Thoughts on John 3:16

 “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.”

 

It was not uncommon a number of years ago – I’m not sure if it happens anymore – that when the television camera panned the crowd in televised sports one could spot a spectator holding a placard reading “John 3:16,” a reference to the Bible verse cited above. And sometimes that “re-direction” to the fundamental truth of Christianity was proclaimed by one of the athletes on the field or court. (I am thinking here of Tim Tebow who during his time as quarterback for the Denver Broncos would etch the numbers 3:16 into the anti-glare black grease under his eyes.)

This familiar Biblical passage is found within the Gospel passage used this year on the Fourth Sunday of Lent as part of Jesus’ crucial conversation with the Pharisee and Jewish leader Nicodemus. It is a conversation in which Jesus draws Nicodemus, and presumably those with him who listen with open ears, from what St. John symbolically expresses as darkness-to-light.  (We are told that Nicodemus, approaching Jesus in the obscurity of night, encounters “the light that has come into the world.”)

How will Nicodemus (and we) escape the darkness of an otherwise fallen world? The answer is to be found in Jesus’ “lifting up,” the cross. For Jesus, the cross is his hour and his glory, the ultimate expression of how “God so loved the world.” By making himself a total offering, he expresses the radiant light of God’s love. His glory is in his total self-emptying; his wealth exists as a gift.

In this light I share with you words taken from a reflection by Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word of God Catholic Ministries. In them he cautions us about what he calls a “terrible interpretation of the cross,” an interpretation that states that the bloody sacrifice of the Son on the cross was “satisfying” to the Father, as if God were infinitely angry at sinful humanity and as if the crucified Jesus were a child “hurled into the fiery mouth of a pagan divinity” in order to appease his terrible anger.  Bishop Barron counters this lie with a much different image, one he draws from the truth of John 3:16. 

“God the Father is not some pathetic divinity whose bruised personal honor needs to be restored; rather, God is a parent who burns with compassion for his children who have wandered into danger. It is not out of anger or vengeance or a desire for retribution that the Father sends the Son but precisely out of love. Does the Father hate sinners? No, but he hates sin. Does God harbor indignation at the unjust? No, but God despises injustice. Thus God sends his Son, not gleefully to see him suffer, but to set things right.”

During this Lenten Season, let us never fail to bask in the light and warmth of a God whose love sets things right. 

Fr. Frank Reale, S.J.