This Sunday we encounter perhaps the most famous of all Bible verses, John 3:16, known to American sports fans everywhere. At least, they know the words “John 3:16,” though maybe not who John is and what those numbers mean. Those with some Biblical literacy know it as that verse about “God so loved the world.” To many, this verse sums up the Gospel, the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ.
Yet it is more complex than one might think at first reading. The part about God loving the world is great… but what about the rest of that sentence? “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.”
Let’s not even get into the “perishing if you don’t believe” part. What do we in the 21st century think about a deity who expresses his overwhelming love for his creation by offering his Son to save it? Wouldn’t we rather it said, “God so loved the world that he gave himself up?” Of course, our wacky Trinitarian view of God reminds us that the Father and the Son are one, with the Spirit – so of course God was giving himself up in giving up his Son. But why a sacrifice at all?
That’s the million dollar question. Did someone need to die in order for us to be freed from sin and death? The writer in me wants to answer that nobody really takes a story seriously until someone dies. God dying? That’s pretty much as high as you can jack the narrative stakes.
But did it have to be a sacrifice? Was the Father consigning the Son to certain death? OR did God simply “give him up” to take on human flesh, a mission to free us from the power of evil, come what may? Maybe it was humanity who decided Jesus must die, not his heavenly Father.
Our Good News is truly good – and so much more complicated than the “God loves you” message to which it is often reduced. It is a story of an all-powerful Creator who puts into motion a plan of salvation which allows for free will on the part of those to be saved. We can say "No thank you." Ever since Jesus the Christ showed up in human history, people have had to make choices concerning him. Would they believe his claims to be the Son of God? Would they follow his ways, counter-cultural as they were? Would they remain allied with him when it became dangerous?
These choices remain before us daily, with this addition:
Do we believe he rose from the dead and has assured eternal life, now and later, for those who believe? How do you choose? Do we want this gift he gave at such a cost?
I don’t know if someone had to die. Some theories of the atonement would say yes, and other interpretations of the Cross find the whole idea of the need for atonement a sick distortion of God’s love. I’m not weighing in. I am standing with the story we have, the story we have received. In that story a man, a man who was also God, gave up his divine prerogatives to accept the limitation of human life, to live out in this realm the values of the realm from which he’d come – values so counter to human values, he became a threat that had to be eliminated.
Gee, sounds like a science fiction story. Someone ought to write that!
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