It’s About the Numbers, Until it Isn’t
(sermon preached at St. Peter’s Anglican Church by the Rev. Dr. Terry Hidichuk)

 

Lent IV
Text: John 3:16                                                                                                                  

                                                                                                                                   

 

For hockey fans 99 means one thing and thing only: Wayne Gretsky of course.
In the United Church of Canada one simply says 1988 and members and adherents know what that means.
1988 was the year the United Church of Canada voted to ordain and commission gay and lesbians persons to the ministry.
You hear the number 9/11 and no explanation is needed.
You know where you were the morning when you heard the news.
You remember what you were doing that afternoon.
The numbers say it all.
There are certain numbers, so familiar, so engrained in certain cultures that they hold their own story.
For Christians we hear or see the numbers 3:16 and we immediately drawn into the world of John’s Gospel:
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.

 

John 3: 16 is one of the best known
most beloved verses in the New Testament.
It is cited by chapter and verse alone.
It is seen on road signs.
In bleachers
On banners.

 

Christians know this verse well because it is a clear expression of God’s love for the world.
It is a code for an essential truth of Christian belief: that God loves, that IS love.
But this text also acts a tempter.
It entices us to isolate it from the rest of the Gospel
So we can stick it on a poster or tee-shirt.

 

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.

 

If you stop at the end of 3: 16.  All is well.
A little sound bite that warms the heart.
This is where many of us do stop.
But if you read on, you might not feel all warm and gooey about the Gospel and the love of God.

 

Listen again to verses 17 and 18 again:

Indeed, God did not sent the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (That’s not too bad but now it gets tricky) Those who believe in him are not condemned: (here comes the hard the part…wait for it) BUT THOSE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE ARE CONDEMNED ALREADY.

 

These words have bite and edge.
The words judge.
They exclude.
What’s a good liberal supposed to do with this?
Many years ago, Catholic Scholar Raymond Brown wrote an article on preaching the Gospel of John.
The premise of the article “the Johannine World for Preachers”
advises,
"Do not domesticate the Johannine Jesus”.

 

Brown was reminding us that John writes in symbols and metaphors.
It is the least literal of all the Gospels.
It is John’s style to say things that border on the offensive,
That causes readers to be puzzled and even affronted;
There are some scholars and commentators who rightly say that John’s Gospel is the source of much of the Christian anti semitism that has oozed into the world over that last 2000 years.

 

The poetry of the Gospel is beautiful.
In the beginning was word…
God so loved…
The symbols hold fragments of truth.
But the Gospel is tough.
It’s hard.
It is difficult.

 

However listeners to the Gospel are not advised to cut and paste what John has to say.
As Brown warns us not to silence this Jesus by deciding what he should not have said and what we like to hear.
He goes onto invite us into John’s world.
But how do we do that?

 

No single approach explains the complex symbolic world of John's narrative, but it is important to crawl around in the debris that is left from first century Palestine.

It you were to visit the Temple Mount area of the Old City of Jerusalem and wind your way through the security checkpoints towards the Western Wall of the second temple, you would walk past huge piles of stone that serve as a reminder that in the first century as it is today, Palestine was an occupied land.

The Romans ruled first century Palestine with the iron hand of military might.
But periodically there were flair-ups.
Small fires of rebellion.
Teachers that would gather disciples to build small movements of protest.
In and around 60-70 AD, the Jews in Jerusalem rebelled.
The Romans had enough and they put the hammer down.
This was the time of Masada and the time when the second Temple just completed by Herod; the Temple where Jesus drove the money-changers, that Temple was destroyed.
Stone by stone.
That is what you walk by when you visit all that remains of the Temple today: the Western Wall.

 

When the Temple was destroyed, Judaism was transformed.
There was no longer a Temple for sacrifices,
No longer a Temple where the priests held power.
No longer a Temple that centred the faith and the culture.

 

Rabbinic Judaism centred around the community in synagogues.
What developed was sectarian Judaism.

