A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 10, 2024 by Revd Richard Carter
Reading for address: John 3: 14-21
The symbol for the Gospel of John is the eagle. The bird that can fly in the heights of the mountains and towards the sun, but can also see the smallest and most intricate detail below as it swoops down to the earth. John’s gospel has the same character. It sees the cosmic Christ. The Word present from the very beginning of time and for all time. It sees the vision of this above – but it is a Gospel which also sees the detail, the intimate drama of human life. And it is a gospel that operates on these two levels at once: it sees the heavenly and the earthly not as separate domains but as intimately connected. As Jesus says, ‘You will see the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’ The drama moves freely and ambivalently between the revelation of God above and the human world below.
Our gospel passage today comes from Jesus’ meeting with Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a man who has come to visit Jesus by night. Present in that simple sentence is both the real local context – he has come by night because he does not want to be seen – and on the universal level the gospel is suggesting that Nicodemus is still in the darkness and is like a moth attracted to the light. Like, perhaps, many of us.
When Nicodemus’ dialogue begins it begins in a very tentative human way. Not on the cosmic stage. He calls Jesus ‘Rabbi’, a title of authority and respect, and acknowledges the presence of God in Jesus’ ministry. Nicodemus is fascinated but unsure, pulled and yet pulling back, wanting to enter an encounter and yet anxious of what others might think or where that encounter might lead. But straight away Jesus confronts Nicodemus, ‘Amen, Amen: Very truly I tell you I tell you no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.’ Jesus cuts to the chase: Nicodemus is as confused as we are. There is confusion even in the very interpretation of the words ‘born again’ or is it ‘born from above.’ What is it that Jesus requires of us? What is this transformation of which he speaks? Nicodemus gets hold of the wrong end of the image. ‘How can anyone,’ he asks ‘be born after having grown old. Can anyone enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’
But Jesus’ words are a challenge to transformation beyond our human formulas – where the above has broken into the below, where God’s stage and our stage are impacting upon one another like the shift of cosmic plates. Our gospel is not offering a formula or a means of control, it’s a whole new way of being and seeing and living. Our gospel is like our East window – that explosion of light that bends the bars and sets us free and the ripples refracting outwards. It’s that ladder between and earth. It is that cross that will lift our eyes to see the eternal love of God.
As today’s gospel begins, who is speaking? Is it Jesus, or is it the gospel writer, or the community of the early church? The meeting with Nicodemus has become like the eagle now soaring into the sun and looking down on all that lies below. Then we reach these words – words that are like the summit of the gospel. That seem to contain in a sentence all the gospel is and all we are called to become.
‘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 his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world may be saved through him.’
I remember having to learn these words at Sunday school. And yet they are words that so often the church has failed to embody. Indeed these words of love and inclusion have been used not to include but to exclude – words of salvation have been turned into words of condemnation and threat. Unless you believe in Jesus Christ you will be damned. But today I invite you now to meditate once more upon those astonishing words.
God so loved the world.
God did not just love, he so loved so much so that he was impelled by that love into giving the most precious gift that God could possibly give. This is not love as a passive thing but a love that so loves, that God offers all. All of God’s self. And who does God love? The world. The whole world.
God so loved the world.
I’d like you just for a few seconds, like one of those panoramic camera shots, to hold the whole world in your minds’ eye. Google Earth the world – in its totality, all of it. That blue planet like the first shots from outer space. The beauty of the planet shrouded in wisps of cloud. Astronauts have spoken of the cognitive shift that affects them when they see the earth from space. Many say they no longer identify with a specific nationality or culture after seeing earth from outer space, instead they see themselves, and all citizens on earth, as one people, living on one world. The world, ‘a tiny, fragile ball of life hanging in the void, shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere.’ From space, astronauts cannot see physical borderlines or national boundaries, all evidence of division and separateness vanishes. The conflicts that divide countries, cultures have no meaning if you contemplate God’s love for the world, this miraculous ‘pale blue globe in the vastness of space.’
