Lent 2A
March 8, 2020
John 3:1-17
INTRODUCTION
Today’s texts
are all about faith. In Abraham’s case, he trusts a God who is basically a
stranger to him and his kinsfolk, doing something that likely seemed ridiculous
to everyone he cared about simply because this stranger God told him to. In
John, we will hear the story of Nicodemus, a devout teacher of the law, who
comes to Jesus by night with his questions. This text will include the most
famous thumbnail expression of the Christian faith: John 3:16. Psalm 121 and
Romans 5 will offer us commentary especially on Abraham’s remarkable faith, but
on the practice of faith in general.
Faith. It’s
something we all claim to have, or at least try to have, though some days may
be better than others on that front. And yet, it is also something notoriously
difficult to understand or describe. I hear a lot about people’s joys and their
struggles with faith, as you can imagine, and most of the time, people have
more questions than answers about their faith. If this describes you, today’s
readings are for you! Whether you are a lifetime believer and practicer of
faith, like Nicodemus, or someone very new to encountering God, like Abraham,
there is something here for you today.
We all need
help in finding sustenance for our faith. Today, I invite you to hear these
texts with our simplicity theme in mind, because simplicity, in its essence, is
an effort to simplify our lives such that we depend more upon God and God’s
providence than on what we can accomplish ourselves through our stuff and
activities. Where does your journey toward simplicity require a bit more faith?
Let’s listen.
[READ]
 |
| by Jesus Mafa |
Grace to you and
peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
“St. Augustine
is walking along the beach when he sees a little boy digging a hole in the sand
and running back and forth from the ocean to fill the hole with water. Curious,
Augustine asks the boy, ‘What are you doing?’ The little boy replies, ‘I’m
putting the ocean in this hole.’ Augustine says, ‘Little boy, you can’t do
that. The ocean is too big to put in that little hole.’ The boy, who is really
an angel, responds, ‘And so, Augustine, is your mind too small to contain the
vastness of God.’”
That’s how I
feel sometimes when I read John’s Gospel, and today’s story is no exception.
How desperately we want real, concrete, understandable answers, just like
Nicodemus! “How can these things be??” we ask. We want to understand God and
God’s ways. We want to be certain about the questions of faith – like, why bad
things happen to good people, why good things happen to bad people, who is
going to heaven and who isn’t, and what is the purpose of even being here? All
good questions – to which only God knows the answers. And the smallness of our
minds compared to the vastness of God’s makes it impossible for us to know or
understand.
Today’s story
about Jesus and Nicodemus shows us just how much we don’t, and can’t, understand
or know. There is so much going on here, and much of it is so cryptic, and a
lot of it sounds, frankly, really judgmental. And yet in the midst of it all is
probably the most famous verse in the Bible, a word of immense love, John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that all who believed
in him would not perish but have eternal life.” The Gospel in a nutshell, as
Martin Luther called it, and it’s true – it says succinctly the whole purpose
of this faith: God loves us so much God didn’t want us to die, but to live
forever in God’s care.
And yet this
verse of love – as well as several other verses in this passage – have been
used over the years not to include people in God’s embrace, but to exclude
them. The “born again” imagery has been used by evangelicals to say that unless
you have had a believer’s baptism – one in which the one being baptized is able
to confess his or her own faith, as opposed the infant baptism – then it
doesn’t count. The verses that follow John 3:16, which come right after our
reading today ends, are also judgmental ones: John writes, “those who do not
believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of
the only Son of God.” It’s enough to make us all squirm a little – because even
if you yourself do believe in Jesus, you probably have someone close to you who
doesn’t, and we all want our loved ones to be with us in heaven. The fear that
it could be otherwise is sad and unsettling.
So what do we
do with all this? We come back to those tough questions of faith – who is
saved, why do things happen as they do – and the fact that we simply cannot
know. Our minds are the small hole in the sand, and we are that little boy,
trying to fit the ocean in there.
