John 3:14-21 (Lent 4B)
St. John, Galveston 3/10/24
Rev. Alan Taylor
+ In Nomine Jesu +
Grace and peace to you, from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
I am a firm believer that the Scriptures have the power to do what they do, whether we understand them or not. “Faith (we are told) comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ.” And so, the Scriptures have the power to give us faith, and to transfer us out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son. And yes, the Scriptures do what they do, even without our judging them laudable or valuable.
Now, please hear what I’m saying and not saying. I’m not suggesting that we should stop studying the Scriptures, or that we should no longer strive to understand what they say. That would be crazy talk for a pastor to suggest such a thing, don’t you think? I’m simply saying that God’s word can and does work in our hearts and minds quite apart from us.
The encounter that Jesus had with Nicodemus, just before the reading for this morning from John 3, is, by my estimation, the best evidence to support what I’m saying. Nicodemus came to Jesus “by night.” That’s an important bit of information that John gives us. His statement is factual, meaning it was night when Nicodemus came to see Jesus. Nicodemus was, after all, afraid of the Jews. He was a Pharisee, you know? And so, he came to Jesus under the cover of darkness.
But in John’s Gospel, light and darkness, day and night, are much too significant to simply pass them by without further thought. While it was night when Nicodemus visited Jesus, he also came to Him in the darkness of his soul. Jesus spoke to him about being born again, something that Nicodemus desperately needed, but because of the darkness of his heart, he didn’t understand anything Jesus said to him. In fact, the whole encounter was quite comical. “You must be born again (Jesus said). To which Nicodemus responded, “what, can a man enter into his mother’s womb again and be born again?” What Jesus told Nicodemus that night went right over his head. Still, the encounter was the beginning of a miraculous change in Nicodemus, one that brought him to the foot of Jesus’ cross at His crucifixion. Nicodemus, you may recall, was one of the men who laid Jesus body to rest in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.
This is all to say that Jesus comes to us when and where we don’t expect to find Him, even in the darkness of our souls, and His word does miraculous things, even forgiving of our sin when we can’t comprehend how such a thing could even be possible. The Gospel, we often say, can be put in a nutshell. And here it is right before us this morning…
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Now, do you understand what those words mean? Do you understand what it’s like for someone to love the world so much that they would give up their own self for it? And, by the way, I don’t mean to love the world in a sinful sense. That I think we can understand, at least on some level. No, I mean to love the world in a holy, perfect sense, and, here’s probably the biggest, the most unfathomable part, to love not just some of the world, but ALL of it. “For God so loved the WORLD that He gave His only begotten Son.”
Louis Armstrong sang “What a Wonderful World.” I see trees of green
Red roses too I see them bloom For me and you And I think to myself What a wonderful world
I see skies of blue And clouds of white The bright blessed dayThe dark sacred night And I think to myself What a wonderful world
That is, of course, one assessment of the world that God so loved.
Another is perhaps a bit less endearing and poetic, but nonetheless, equally true. The other day, Wednesday, I think, I searched through some news headlines to get an idea of what’s going on in the world these days. Here are just a few things that I found…
“Search continues two weeks after a 3 year old boy disappeared in Wisconsin.”
“A man crashed a snowmobile into a parked Black Hawk helicopter and is suing the US government for $9.5M.”
“Liberty University will pay $14M, the largest fine ever levied under the federal Clery Act.” (The fine had to do with the Christian Universities failure to properly report sexual abuse cases on the campus.)
And, of course, behind every headline is a true to life story.
The little three year old boy who went missing in Wisconsin, his name is Elijah. He was staying with his mother and a man she had asked to help with the boys discipline. The man and the boys mother have both been charged with child neglect. Court documents showed that the two were trying to correct the boy's "bad behaviors" and make him "be a man.” That included disciplining Elijah by making him stand for one to three hours in "time outs," making him pray and giving him cold showers, the documents allege. Elijah is still missing. Orson Vue, Elijah’s uncle, told reporters: "It’s just, trying to keep the bad thoughts out. But at the same time, not ruling out anything at all."
“For God so loved the World that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
The words sort of roll off our tongues, don’t they? And yet, I would suggest that the love of God itself is beyond our comprehension. Oh, we say, but God just hates the sin and loves the sinner, as if that were an easy thing to do, as if our sin were somehow not a part of who we are.
“God is love,” is a well known text of Scripture, says Luther. In fact, God (he says) is nothing but Love. Who is able to believe this? He (meaning the Apostle John) says not only that God is Goodness, but also that He is Love…He who knows God as wrathful, hostile, as an Enemy and a Judge, does not know God, because he does not know the love in God. You see how much we still have to learn in Christ? Short but sublime words are these. All human hearts are blind, fearful, and sad because they do not know that God is Love. He who knows this is saved. When I ascend through Christ, I see love supreme in God.” God didn’t send His Son into the world to judge the world, but that they world might be saved through Him.
And so, God’s word, both enfleshed in bread and wine, and proclaimed from the pages of the Bible, grant us faith and give us the ability to believe what we can scarcely comprehend.
“The Gospel is the power of God to save
From sin and Satan and the grave;
It works the faith which firmly clings
To all the treasures which it brings.”
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The peace of God that passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.
+ Soli Deo Gloria +