“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.”
This line is memorized by millions, spurs countless sermons and reflections, appears on billboards and signs at gatherings and protests, is emblazoned on the shirts of sport stars and makes its way into the speeches of hopeful politicians the world over.
It summarizes some of the essential Christian doctrines: the relationship between the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, the Uncreated Creator, and the Son, the Second person, God who incarnates and comes as one of us – and most importantly, the reason for this Incarnation: an act of unsurpassable love that leads to unsurpassable life, the life eternal.
Being so well known and being used for so many purposes – including as a mainstay of evangelical outreach to try and bring new people to faith, often by the assumed fear of Hell associated with the word ‘perish’ – this phrase has however, over the centuries, accreted to it many misunderstandings and assumptions. If we are to really enter into, be held within, and transformed by these words, we may need to let some of these go.
We start with context: this is the final section of the response from Jesus to the questions from Nicodemus, a Pharisee, described at the start of chapter three. We may recall Nicodemus misses Jesus’ point when discussing spiritual rebirth. Jesus says one needs to be ‘born from above’; Nicodemus hears this as ‘born again’.
This is because the Greek word used, anōthen, can mean BOTH ‘again’ and ‘from above’. This is important because this confusion between the two possible meanings only works in Greek, not in the Aramaic Jesus would have spoken. This means that this account, which we hear part of today, was not spoken directly by Jesus. It could not have been, because it the double-meaning confusion is not possible in Aramaic.
Rather, today’s gospel is a literary creation, a beautiful theological reflection by John to convey succinctly the radical and world changing Good News of Christ.
And so, both to give due honour and respect to the author and for our own benefit, we need to look deeply at this theological literary creation.
To do this, we go once more to the Greek. “For God so loved the world …” Now, of course the love God has is agape love, universal, self-giving love. Love for all people – and so love for the world.
And, there were several Greek words that John could have used to indicate the “world”. Each of these words, while overlapping a bit in semantic meaning, have their own emphasis. He could have used a word to express the natural, the physical world, the earth and land and sea that would include all creatures, ourselves also. Or he could have used a word to indicate the world of civilization, the world of known inhabited lands, the Roman world.
Instead, John chose to use the word cosmos. In the context of the day, cosmos referred to the human world of life and commerce and society, the world how we have made it, with all its flaws and all its beauty. This is the world, that in the Gospel of John, rejects, hates, excludes and refuses Jesus, the world that refuses the God incarnate. This is the world that God, somehow, still loves.
Now our passage, our single line, John 3.16, is often assumed and is used with seemingly obvious reference to the cross and the theological principle of substitutionary atonement - Christ dying for us; God giving his only Son to die so we may not.
But this idea of Christ’s sacrificial death in place of our own is not the only reading, and certainly not the most ancient reading, of our text, indeed of the Gospel itself.
Just before our passage today we hear at verse 14:
“And just 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.”
The lifting of the serpent by Moses was a way to bring about God’s healing: it gave the Israelites life. Jesus being lifted up gives not just the Israelites, but the whole world, eternal life. Substitutionary sacrifice, Jesus instead of us, is not mentioned at all.
In fact, in the line before we hear:
“No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man”.
So, another way of reading this text, as ancient as those better known to us, is that Jesus, as the Son of God, through his death on the cross, being lifted towards heaven, breaks the barriers between the heavens and the earth, forever linking the material and the spiritual, the earthy and the heavenly. And this is exactly what happens at the moment of his death in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke: the veil in the Temple that separated the ordinary people from God is torn asunder forever.
And just as our glorious full and rich tradition offers us a new way to look at the death of Jesus, so too it can bring a new vision to the final clause: “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
The words, “may not perish” and a bit later, “but those who do not believe are condemned already”, can easily prompt ideas and theologies of Hell, eternal conscious torment.
Again though, this is not in our text.
In fact, none of the three Greek words translated as ‘hell’ in the New Testament appear anywhere in John, who only idles sideways towards the modern concept of hell, preferring instead to talk, as he does here of “perishing”, condemnation and judgement.
Perishing, the judgement and condemnation (the same Greek word for both) are only later linked to any concept of eternity. The ‘perishing’ is once and for all; utterly destroyed but no sense of eternal punishment at all.
And so, the very absolute sense of our passage – belief in Jesus equals eternal life, unbelief equals eternal torment begins not to be so absolute after all.
Indeed, the very particularised Salvation offered only to those who belief in Christ is, later in our reading, balanced by a universal expression of God’s love for all the world and all in the world:
“Those – not just the believers in Christ - who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
When we do what is true, we are in God and we come to Her Light
And this means all people, all of us, not just we who believe in Christ. This is why C.S. Lewis who struggled honestly with our holy texts concluded:
We know that no one can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.
I will read that again … “We know that no one can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.”
And so, Christ given for the world, Christ lifted up, his death that connects earth and heaven, his death given for many, means that our own little deaths, our sacrifices of our ego today and every day, may also connect earth and heaven, not only for ourselves, not only for the Christians in our lives, not only for our loved ones, but for everyone, for all people. In his Name, Amen.