But that
doesn’t stop us from digging into God’s word and trying to understand. So
first, let’s look at that word, “world.” The Greek word John uses there is kosmos, and throughout John’s Gospel,
this word refers to “that which is hostile to God.” So we could translate John
3:16-17 this way: “God so loved the God-hating
world, that he gave his only Son…” and, “God did not send the Son to world that despises God to condemn it,
but instead so that the world that
rejects God might still be saved through him.” It is hard for our
small-hole-in-the-sand minds to grasp such audacious and unexpected love as
that!
Well that
sounds good, you say, but what about all the stuff that comes afterward about
condemnation for those who don’t believe? Listen: “Those who do not believe are condemned already, because they
have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment,
that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than
light because their deeds were evil.” Yup, that is difficult. But a
careful look reveals: nowhere does it say that God is the one doing the
condemning. It says simply that their lives are in darkness, that they must
endure all the things that darkness brings. In other words, life is better
when you are living it with Jesus, and if you aren’t living it with Jesus,
you are already suffering the negative impact of that. The consequence of not
believing isn’t necessarily an eternal one – Jesus says later in John that he
came to draw all people to himself. Rather, the consequence is right
now.
(How’s that
small hole in the sand doing? Is the ocean fitting? Mine is already
overflowing! Bear with me!)
Maybe you’re
thinking about now, “So, then what’s the point? Why believe if just anyone can
get into heaven?” To that, I have two answers. One is: my mind is just as much a
small hole in the sand as yours is. Who knows if anything I just said is true.
I hope it is, but I don’t know! This is all way beyond me. It was way beyond
Nicodemus, a teacher of the law. It is way beyond anyone who isn’t God, so don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
God and God’s ways cannot be understood. The fact is: we don’t know what
happens in the final judgment, but one thing we do know is that it is up to
God, not us. And if God welcomes someone into heaven that I wouldn’t have let
in if it were up to me, that doesn’t in any way diminish my own experience of
heaven. It’s just not worth worrying about – all we can do is the best we can,
living into this life in the way Jesus teaches us how, by loving God and
neighbor with all that we are and all that we have.
But my other
answer is a testimony. If your question is, “What’s the point of faith?” then
let me tell you what is true for me. Here is why I believe in Jesus Christ: I
believe in Christ because it makes my life better. I feel full. It gives me
hope when I am in despair. It gives me strength when I am weak. As much as I
cannot and will not ever understand about God, my faith still helps me to make
sense of the joys and the challenges of this life.
I believe in Jesus because that
relationship makes me want to be better. It moves me every day toward living
more and more authentically into life as a baptized child of God, a life of
looking to the needs of others, a life of self-sacrificial love, a life of
speaking out for the needs of the oppressed and vulnerable. It moves me to do
things like, simplify my life, so that I can be my best and most joyful and
most faithful self.
I believe in Jesus because the story
of death and life that God tells through Christ is one that I have seen to be
true in my own life. It is a story that, because I know it is true, I am
compelled to search for it. I am moved always to search for life, even in the
darkest of deaths. And this keeps my head above water, and makes my life worth
living. It gets me up in the morning and puts me down at night. And I tell
other people about this, I share the good news, not because I want them to go
to heaven (though I do!), but because I want them to experience the life right now that I experience by having a
relationship with Christ. I want other people to feel the fullness and love
that I experience by my belief in Jesus.
For me, that’s the point.
We cannot know
about things to come. Our minds are small holes in the sand, and we can only
fit so much ocean into them. What we can know is this: that God loves us. God
loves us so much, that God sent God’s only Son so that we could have a glimpse
of that love, a glimpse of what is yet to come. God loves us so much that God endured
the same pain and suffering we do, so we would know we are not alone in it. God
loves us enough to provide us a Way into a new life of fullness and love.
That’s the point.
Let us pray… Lord of light, we thank you for your
self-giving love. Help us to live with unanswered questions, and even to find
you in those questions, so that we would be encouraged to go forth in faith and
trust. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Image credit:
| JESUS MAFA. Nicodemus, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48385 [retrieved March 9, 2020]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact). |
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