John 3:16

by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

This sermon is based on John 3:14-21. An audio version of this sermon is available here.

(Holding up a cardboard sign that says “John 3:16”) Have you ever seen one of these? I tend to see signs like this in the stands at sporting events — especially when someone knows the camera is on them. I’ve seen this on vanity license plates. I’ve seen it on signs in people’s front yards by busy highways. I’ve seen this simple reference in all kinds of places.

Now, the reason you see this reference in so many places is that many people say this verse is the heart and soul and center of the gospel Good News. The whole message about Jesus and the Church and Christianity, they say, can be summed up in this one sentence: “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.”

Of course, the thing about summary statements is that they have to be unpacked. You have to take the summary keywords and expand upon their meaning, in order to bring out everything the statement has to say. And different people unpack John 3:16 with different understandings.

One way that John 3:16 is understood, a way I think is very common in American Christianity, and especially in American Evangelical Christianity, goes something like this: God loves the world so much that God wants to save it, rather than destroy it. Now, the world deserves to be destroyed: because of sin, because of rebellion against God’s commandments, the world needs to be punished, and the punishment for sin is death. But because God loves the world, God wants to save the world — or at least a part of the world — and not destroy it after all. So God gives his Son Jesus to die on the cross, to suffer on the cross the punishment that should rightly fall on all of us, so that we won’t have to be destroyed. And if you believe this, if you accept as true that Jesus died for your sins and that God will now no longer punish you, then you are saved, then you are rescued from perishing when this world is destroyed, and you are given assurance of eternal life in heaven with other faithful people who have believed like you. I think that’s the way a lot of people who hold up their “John 3:16” signs understand the meaning of their famous verse.

But this understanding is not without its problems. It seems to set up a dichotomy in God between judgment and love — and I don’t think there are any dichotomies in God. It seems to draw a big dividing line between those who believe and those who don’t, between those who will get into heaven and those who will be made to perish — and I don’t think God draws big dividing lines. And it seems to say that the whole meaning of the good news is about getting into heaven, as if there is nothing good or meaningful or encouraging to say about our life on earth here and now — and I think God cares a lot about our life on earth here and now.

So is there another way to unpack John 3:16? Can we open up this famous verse with a different understanding?

Here’s what I think it means: God loves the world. Period. No judgment, no punishment, no destruction. God loves the world. God created the world for love, so that God could share the gift of love with something that was not God, so that God could nurture the universe into evolving and growing and developing creatures that could love each other and could love God back. That doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as sin, it doesn’t mean God makes no judgment and no distinction between what is loving and what isn’t loving. But it does mean that God does not simply destroy sin, it means that God has made a solemn promise, a covenant, to deal with sin not by destroying it but by loving it into redemption and reconciliation. God loves the world.

God loves the world so much that God sends the Son, not just to die, but to live, to live with us as one of us, to show us how a human life can be when it is lived in the fullness and height and depth and breadth of God’s own holy love. Jesus reveals God’s love with a human face and a human voice and human hands and in a human way that we can see and touch and relate to and love back in our very human ways. Jesus’ death on the cross is the sign that God loves us so much that God will be with us even in the worst pain and suffering and loss and humiliation we can imagine, and God will raise even that up to a meaningful role in a new life. God loves the world so much that he sends the Son to show that love.

And God shows us this love in Jesus so that we can love like Jesus, too. That is really what it means to “believe” in Jesus. We today usually use the word “believe” to mean accepting something as true even if we can’t logically prove it. But the word originally meant much more than that. Our word “believe” comes from an Old German root word for “love.” Believing in someone is connected to loving someone. The Latin word “credo” — from which we get our word “creed” and repeat in church every Sunday when we say “We believe in God...” — comes from the word “cardia,” which means “heart.” To believe in Jesus is to take to heart in Jesus, and to give your heart to Jesus, it means to enter into a loving and trusting relationship with Jesus, and with the community of disciples that follow the way of Jesus, so that the divine love we see revealed in Jesus begins to be revealed in us, too. God loves the world so much that he sends the Son to show that love, so that we can give our hearts to that love and live that love as well.

And when we live that love, then we do not perish but have eternal life. In this understanding, eternal life is not something that comes to us only in heaven, beyond this world, but is something we can begin to know and experience in this world, in this life, here and now. The Greek phrase that John uses here, which we translate “eternal life,” literally means “the life of the ages”; and what that phrase points to is a vitality, an aliveness, a creativity that endures through all times and places. Age after age, epoch after epoch, year after year, day after day, even moment after moment, things change, the world is full of changes, governments rise and fall, weather systems form and disperse, people come and go, health waxes and wanes. Things change; and yet through all that change there is something that endures, something that is always there, some fundamental creativity out of which all the changes come and into which all the changes return. That steady, trustworthy, always-there creativity is what John calls “the life of the ages,” or “eternal life,” the life that comes from God and will not let us go. Eternal life, if we understand it this way, is a quality of vital creativity that we can come to know in the justice and peace and love we work for here and now, with each other, in this life — and that will also endure with us as this life changes and opens up into a height of life, a heaven of life, beyond anything we now know. When we believe in Jesus, when we give our hearts in trusting relationship with Jesus, then we begin to live with divine creativity here and now and forever.

“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.” God loves the world so much that God sends Jesus to show that love, so that we can give our hearts to that love and live a life of love that endures through all our changes and through all the ages. That’s what I mean when I hold up my “John 3:16” sign.

In this Lenten season, when our spiritual disciplines and faith practices help us cut through distractions and prepare with joy for the Paschal feast, let us stay focused on this central gospel truth: God loves us so much that God gives us Jesus, so that, giving our hearts to his love, we may share his enduring life. Amen.