For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)
Frederick Buechner says of this verse “That is to say that God so loved the world that he gave his only son to this obscene horror; so loved the world that in some ultimately indescribable way and at some ultimately immeasurable cost he gave the world himself. Out of this terrible death, John says, came eternal life not just in the sense of resurrection to life after death but in the sense of life so precious even this side of death that to live is to stand with one foot already in eternity”. (Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, Harper One, copyright 1992, p. 98). This verse of Scripture has captured the imagination of Christians for over 2,000 years. I want to explore the meaning of these words from the Gospel of John, for in these words and in the message that they carry there is hope, there is meaning, and there is life. For God so loved the world… God glances across His unspeakably glorious universe that had exploded into the magnificent burst of colors and sounds and shapes and rhythms and throbs of matter and energy by the mere utterance of a Word from His mouth, and He focuses His attention on one little blue speck, this planet, this world, this broken and violent and strife-filled and war-torn world where people fight and argue and criticize and condemn and fear the ones they hate and hate the ones they fear, where injustice rules the planet, where people try to solve their problems by picking up guns and killing each other, or by dropping bombs one each other’s countries, or by exterminating people by the millions, where deceit is common and truth is scarce, where people would rather hide themselves behind behind the fig leaf of convenient lies than deal in naked honesty with uncomfortable and self-incriminating truth, where the common good is sacrificed on the altar of personal and partisan agenda, where love of God and love of humanity are shoved aside without a moment’s hesitation by the scheming and manipulative mechanisms of both those who want to stay in control and those who want to seize control. For God so loved the world-- that world— that He gave His only Son. For God so loved the world that He gave… Why would He give to a world that knows nothing of giving and only of taking? Why would he come to a world whose inhabitants would only reject him? The Pharisees didn’t like Him because He didn’t follow their rules. He wasn’t religious enough for them. The Sadducees didn’t like Him because He believed in too much. He threatened their intellectual snobbery. The Romans didn’t like Him because He believed in love and mercy and forgiveness and compassion and spoke against revenge and proclaimed a Gospel of peace and non-retaliation. He was too soft for them. The average Joe on the street didn’t like Him because He exposed Joe’s sin and selfishness for what it was. He took away Joe’s fig leaf. He had a brief moment of popularity on what we now call Palm Sunday, when he was acclaimed by the crowds in the streets of Jerusalem as the coming Anointed One, but his popularity didn’t last long. He hadn’t come to bring them the kind of kingdom they were expecting— the kind where “we” are the good guys and “they” are the bad guys and “we” get to rule over “them”. Jesus came to oppose that kind of kingdom-building, not to build that kind of kingdom, and so the admiration of the crowds quickly morphed into a toxic cocktail of collaboration of Church and State in an underhanded plot to kill the Son of God, with his small band of followers cowed into silence. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son… Without trying to explain the intricacies of Trinitarian theology, let’s just cut to the chase and let the theologians attempt to explain that which is ultimately inexplicable. When God sent his Son to visit the planet, God visited the planet. A might army of soldiers wouldn’t have been able to fix the problem. A brilliant band of theologians and scientists and ethicists and politicians and artists and poets wouldn’t have been able to fix the problem, even if they could all agree on a common solution. The problem ran so deeply into the systems of human society and into the fabric of human hearts that any solution they could have possibly proposed would have served only to place an awkward band-aid over a gaping wound. The band-aid would soon fall off, leaving the gaping wound even worse than it was before. Only God could solve the problem, and there was only one way that that He could do it— by coming to planet Earth as a man. That man was both God and man. He was the Son of God and God the Son. That man was Jesus. By coming to the Earth, He showed us how to relate to God as our Father. By dying on the cross, He reconciled us to God by taking upon Himself the penalty and punishment for our sins. By rising from the dead, He abolished sin and death forever, conquering them decisively and victoriously. He came to bring healing and peace to a wounded and war-torn world. He came to bring healing and peace to our wounded spirits. He came to give us a way out of isolation and self-absorption and into relationship, with God and with each other. He came to forgive us of our sins and reconcile us to God, enabling us to live the kind of life He had intended for us to have all along— eternal life, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Eternal life is knowing Him. For God so loved…. It was all motivated by love. What else would we expect from a God of love? He didn’t come to fix the world and then move onto another project on some other galaxy in some other corner of the universe. It was love that prompted Him to come, and it’s love that will prompt Him to come again, so that He can be with us forever— which is exactly what He has wanted all along. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)
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