I’m sure you all remember the past when people used to attend sporting events in person. And in the end zones at football games you’d often see someone holding up a sign that said John 3:16. And of course that’s scriptural shorthand for one of the sentences in today’s gospel, the one that tells us that God so loved the world that he sent his only son to bring us eternal life. I imagine that the people in the end zones with those signs think that if you were going to see only one sentence from the gospel, only remember one thing, that this is the one.
Are they right? Is this it? On the one hand it would be wonderful to tell you that you could boil down the Christian life to one index card, but of course at times, it’s not as simple as that. But right now, here in the middle of Lent, maybe yes, this is where we need to be reoriented, and to remember the one thing we do need to realize about God and that never quite gets through to us, which is that God loves this world, and literally can’t do anything else except love the people in it. Not people in the abstract, but you and me, as if we were the only ones here.
I don’t know what it’s like for a parent to lose a child. I have seen people go through it, and maybe you have too, but when I picture what it would be like to lose one of my own children, I can’t think about it for more than a second without turning away from it. When we imagine God’s child dying for us we shouldn’t imagine God suffering the way we would, but what we should imagine is that God’s love for us is so great that it would be the same as a parent saying that yes, they were willing to undergo that kind of a loss, just so we would understand the depth of this love. It’s love beyond anything we can imagine, but it’s the only image that Jesus can use to get across that God doesn’t love this world in the abstract but in the concrete reality of us. God would do anything to get through to us.
And all this is not supposed to make us feel guilty, it’s not supposed to paralyze us by thinking that we could never possibly do enough for someone who loves us this much. It is intended to give us freedom, a sense that there is nothing we could not do nothing about us or this world we could not fix with that kind of power surrounding us.
We think lent is about repentance, and it is, but why do we repent, why do we make resolutions to change our behavior? It is to reorient ourselves toward love, toward realizing what God wants for us, toward seeing that God loves us now, not at some point in the future or the past.
Jesus unfortunately didn’t banish the darkness from this world or from our inner lives. The suffering and passion of Christ is all around us, the poverty and isolation of people in this world is painful to see. But what Jesus did do is show that love cannot possibly lose to this darkness, and we have to find a way to live as if we know that’s true.
And so Lent is our time to come out of the shadows and help others to come out from them. We have someone who showed us how to do it, and who wants nothing more than to be with us.