Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
03.22.09; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: John 3: 14-21
There are few verses in the New Testament more familiar than John 3:16. It’s at the very heart of the evangelical movement. It’s meat and potatoes stuff, or perhaps that’s tofu and potatoes. “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.”
It’s a quick, short, catchy verse. It sums up, for most, the whole purpose of Jesus. It also is a shorthand verse that makes it’s way onto an array of different evangelical products. You can buy John 3:16 caps. You can buy John 3:16 shirts. There are bumperstickers in a whole array of different colors. There’s John 3:16 candy corn. There are these little John 3:16 keyring bells they market to bikers, which tinkle quietly as you motor along. Also for bikers, there are these John 3:16 pant clips to connect your jeans to your riding boots, because God so loved the world that he didn’t want your pants to hike up your legs in an unattractive way as you motor down the road on your Harley.
I’m convinced that a large part of the reason that this passage is so well known...particularly to my generation...is because of a guy known as the Rainbow Man. He was, waaaay back in the 1970s and 1980s, the guy who showed up at pretty much every sporting event he could wearing a huge multicolored afro wig and waving a large, handmade sign. That sign, often written on a simple sheet, said: John 3:16. Christians knew what that meant, and the idea was...outside of Rainbow Man promoting himself...to get people curious as to what John 3:16 actually was.
The man’s name was Rollen Stewart, and he was seriously dedicated to his rather straightforward task. Every year, he’d rack up over 60,000 miles of driving to truck himself across country. Every Sunday, during at least one major televised sporting event, there he’d be, waving his homemade sign.
He became somewhat sort of kind of famous, the nation’s most well known sports fan. He also became a small celebrity in the evangelical Christian community...and then he disappeared. Well, he didn’t so much disappear, as he ended up convinced that he had to tell the world that Jesus was coming back to destroy it soon. It was 1992, and the end-times were about to be fulfilled, and everyone needed to repent or be destroyed in the very near future. As no-one seemed willing to listen to this rather less cheery message, Mr. Stewart took three people hostage at gunpoint, demanding that police give him access to the media so that he could tell the world that destruction was imminent.
After 8 1/2 hours of armed standoff, Mr. Stewart was apprehended by the police. He’s now doing three concurrent life terms at Mule Creek State Prison, near Sacramento. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times given in May of 2008, he shared that he’s unrepentant, convinced that he only botched the timing of his message. He remains absolutely positive that he did the right thing in trying to warn people that the world will soon be destroyed. If he had it to do over again, he would. What could have been a simple message of grace became somehow obscured by an growing obsession with condemnation and destruction.
It’s a strange tension for many Christians, one that can be reinforced if you bother going beyond branding and slogans and actually look at the passage that surrounds that iconic verse. It’s a challenging one.
The saying itself comes in the middle of a conversation that Jesus is having with a curious Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus truly struggles to understand what Jesus is talking about, as he’s prone to taking things...like being “born again” completely literally. As Jesus tried to explain himself to Nicodemus, the conversation turns to talk of the purpose of the coming of the Son of Man, one of the terms that Jesus uses to describe his relationships with God. What is his purpose? His purpose is defined by God’s love for the world, and God’s desire to give those who know the truth of Christ’s grace eternal life.
That’s the 3:16 part of John...but Jesus may not be finished talking. Or maybe he is. We aren’t sure, actually, where the words of Jesus end in this passage. In large part, that’s because the Greek language in which this Gospel was written doesn’t happen to have anything like quotation marks. You just have to kinda figure out from the context of a sentence when someone is no longer speaking. Many reputable scholars think that Jesus is done in verse 15, and 3:16 through 3:21 come from the voice of the Gospel writer.
Whichever way, the passage goes on, as conveyed by John’s elegantly simple Greek, to describe the purpose of the Son of Man further. Here, we start to get some mention of condemnation and judgement. Verses 17 through 19 talk a great deal about who is and who is not condemned. Coming off of the grace of verse 16, the rest of this passage seems to stand as a stern warning: believe, or be condemned. The transition can seem as intense as the one that was expressed in the life of Rainbow Man. Grace on the one hand...and the threat on the other.
Here, though, it actually does help to have a smattering of Greek, and to be aware that sometimes what is expressed in the Gospel we read may not be exactly what was written by it’s author. English and Greek are related, as English relies on Greek for many of it’s words...but they are not the same.
The word “condemn,” for instance, has a strong negative connotation. You condemn a building when it’s time to knock it down. You condemn a rainbow-afro wearing John 3:16 quoting hostage taker to prison for pulling a pistol on bystanders and the police. Condemnation means a judgment in the negative. Problem is, the word that the most ancient texts of John’s Gospel uses to describe what the Son of Man is doing in verses 17 through 19 doesn’t have that negatively charged meaning. The word is krino, and it just means to judge or to decide. It can just as easily imply a positive outcome as a negative outcome. Where it appears in verse 19, for instance, as the related word krisis, any sense of being a negative value judgment is completely missing. It is simply “judgment,” or, if you’re using the NIV, “verdict.” Verse 19 would read pretty strangely if we translated it as “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world...” That would as far from John’s point as it’s possible to get, and that point is the depth of God’s love as expressed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. What we get when we go back to the original language is a much more consistent passage, one that speaks primarily of God’s love and God’s willingness to embrace humankind, and in which condemnation and damnation are not a central part of what Jesus was all about.
There, I think, is a core Gospel challenge for many contemporary Christians. It’s easy for the message of grace to be lost in our desire to be sure of our own savedness. It’s easy for the message of God’s Kingdom to be lost as we dither endlessly over who gets to go to their 10,000 square foot mansion in heaven and who gets Left Behind. It’s easy for us to take this message of reconciling love as just another thing to argue about or to use as a club against those who don’t believe as we do.
It’s just a question of judgment.
