John 3:16 for the Twitter Generation

John 3:16… Like many things that live strongly in the public conscience, we almost hear this verse too much. It has become one of those things—like a commercial jingle—that gets in our heads. As such, I want to pause and leave room for the weight of the verse. Let’s see if we can get there...

            There are five very big verbs in this verse: God loved, he gave, everyone who believes, may not perish, have eternal life. Love, give, believe, not perish, have eternal life. It’s a well-known adage that bad writers use lots of adjectives while great writers know how to use a verb. This is a passage chock full of verbs. But the fact that there are five also confuses the focus. Consciously or subconsciously we resonate with one action over others. To illustrate this point, I asked the members of the ELCA clergy Facebook group what verb they find most important in John 3:16, and as of this morning, 12 pastors voted for love, 9 for gave, 2 for believe, 1 for not perish, and 1 for have eternal life. I want you to take a minute and realize why this is important. 25 pastors from the same denomination did not come to a consensus on what is the most important thing that God does in John 3:16. It’s one verse, but they all emphasize something different.

            This is important for a couple of reasons. When the guy standing behind the goalposts at a football game holds up a sign that reads John 3:16 he has a clear idea of what that means, and he is expecting you will open your Bible, read it and come to the same conclusion. But each of us brings our own experience, bias and considerable influence, and each of us reads that verse differently. We do this every time we interpret and we interpret every time that we read or listen. This is why dwelling in scripture is challenging; texts don’t have one, universal clear meaning devoid of culture, time and context. Scripture is always deep enough to support a multitude of opinions. Faithful reading, therefore, requires taking the whole mess that we have made of God’s word and pulling at the threads to better see what is underneath.

            This is a tough thing to do, because it is much easier to quote little snippets in favor of our various positions. But even John 3:16 is preceded by John 3:15, recalling a passage from Exodus where Moses lifts up the snake. If you don’t know about that passage then you’re missing the context. In order to ground John 3:16 we need John 3:15, and in order to ground John 3:15 we need Numbers 21. All of scripture is a nexus of connections. One brush stroke may make a greater impact on the final portrait, but every stroke was necessary to get there.

            John 3:16 is nice; it is concise, the kind of thing that fits on a bumper sticker. And we are bumper sticker people, or, better yet, we are Twitter people. The motto of the Twitter generation is to keep everything to 140 characters or less. But the Bible refuses to be tweeted. Anything worth believing is both simple and complex, but most of all it is worthy of slow and careful reflection.

            We quote John 3:16 so much because it is that nice little summation of scripture. We use it to tell people about the gift of salvation through Jesus, which is a pretty good thing to share. Keeping it simple is a good start, as long as the simplicity underlies the gravity of the message. God so loved the world. The Greek word for world is cosmos. God loves the cosmos, the whole big picture. And so he sent Jesus. The movement is from God to the world to Jesus, and only then to us as individuals. We can only see from our point of view as individuals, but as Madeleine l’Engle once wrote, “We have point of view, but God has view.”

            We focus on little things. God sees the whole big picture—the cosmos. We want to talk about salvation, but we don’t know what salvation looks like, so we fall back on an individualized concept where it all works out for us in the end. Salvation is not just about the end, but also about the beginning and primarily, for us, the present.

            God loved the world so much that he gave Jesus so that you who believe in him shall experience what it means to be truly saved. To be truly saved is about being well. Salvation is the completion of the law, which is to love God back and to love your neighbor as yourself. True salvation is big, it’s difficult—nay, impossible—to see from our point of view. John 3:16 does not compel us to understand, but it promises salvation nonetheless. We are part of a creation that quakes, that burns, that groans (as Paul says in Romans); all of which is to say that creation is visibly unhealthy. The whole world is in need of Jesus lifted up on the cross.

            Science talks about the groaning of creation in terms of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, for those of who may vaguely remember something of chemistry or physics classes, tells us that the entropy, or the total instability in the universe, is always increasing. Things are getting more and more chaotic, they break down much easier than they are built up. Jesus came not because we are the only messed up creatures on this planet but because God loved the world.

We have this brilliant illustration of chaos that we experience everyday called the internet. The internet brings us together across impossibly large distances, but it also magnifies all the little things that separate us. Suddenly, thrust together over the vastness and virtual anonymity that the internet provides, people are willing to say things they would never say face-to-face. Things are messy. And they continue to get messier still. It’s why it is easy to isolate ourselves from the outside world. We face a huge temptation to turn in on ourselves and avoid the banalities of what goes on out there.

This is why we need John 3:16. “God so loved the world.” The world is complicated; it’s big; there’s a lot of bad stuff going on in the world. It would be much easier if my only concern was God’s love of myself. We read our life experiences into John 3:16—just look at the response of those ELCA pastors. But nevertheless, the big picture matters. Just as an ecosystem suffers when a single species is diseased, so we suffer when others do not know salvation through Christ. Salvation is wellness for the entire body of Christ, and the body of Christ is much bigger than we most often imagine it.

This is why I’m going to make a radical claim, which is this: there is no such thing as individual salvation. Salvation involves the whole picture, so to think of oneself as saved in spite of creation is a strange thought. We are not singular units worthy or unworthy of Christ’s redemption. Salvation is about making everything new; our bodies, yes, but not just our bodies; our family, yes, but not just our family; our natural world, yes, but not just our natural world. Only when everything is returned to health can there be salvation.

We know this intuitively. It is why the internet divides as much as it connects; it is why all of nature is becoming more and more chaotic; it is why the snake was lifted up by Moses and Jesus was lifted up by us; not on a throne but on a cross. That is what salvation looks like. It is a promise that refuses to be tweeted. It is a promise bigger than anything our little points of view can imagine. It is the big view.

Amen.