Reflections from The Hill – God’s Story (John 3.16)
Apart from being flummoxed and not a little embarrassed when people want to talk about something I said, I’m actually beginning to learn that some do hear some of the things I say; generally, though, I suspect that they hear things I didn’t say or only thought I said. Such is the wonder of communication.
That's why I feel sorry for John the Evangelist. John, beloved by Sunday School teachers the world over for of the number of Bible-Verses-To-Remember he wrote, is also the star of today’s Gospel reading, particularly Ch 3 verse 16.
This verse was the very first bit of Scripture I learned off-pat and I have warm-fuzzies thinking about it even now. However, this verse is more easily found these days in other places than in the Bible itself or in our family’s history.
Look closely during the upcoming Olympics and you’ll see it draped over balustrading in the various arenas of combat. Look closely at the tee-shirts people wear, or bumper stickers that go on their, um, bumpers and tell me I’m wrong.
I’m sure John 3.16 was never meant to be like that. I’m sure John never meant it to be the centrepiece of an advertising campaign. It’s almost as if, by flaunting it so, we are (or someone is) expecting it to do the hard yards of conversion for those myriads of folk who will somehow see it, wherever it’s shown.
It’s sad but challenging to think that many people read the Bible like that – whether in the small, bite-sized pieces in the
Instead of reading John 3 as a selection of God’s Greatest Hits – a fist-full of Biblical assurances that will get us to heaven – we might begin to read it as part, and only part, of the continuing Story of God’s grace at work in human lives.
This Gospel Reading, and moreso this verse, might then serve to remind us that each of us live in stories: that our life is a story in itself, with a beginning, a middle and an end; is inside and intersects other, bigger, stories; and that even a pithy saying like this will not allow us to know all we need to know of God's grace and love.
You and I live in stories, not in words or verses or systems, and so we understand our lives, the world, and God most fully only by paying attention, by listening, and by living forward into His story, as it were, with hope.
That's why I love the story of Nicodemus; he comes out of the dark night stuffed full of the codes and systems he lived by as a leader and chief teacher of the Jews, hoping to make sense of this new piece of data called Jesus of Nazareth.
He is a thinker, and Jesus describes him thus, but in a few more words than I’ve done. I reckon Nicodemus came because had an inkling that he was missing something about Jesus that others were beginning to allude to and that, whatever it was, he was in danger of letting it escape him.
Nicodemus is so like us: here he is trying to figure Jesus out, having a gnawing hunger for what Jesus seems to be offering, yet unsure how to slot it into everything else he knows. It’s a familiar tale.
Nicodemus reminds us that all of us, including religious people – and especially religious people – have systems or beliefs or coded rational meanings designed to get a handle on God, to try to put God in a box.
Yet the story we enter today is not just about the John 3:16 belief that Jesus is the Son of God who cleanses us from all sin, but about our own inability or unwillingness to believe that.
The story is not about a bumper-sticker faith that can be refined into 144 characters. It is about a different way of seeing, of living, a way that changes everything about us. As someone said, it is about stepping out of darkness and choosing light.
The words of John 3:16 come true not on bumper stickers or bits of hand-painted cloth. They come true in the human heart and are played out in human lives, lives like those of Nicodemus, like yours and mine.
As we continue to journey through Lent, may we also move into the light and begin to live fully into the story of God that He wants to tell in and through us.
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