I would guess that most people, whether they want to be or not, are familiar with at least the phrase “John 3:16.” It appears everywhere from football games to country songs, to mark the faithful people of God. I cannot even begin to count the amount of John 3:16 tattoos I have seen in my lifetime growing up in the Midwest. While John 3:16 is an important Bible verse, I personally think it is really hard to have one verse teach us everything that we need to know about faith; maybe that’s just me and my discomfort with picking only a short passage though because trying to pick my Confirmation reading and ordination readings was difficult! John 3: 16 says a lot about our faith, but can it say everything?
I have found it interesting over the years to examine the dynamic around the love for John 3:16; “Yes, God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One, that whoever believes may not die, but have eternal life”. Or, as it is more commonly heard: “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, NRSV). Because, John 3:16 sometimes feels like it is worn as a badge of honor among Christians, taken only by itself as a reflection of their faith and Christian superiority in the war against anything that is opposed to their idea of the will of God.
I find it ironic, like when people take Scripture from Romans or Leviticus out of context, because John 3:17 continues the promise; “God sent the Only Begotten into the world not to condemn the world, but that through the Only Begotten the world might be saved.” These seventeen verses from the third chapter of John are not about superiority, but humility. It is through Christ alone that the world can be saved, not by human actions or choices. It is talking about the promise that Christ is coming into the world to save the world, not condemn it, but John 3:16 is so frequently used to condemn non-Christians for not believing in Jesus.
Additionally, this story features Nicodemus at the beginning. Someone who would only come to visit Jesus at night, for fear of being seen. A man who didn’t understand what Jesus was trying to say and couldn’t quite grasp this concept of being born again through the Spirit. Jesus was trying to figure out how to explain this to him in a way that makes sense, but Jesus also didn’t send Nicodemus away. He didn’t say he couldn’t ask questions or that he had to come back in the daylight. Jesus continued to share the promises with Nicodemus too.
Like the context of this Nicodemus story, I think we have always struggled as a larger Christian church in wanting clear decisions about whether someone is in or out, and we judge and value them differently based on what the response to that is. Whether it is exclusion of people from being able to commune at the table, decisions about who is and isn’t allowed to lead the church, who is able to be baptized, etc. We spend a lot of time and energy as Christians trying to decide who is worthy. I honestly wonder what Jesus would think if he saw us today. Fighting over what Christianity means, who is the “right” Christian, or who is allowed to partake in his promises.
I’ve noticed this not just in our decisions about who is worthy enough in the context of church, but also in these great social battles that we hear about every day that really feel based in “Christian love.” Sometimes these arguments are Christians against Christians, other times its Christians against non-Christians, in the name of “Christian love.” I’ve watched decisions about my own life play out in these kinds of arenas and I have a really hard time reconciling that this is not what Christian love looks like to me. This is not God’s love, at least, the love that is so deep that God sent God’s Son. But, rather, this feels like Christians have taken John 3:16 and other Scripture passages to mean that God condones all of their actions. It feels like it says, “If I believe in Jesus I can do anything, especially if it is me against someone who doesn’t see faith the same way I do.”
I think the reading today calls that into question a bit because God sent Jesus for the sake of the world, not just the sake of a select group of people who identify with the right labels and have what is deemed to be the correct practice of faith. The reality is that God’s love is a whole lot more expansive than we allow it to be. For a whole variety of reasons, I think it makes us a bit uncomfortable at times that God’s love is so broad because we cannot comprehend what that looks like and what that means for the world around us. We try to fit God into our image instead of the other way around.
The context of these first seventeen verses of John is Jesus’ explanation of baptism to Nicodemus. Baptism, a rite that is inherently humbling, as we recognize God’s call on our life and God’s promises meet us in the water and the Word. And outward claiming of the already internal reality of our Belovedness in God’s eyes. This isn’t a story about Nicodemus being sent off knowing everything about the world now, running away to make sure that everyone followed his idea of what Jesus said. But it is about Nicodemus, who comes in the middle of the night to hear the promises of God, who is still trying to learn what this grace and these promises mean for his life. It is about Nicodemus hearing about God’s love for the world, even when surrounded by a society that is also quick to judge. God didn’t send Jesus into the world for us to be having the same problems 2,000 years later!
“Yes, God so loved the world as to give the Only Begotten One, that whoever believes may not die, but have eternal life. God sent the Only Begotten into the world not to condemn the world, but that through the Only Begotten the world might be saved” (John 3: 16-17). Like I said in the beginning, John 3:16 can’t say everything about our faith, but it can say a lot. Yes, John 3: 16 has beautiful promises for us about eternal life, but John 3: 17 has promises for the life of the world, not just for us as individuals. There is actually a lot of beautiful promise even just in these two verses, for the life of the world, a life that is flourishing, not just surviving. It genuinely hurts a little bit to see verses like this co-opted for specific people and purposes because there is so much beauty in them that gets almost weaponized. Yet if we clear away all the noise and debris around it, we can see that God is inviting us into a new way of being in the world, into these promises of baptism. John 3:16 isn’t meant to condemn the world, but to draw us fully into the life of God. May we trust in those promises together, even as the noise around them gets a little too loud sometimes.