The “life” is of completely different quality. The “salvation” isn’t a sort of pulling something disgusting out of the trash but a continuing labor of restoration to the wonder of the life God had given us in the first place. And God hasn’t condemned everyone and everything to some sort of cosmic dump. God loves humanity enough to save us not simply from the power and influence of Satan or Hell but from our own inborn, other- and self-destructive tendencies. And all God asks is that we turn, that we become faithful to who we really are, children of God restored for divine purpose, and that we offer this path of restoration to each and every person willing to receive it, that we reflect our maker not with condemnation and judgment but with God’s own continuing and active devotion to humanity itself.
[1] Jesus enters “the Temple,” but the later argument is over “this shrine.”
[2] John 3:3-4 | There might also be some regional teasing going on here with Jesus saying you needed to be “born in the north” (Galilee) to really encounter God.
[3] I suspect that some of Jesus’ more awkward or evasive responses in this conversation might also be the result of wordplay, but that level of translation is beyond my skill.
[4] Numbers 21:4-9
[5] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[6] John 3:16
[7] I John 4:8 & 16
[8] John 3:15-16 | my translation
[9] John 3:17