By the end of the first century, this sectarianism was in full developed.
What was going on was an internal struggle within Judaism to re-define itself for the new reality of post Temple life.

 

As in many such struggles
Lines are drawn.
There is polarity between insiders and outsiders,
There is a sharp contrast between the community and dominant culture,
Between those who have truth and those who don’t.

 

Out of this struggle emerges the Gospel of John.
Today’s Gospel reading continues the story of NIcodemus.
Nicodemus was a Pharisee and leader of the Jews who comes to Jesus by night.
He recognizes Jesus a teacher sent from God.
But he surrounds himself in shadows.
He doesn’t want to fully embrace the light and Jesus chides him for his lack of understanding.
In John’s gospel some of the sharpest criticism is directed at those who believe but hid it.
Even some authorities believed Jesus, but were afraid to make public confession for fear that the would be put of the synagogue.
In the sectarian struggles going on within Judaism was the battle of who was in and who was out.

 

John responds with polemic language.
Dark versus light.
In versus out.
Remember that Jesus was born a Jew, bar mitzvahed, and died a Jew.
His followers were Jewish.
The first communities were Jewish.
When John writes the Gospel this sectarian group of Jews who were followers of Jesus the Messiah, the Christ had separated themselves from the synagogue.
They didn’t deny Judaism, they stepped outside the community.

John uses polemic language to affirm members of his minority community of believers.

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.

Indeed, God did not sent the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him Those who believe in him are not condemned BUT THOSE WHO DO NOT BELIEVE ARE CONDEMNED ALREADY.

 

This is language of definition.
The language of boundary
And polemic.

 

The purpose is not to exclude others,
But rather to support those who likely make difficult choices to belong.
The intent was to encourage others to join.

 

As a small minority, the Johannine community did not have the power or influence to marginalize others
or cause them harm by excluding them.
But our world is not John’s world.
Christianity has been the dominant religion for centuries, whether state supported or not and it still has the power to marginalize and exclude those who do not conform OR THOSE WHO CHOOSE TO PRACTICE OTHER RELIGIONS.

 

In our hands, we can use the language of John’s Gospel to do serious harm. And it has.

 

John 3:16 is a good lens into the Gospel.
John Gospel as we recall, begins we echoes of Genesis. And the goodness of God’s creation,
The world and ALL THAT IS WITHIN IT.

 

That note is sounded again in John 3:16.
For the sake of the world, this world….God gives.
That gift is described as a parent’s love for a child.
In this human experience of loving a child, we grasp God’s self-giving love.
Giving us the incomparable gift of life forever…not at some time in the future but now, in this time, where we life and breathe and have our being within all of God’s creation.

 

Are we to respond with exclusion?
With edges that separate insiders from outsiders?
How are we to love God back?

Sami Awad is a Palestinian Christian living Bethlehem in the West Bank. He is the Executive Director of Holy Land Trust an orgnization whose mission is to lead in creating an environment that fosters understanding, healing, transformation, and empowerment of individuals and communities, locally and globally, to address core challenges that are preventing the achievement of a true and just peace in the Holy Land. 

Awad describes his personal mission as learning to love your enemies.
That is difficult work he says but the only that can bring healing to this land.

 

He went on to express his discouragement the political process and prospect of peace in between Israel and the occupied territories.
He was discouraged but not defeated.
He talked about how the Holy Land Trust was having informal conversations with religious settlers in the West Bank.
The conversations are not about Green lines or two state solutions but how enemies can learn to live together and share one land because they realize that neither one of them are going any anywhere.

At one point Awad said: someday you all have to come back to Bethlehem and next time I bring my friends the settlers to talk with you as well. Then Awad paused and smiled and then said…you know a year ago I never thought I could ever put the words settler and friend in the same sentence.

God so loved the world.

Maybe there are ways to love the world back…even the bits we don’t like very much.

Amen.