John 3:16 As Evangelical Graffiti?

4 Lent             March 18, 2012  

Numbers 21:4-9  Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10   John 3:14-21

Lectionary Link

  

  Probably anyone who has watched a televised sporting event has at times seen a spectator holding a sign: John 3 colon 16.  Or John 3:16.  Tim Tebow, a quarterback has worn John 3:16 as eye shade when he plays football as a way of telling people about his personal Christian beliefs.  Displaying John 3:16 is a way for an avid evangelical Christian to mix a love for sports with the requirement of his piety to always be evangelizing.  So while watching golf shots, home runs and touch downs, the evangelical Christian sports fan can be evangelizing. (One may often wonder if in our sports crazed culture whether people actually love their sports and sports heroes more than Christ).   The most famous John 3:16 sign man was the rainbow man who wore a rainbow wig in the 70’s and 80’s and a John 3:16 tee shirt to major sporting events.  Of course in a biblically illiterate culture Jn period 3 colon 16 might be a foreign language.   But it is a code reference to all evangelical Christians about perhaps for them the most important verse in the Bible.

  I would not disagree with evangelical Christians about the importance of this verse and I think that all Christians are called to be evangelical in the sense of being ready to live in their lives and speak with their lips the good news about God’s love in Christ.  Each of us has a different way to be evangelical and we can share the good news in ways that are compatible with the gifts of our personalities.  Evangelical can be regarded to be a negative word if it means that you have to be “hell fire and brimstone” preachers or if you have to be persons who are obnoxiously wearing one's brand of religion on one's sleeves in a very pushy way.  It is something oxymoronic to be presenting “good news” in an off putting way. Some evangelicals do seem to have bad news.

 What we can say from our Gospel lesson is that the writer of the Gospel of John was evangelical, that is, the writer used a narrative about Jesus to present good news.  The target audience included non-Jews, followers of the sect of John the Baptist and other Jews who had not yet come to embrace Jesus as the Messiah.

  Since the Gospel of John was the last Gospel to come to textual form it includes some significant differences from the other Gospels.  In John there are no exorcisms, which probably means that such a practice was not a familiar method of healing for their readers.  There are no miracles in John; John uses a different word, he calls the special acts of Jesus, Signs.  As signs, the teachings about Jesus that occur within the story are more important than the particular uncanny event of the story.

  Also, there are more red letters in the Gospel of John.  In some Bibles, the words of Jesus are printed in red letters.  John’s Gospel has long discourses of Jesus with highly developed theological thinking.  Logically, one might assume that the earliest Gospels and sources would include more words of Jesus than Gospels that were written later.

  Since John’s Gospel was written much later than the other Gospels, the writer had to account for the fact that world had not yet ended with the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds.  The coming of the kingdom of heaven in the earlier Gospels has become in John’s Gospel an already happened parallel kingdom of God which was known by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  And so in the Gospel of John Passion narrative, Jesus can confidently say to Pilate, “If my kingdom were of this world, the world of Roman military power, then my angels would come and fight in your world of soldiers.”

  The Kingdom of God as having already arrived is the Good News of the Gospel of John.  Jesus promised Nicodemus that a person could be born into this kingdom by water and the Spirit. 

  In the Gospel of John, there is a great contradiction that is presented in this way.  Jesus said that his followers were to be in the world but not of the world.  They were not supposed to love the things of the world.  But in our famous Bible verse that we’ve read today, it states that God so loved the world that God gave his unique Son so that whoever believes in the Son will have everlasting life.

  So how is it that God can love the world and we cannot?  The way in which John’s Gospel deals with this contradiction is to propose that people can experience another kind of life or world within this world.  The Kingdom of God is no longer portrayed as an end of this world; it is a parallel world of God’s Spirit that we can know in this life.  So within our natural lives, we can experience abundant life, or the life of God’s Spirit, whom to know is also everlasting life or eternal life.

  The Gospel of John, like no other Gospel, presents Jesus as a person who represents most fully the life of parallel existence.  Jesus is the Eternal Word of God but he is also Jesus of Nazareth.  He is proclaimed to be the coincidence of God and Humanity in one person.  And the way that John states the good news is to inform us that we as human beings need to know how to live in parallel worlds simultaneously.  We need to live in the world of Spirit and Word as members of the Kingdom God, even while we live in very earthly and external kingdoms of this world.  The truth of this presentation is the truth of our lives; all of us have to come to know our interior lives in certain ways and their relationship to our exterior worlds. 

  The Gospel of John is trying to convince us that we can know in a significant way that our interior life is an experience of the comforting presence of God’s Spirit.  And in knowing this, we can relate to our exterior world with a motivation of God’s love for us and the comfort of God’s peace.  And even when the challenges of life present themselves, we can experience the Signs of living from our birth into the Kingdom of God.

  So here is the logic of John’s good news; God so loved the world.  How much?  He gave his unique Son, just as Abraham was willing to give his only son Isaac.  How much was God’s love?  How much was God willing to be identified with human experience?  Well, lots of people would say that death in some way expresses the completeness of natural life.  And God loved the world so much that God was willing to take a complete identity with human death.  And if God could deal with human death, then we would have an ensign or a symbol for us to look at as each of us contemplates the deaths of our loved ones and ourselves.

  So the death of Jesus was an elevated symbol of the fullness of God’s identity with human experience and gives us a place to glance to know that life continued after the death of Jesus.  There is an afterlife to Jesus. It is the Risen Christ known through the Spirit of God.  And there is an afterlife for us, because we know that there is something greater than death.

