“Again & Again, God Loves First”
Rev’d. Tanya Stormo Rasmussen
The Congregational Church of Hollis, U.C.C.
14 March, 2021
Lent 4B
Numbers 21:4-9
John 3:14-21
If you grew up going to Sunday School, or even if you didn’t but instead grew up watching football games on television and paid attention to the posters being waved in the end-zones, you probably can’t recall a time when you didn’t know what is perhaps the most famous Bible verse to twentieth-century America: “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.”
John 3:16 has been promoted as the ‘Gospel in Miniature’ or the ‘Good News in a Nutshell’. But like all proof texting—that practice of lifting a single verse or small passage out of its wider context in support of a particular doctrine or belief—there’s a dangerous agenda at work in it, one that aims to make God’s love and grace exclusive to those who conform to a particular interpretation without taking in the broader sweep of the surrounding context, never mind the whole library of the Bible. John 3:16 has been used as a blunt tool by some Christians to suggest that those of other faith traditions, regardless of how clearly they manifest a relationship with the God of love, are damned to “perish”—which is too often construed to mean destined for an eternity in hell—for their failure to accept our truth.
Like most of Scripture, the verse takes some unpacking. And in order to do that, we need to widen the lens to include more than just the one verse. In fact, it requires that we look at more than just the eight verses set out by the Revised Common Lectionary.
If you open your Bible and start at the first verse of John Chapter 3 instead of at verse 14, you’ll see that our lectionary passage is actually the second half of a longer conversation Jesus was having with Nicodemus, a religious scholar and—John tells us in verse one—“a leader of the Jews.” He came to Jesus at night, hoping to get answers.
The nighttime visit was both strategic and symbolic, as John presents it: Nicodemus isn’t as likely to be spotted at that late hour by others who might question his association with Jesus—who, remember from last week and John Chapter 2, had just made big waves and ticked off a lot of the powers-that-be by daring to protest the corruption in the Temple. So, strategically speaking, Nicodemus is playing it safe with his leadership status by not making his curiosity about Jesus’ identity and purpose public, or visible in the light of day.
If you flip back to Chapter 1, you’ll remember that John wrote this in his Prologue, as he introduced Jesus: “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”[1]
John loves poetic wordplay. For him, it’s not only Nicodemus’ desire to keep certain behaviors hidden from the world, it’s also the short-sightedness that night vision imposes that says something about the religious leader. Nicodemus was trying to hide, which was disclosive of his spiritual blindness. His behavior and what it reveals about his character becomes a symbolic representation of someone inviting their own condemnation by refusing to live in the light. “For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light,” John quotes Jesus saying to Nicodemus, “so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”[2] Jesus is both gently commending Nicodemus for coming to him, the light that shines in the darkness, but also challenging him to move out of the shadows as the religious leader opens his eyes to the truth, which will not allow him any longer to be a supporter or upholder of the status quo.
But I want to widen the lens a smidge, to the beginning of their conversation. Because when Nicodemus first approaches Jesus, he acknowledges that he’s recognized a few things: “Rabbi,” he says as he greets Jesus, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Jesus responds—I’m reading from the New Revised Standard Version—that “… [N]o one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”[3] (I’m making that clarification because this verse is another proof text that has been abused: Some translations have inaccurately rendered the Greek to read in English, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again”, and used it to privilege a particular religious experience—identifying a specific “born-again” moment of conversion—as a test of inclusion or exclusion from God’s saving love and grace.)
Nicodemus, confused, asks, “But how can anyone be born after having grown old? Can they re-enter their mother’s womb?”[4] But Jesus is talking about a spiritual rebirth, which he goes on to clarify by referring back to a story they both knew well. And here, we widen our lens to include the broadest scope of our faith story and Biblical narrative. Jesus refers to our first Scripture lesson, the story of the Israelites who were unhappy with their lot in the wilderness.
As Numbers 21 narrates the scene, the people had become impatient, complaining against God and against Moses: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”[5] Although daily manna represented faithful divine provision, and the assurance of “enough”—their needs were met; they were not truly lacking food, and they were safely under God’s watchful care—they wanted more. More than a predictable meal, they wanted choices. They wanted control.
In his fourth Strange New World “Understanding Easter” podcast, the Rev’d. Dr. Matthew Myer Boulton summarizes what happens next: “As if to manifest the poisonous, bitter, self-contradictory character of their complaints, God sends deadly serpents to slither among them, wreaking havoc. The people promptly and self-servingly confess and beg for help. And God instructs Moses to fashion a serpent out of bronze, and lift it up on a pole so that any bitten Israelite can look up at the serpent of bronze and live.”
