From the Daily Lectionary for Thursday in the First Week of Lent
John 3:16-21
“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 send 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, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
There is an important misunderstanding about this famous passage. I remember the guy with the rainbow hair who would hold up a placard citing John 3:16 at sporting events on television some thirty years ago. “Everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” The implication is that if we just believe in Jesus, then we will go to heaven in the next life. In other words, that our personal salvation depends on believing rightly.
The word that is translated “believe,” pisteo in the Greek, actually means “trust.” That, I think, is a huge difference. We are to trust in Jesus, that is to say, we are meant to live our lives congruent with Jesus’s life and ministry: welcoming the stranger, showing compassion for the poor and the infirm, embracing the outcast, advocating for justice, laying down our lives for our neighbor. We are to trust the Way. This is a passage more concerned about practice than it is about belief. Our creeds are not the thing; our lives of faith are formed by practice.
If we live for self alone then we are living contrary to God’s purposes, which according to the writer is condemnable. The light of the world is manifest by our predisposition for sacrifice, living for the good of the other. This passage has been used over the centuries as a means to embrace the notion that our Christian faith is exclusive, that you are either in or out, according to your professed belief. But this proclamation has universal implications. If one practices loving sacrifice, then one is participating in God’s project of salvation, no matter one’s belief system.
Salvation then is not about our personal edification. Salvation is about raising to dignity the lives of our neighbor, the excluded, the disenfranchised, in order to create a sustainable society, to bring heaven on earth, in short. Our salvation is intimately contingent to the salvation of our neighbor. That is the way love operates. Love will not forbear anyone excluded from God’s gracious bounty. Our work is to trust that very vision, to act as if it were true.
A Prayer for the Future of the Human Race (BCP p. 828)
O God, you have blessed us and given us dominion over all the earth: Increase our reverence before the mystery of life; and give us new insight into your purposes for the human race, and new wisdom and determination in making provision for its future in accordance with your will, through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