  The healing experience, the saving experience for the children of Israel who were plagued by poisonous serpents was to look at the bronze serpent lifted up on a pole.  The plague of the snakes came because of their disobedience; but the gift of healing came simply by looking in faith upon the uplifted bronze serpent.

  The writer of the Gospel of John took this story of the lifted bronze serpent and stated, “this is how the cross of Jesus functions for our spiritual lives.”  God’s life in the divine Son dies before our very eyes and yet only initiates another order of healing or salvation life, the life of resurrection, the life of the Holy Spirit, abundant life, eternal life even now as we live.

  This is the good news of the Gospel of John: we can know that God loves the world better than we can.  When we love it, we have the human tendency to linger our love into idolatry and we can lose our enjoyment of the world.

  And so in knowing a birth by God’s Spirit we can love our world in the Spirit without falling into the idolatry of addiction, and we can learn proper enjoyment so as to be able to discover what is truly good in our world and in our lives.

  Today, let us embrace perhaps the six most positive words of the entire Bible: “For God so loved the world!”   Now you don’t have to go around wearing John 3:16 signs but these six words can help us live with optimism and make us good Episcopal Evangelicals whose favorite words might be: “Preach the Gospel always and if necessary use words!”  Amen.

A Saving Glance at the One Lifted Up

4 Lent    B         March 18, 2012  

Numbers 21:4-9  Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

Ephesians 2:1-10   John 3:14-21

 Lectionary Link

  We are familiar with serpents and healing because the American Medical Association uses the symbol of two serpents entwined around a rod.  This came from the Greco-Roman medical tradition.  The ancient myth of Aesculapius encounter with a serpent healing another serpent is the origin of the association of serpents and healing.  The habit of a snake literally resurrecting itself from it dead skin could be the inspiration for the regenerative powers associated with the snake.  The Greek word pharmakon can mean both poison and remedy.  Certainly the theory behind vaccination is to take some of the “poison” and it is a remedy in that the body builds immunity to the actual disease.

  Whether the healing serpent of Moses is related to the Greek mythological notion of the healing serpent, can not be ascertained. 

  The people of Israel, while they wandered in the wilderness toward the Promised Land, are portrayed as immature sheep and always ready to mutiny against God and their leader.  For their mutiny and their rebellion, they are often punished.  One of the punishments was a plague of poisonous serpents.

  Moses, the leader, is the patient father, who is always interceding with God on behalf of the rebellious people.  And when the plague of snakes occurred, Moses was given the remedy.  He was to place a bronze likeness of the serpent on a pole in the middle of the camp.  And those who looked at the serpent were to be healed.  “That’s stupid Moses!  Why would looking at the serpent cure me?”  The cure was not based upon rationality; the cure was based upon simply accepting God’s healing provision.

  One of the consequences of being biblically illiterate is that one misses the symbolic system that functions between the Old and New Testaments.  And if we don’t understand the symbolic system, then we cannot make sense of the meanings and methods of what the Gospel writers were trying to communicate to their communities.

  In the long discourse that is presented between the Pharisee Nicodemus and Rabbi Jesus, there is a comparison made between the cross of Jesus and Moses’ serpent upon the pole.

  Just as God wanted the Israelites to recover from their rebellion and resulting punishment by simply looking at God’s healing grace given for them, so the early Christian believed that God did not condemn people in their sin, alienation and rebellion; rather God wanted people to simply look in the direction where they might be saved or healed.

  So looking at Jesus lifted up in his death upon the cross was viewed as God's way to bring us health and salvation.

  It is a rather irrational act.  Foolishness to the wisdom of the Greeks; A stumbling block to the Jews, as St. Paul said.  It may seem ridiculous to us.

  But the essence of the Gospel is that God acts with grace to let us know that we have found favor.    We would rather say that we deserve God’s favor because we are good and we have done some good things.  It is admirable to be as good as we can and to do as much good as we can, but it isn’t our “good natures” or our “good deeds” that qualifies us in God’s sight.  God created us good, so goodness is an act of God, and when we depart from goodness in our nature and acts, it does not remove from us the original goodness in which we were made by God.

  So seeing Jesus upon the cross is simply understanding that God’s creation and God’s redemption are but God’s affirmation of our goodness and favor and acceptance.  That means it is up to us to accept the grace of God both in creation and redemption.

  This portion of John’s Gospel contains the most popular evangelical bible verse of all time: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.”

  I think that the people who push the born again experience often do something that shifts the focus from God’s grace to the importance of the human decision.

  If someone offers me a million dollars; what is more important, the generosity of the giver, or my decision to take it?

  Some times the born again people think that we should celebrate the fact that we receive God’s grace even more than the generosity of God who offers us the grace.

  Yes, it is important that we receive God’s grace and it appears to be a very irrational decision to do so.  We would much rather believe in our own ability and circumstances for our salvation; but the experience of the generosity of God, and our acceptance of it is the very essence of the Gospel.

  So today, let us trumpet and highlight the grace of God’s creation and redemption, and let us simply accept it, and not trumpet our acceptance except with thankfulness to God who is the giver of all.

  God’s generosity does not make us proud Christians who are certain that our choices and ways are best; God’s generosity humbles us with thankful hearts and with joy that comes in an indescribable way.  And that is the experience of the Good News.  God in Christ is the Good News and we have the privilege to be caught up in that.  For us to reduce all of this to my church is better than yours, or my salvation is more complete than yours, is to misunderstand the generosity of God.

  Let us proclaim a generous God, who simply asks for us to give a receptive glance toward the divine grace today.  Amen.