Where have we heard about a death-dealing serpent before? That’s right: in the very opening chapters of our faith narrative, when the serpent deceives the man and the woman, tempting them with power and control that put them in direct conflict with God’s intentions for their life together. God had designed the world with love, entrusting humankind with the privilege of partnering with God in nurturing creation. But God also knew the limitations of the human mind, which is not on par with God’s own understanding. As if to prove our limitations, the story of Adam and Eve tells how humanity, almost from our very beginning, attempts to seize more than we can grasp, coveting equal power with God more fervently than we pursue loving relationship with God. And then, we attempt to shift the blame and responsibility from ourselves, refusing to acknowledge or look squarely at the source of our pain. Thus, we are exiled from the Garden of Eden, or God’s intentions for our life together, and into a spiritual wilderness.
So, there are the Israelites in their wilderness. Freed from their humiliation and bondage as Egyptian slaves, God’s invitation was for them also to experience liberation from their bondage to the worldly ways of sin that lead to death. But they refuse to look at behaviors they’d rather hide, as though their ability to observe truth only extended as far as it might under a night sky. They cannot see their own poisonous, bitter, self-destructive behavior for what it is, as they argue with each other and complain against God. Their longing for control, their covetousness of power and material goods makes them miserable; it poisons their ability to see and appreciate all they have, and diminishes their capacity to care and to share with others according to God’s design and instructions for a blessed life.
But God’s love for them is not deterred by their willfulness and insistence on their own way. From the beginning of time, serpents (or snakes) have been among humanity’s most feared and reviled creatures. The fear of them is itself profoundly powerful—just looking at the picture of a snake is enough to make many people squirm—which is why they make a strong symbol for any number of things we might fear confronting.
Have you ever noticed how our fears, or our cravings, can become a greater focus for our attention and devoted thoughts than God is? Like the serpents invading the Israelite camp, furtively slinking about as a constant, uncontrolled threat, our fears, as surely as the destructive cravings we indulge in secret, will be the death of us if we don’t seek divine deliverance.
And so, God uses the image of the serpent, the very thing from which the people sought deliverance, to assist in the relief effort – instructing Moses to lift it up where everyone could see it: to have the people of faith actually look at it, confront it, see it clearly, in order to live.
And there, under the blanket of the darkened sky, Jesus says to Nicodemus: “[J]ust as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”[6]
It’s important to point out that, for John and other gospel writers, “eternal life” is something we begin enjoying in the here-and-now; it’s not just the promise of a heavenly afterlife. The “perishing” includes anyone who does not know or understand the joys of God’s kingdom come, God’s will being done here on earth as it is in heaven.
When Jesus refers to the Son of Man being lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness, he’s saying that humanity will need to confront the fearsome, ugly truth that our actions will go so far as to crucify God’s love. Only when we face that truth will we experience the full power, the truth, the healing grace of that same love. We will betray, and deny, and spurn God even unto a torturous death—whether in pursuit of our personal agenda, or out of fear and submission to someone else’s.
And yet, God’s love is more powerful and creative even than our death-dealing and destructive ways. God’s love is always working ahead of us and after us, finding ways to transform our worst, most damaging and self-destructive activities into something worthy of displaying in broad daylight. Something redeemed. I mean, God transformed even the most gruesome instrument of imperial torture and execution into a symbol of salvation, that we hang high in our sanctuaries and around our necks so that we can look at it, and be reminded of the lengths that God will go to, to prove divine love.
Jesus tells Nicodemus that God so loved the world—the entire cosmos, if we use the actual Greek word (in other words, not just some fraction of humankind who assent to some specific doctrine as if there’s a litmus test of our worthiness to be members of the kingdom of heaven). God loved the whole world and everyone in it so completely, God responded this way: God gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him—the Way, the Truth, and the Life—may not perish but may have eternal life.
And, while it’s often presented as if the “Gospel in Miniature”, or the “Good News in a Nutshell” ends there, with the period at the end of John 3:16, that’s not all Jesus said. What follows clarifies that the divine intent was to save the entire world, the whole cosmos. In John 3:17, we read, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world—the cosmos—might be saved through him.”
As if to make the point to Nicodemus that he was unwittingly condemning, or punishing, himself by refusing to believe, Jesus says, “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil… But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”[7] Nicodemus had come to Jesus, had approached the light. He just needed to relinquish his fear of being exposed, and live fully in the grace of that light.
The Gospel truth, the Good News Jesus was trying to help Nicodemus see—the light that you and I are invited to see and embrace today—is that the worst of our offenses is no match for the power of divine love. Though we hide things from ourselves and others, though we should deny our relationship with God in Christ Jesus, though we should participate in any number of ways in crucifying his Way, his Truth, and his Life in this world, it is not enough to finally extinguish God’s love. Because despite humanity’s treachery, that unremitting love will rise again and again and again, and keep pursuing us with forgiveness and mercy, for the sake of our own healing and salvation. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all. Amen.
[1] John 1:3b-5
[2] John 3:20-21
[3] John 3:2-3
[4] John 3:4
[5] Numbers 21:5
[6] John 3:14-15a
[7] John 3:19, 21