You don’t have to go to space to experience this Overview Effect, you don’t have to be an astronaut. You can feel it just by closely studying an image of earth from space. Or even looking down through an aircraft porthole window as you fly over a continent. You’re struck with such an overwhelming sense of the beauty and the originality of it, that here is a world that contains the mystery and wonder of so many lives and relationships and hopes and fears. You don’t even have to be on an aeroplane to contemplate God’s love for the world. You can be on the London Underground, or walking through St James’s Park or in this church this morning.
What does God so loved the world mean? It means its oceans, its land, its vegetation, its trees, its biodiversity, its abundant life. And it means every nation, every culture, every faith, every colour, every sexuality, every age, every human body, every single living creature. God so loved the world. Every Israeli, every Palestinian, every Syrian, every Somalian, every Ukrainian, every Russian, every Muslim, every Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, people of faith and no faith.
God so loved the world means feeling in your own heart the pain of that love for every nation threatened by rising sea levels, or by poverty; every migrant in rough seas calling for help among the waves; every asylum seeker or migrant in a vast tented refugee camp or in a prison; or on an all-night bus in London; and every homeless person living around this church. God so loved the world: every single child screaming for their parents in Gaza or lying covered in blood in an overcrowded bombed hospital with no lights. And as you see the target on the screen of a missile strike – every single person who might be in the vicinity of the building you see from above hit and turned to dust. Every Jewish family member holding the placard of a relative taken hostage they are longing to return and the anxiety and grief which fills every single moment of their waking life – praying that they will return. God so loved this world. And it’s not past tense. It’s present tense. God so loves this world. I ask Olga from Ukraine how she feels about watching the news on the TV about her country. She is silent for a long time. Then she shows me pictures on her mobile phone of the classroom of children she used to teach before the invasion began. ‘This is not Ukraine’ she says pointing at the TV news with tears in her eyes – this is Ukraine- these children are Ukraine. God so loves this world.
‘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 his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world may be saved through him.’
This is the incredible generosity at the heart of God into which we are called and called to mirror. A love expressed in a total act of relationship and self-giving. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Feel the tenderness, the heartbreak, of what that means. To give all that you love in love. Not just one thing among many but your only child. Giving the thing that is closest to your own heart in love for others. The cosmic God in Christ becomes the personal. The God greater than anything we can conceive becomes the child held in Mary’s arms, growing up in Nazareth, the friend, the teacher, the loved one, the accused, the victim – the one suffering and being victimised – the dying rejected one. The cosmic universal God becomes our neighbour.
God so loved the world. That also means you and me, surprising, perhaps foolish but the very substance of our faith. That you and me, all of us are the beloved of God, made in God’s image. infinitely precious. Think of the planetary vision held together and united with the specific the individual – the close up. The God who loves the whole world also knowing each hair on your head and each bird that falls. The God who does not send his Son to condemn the world but in order that we might have life in all its fulness.
I once heard Rowan Williams preach these words at a Lambeth Conference in 2008 when, 16 years ago, the church was divided over many of the issues it is still divided over. He said this and it is a truth I have returned to again and again.
Each person is diminished by the pain of another person and enriched by the holiness of another and if we say that we no longer can hear the pain of another, we can no longer feel empathy with a homeless man in London, an asylum seeker seeking a safe home, a mother and her family threatened by global warming, a political prisoner beaten with sticks because he has voted for the opposition, or a sinner who has lost the way: if we our church is not living this connectedness with humanity then God forgive us and help us for we have lost Christ the Word who became flesh and lived among us… This is unity, this is our calling, to let the Son of God be revealed in us, to be a sign of a unity that brings alive that deep connectedness in the human world.
God so loved the world.
Love for the world specific and universal, immanent and transcendent – here and now and yet for all and for all people everywhere, the gift of God for us, here on the edge of Trafalgar Square, and for the whole world, today 10 March 2024 and for all eternity
