The Fourth Sunday in Lent

"Now is the Time of Salvation"

The Rev. David Frazelle

About 10 years ago, in order to finish my degree in biblical studies at the Catholic Institute of Paris, I had to write a paper of 20 or so pages in length on one short passage from Scripture. I chose the passage from John that happens to be today’s gospel passage – John 3:14-21. I chose it because I had chosen to focus on the NT, and because I had taken an excellent course in John’s gospel that I had found fascinating. But most of all, I chose this passage because I had grown up watching Atlanta Braves baseball games on television, and I inevitably would see some fan in the stands behind the catcher holding up a sign that said, “John 3:16.” I was curious to see what scholars and saints over the centuries had said about this verse that has become such a favorite among baseball fans.

[This morning, I invite you to take your bulletins/bibles and look again at this gospel passage with me.] Today, I want to talk a little about how John the evangelist inspires us in this passage to believe in Christ, to act on our belief, and to live in God’s eternity now, through our actions.

Belief is the primary subject of our passage. John speaks of belief five times in our seven verses. In v. 15, whoever believes in the Son of man may have eternal life. In v. 16, whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Verse 18 uses the verb “to believe” three different times. Belief is also the central aim of the entire gospel according to John. You may remember from the prologue of John’s gospel the line, “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”(1:12) And you may recall from the end of the gospel the summary lines, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.” (20:30-31) John’s whole gospel, including our short passage, is about belief.

Belief is often taken to mean thinking the right things about Jesus. For the record, I am in favor of thinking the right things about Jesus. It is helpful to do so and, clearly, John the evangelist cares deeply about right belief in the intellectual sense. But that kind of belief is not at the heart of this passage. Our gospel passage today is about the kind of belief that implies action much more than thinking. The verb-preposition combination “believe in” or “believe towards,” which is used so many times in our passage, had no precedent in Greek philosophy or in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This new kind of belief, scholars say, involves submitting all one’s actions to the will of another. This kind of belief concerns the total dedication of one’s life.

This belief, in other words, consists of a pattern of loving actions in response to God’s supreme action of love. The word John uses for “love” in verses 16 and 19 indicates not feeling but action in time and space. God demonstrated his love by the actions of giving and sending his Son.

A response of belief to God, then, must entail actions of love. In verse 19, those who are condemned love darkness through their evil actions, or deeds. By contrast, in v. 21, those who believe move towards the light through their deeds.
John is inviting us, his listeners, to believe in Jesus’s act of love by acting in love.

I already mentioned the kind of reading of this passage that takes belief to mean correct thinking. This same kind of limited reading also normally focuses on eternal life as a future reward for such belief. Eternal life is presented as either a reward at one’s death or as a reward at the end of time.

Our passage at hand bears a very different proclamation about judgment and eternal life. In our passage, eternal life begins now, with each action through which we express our belief in Christ and our love for him. In our passage, there is no future tense. In v. 15, whoever believes in the Son of man has eternal life – not “will have” but “has” eternal life. In v. 16, whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. The verb for salvation in v. 17 is in the present tense. He who believes in Christ is not condemned, and he who does not believe is condemned already. The final judgment has already happened! V. 19 proclaims that the light has already come, and some people have already pronounced their own condemnation because they loved darkness through their deeds. Those who reject Christ are stuck in the past tense because of their active rejection of the light of Christ. By contrast, those who believe live in the present in God’s ultimate reality. In v. 21, those who do what is true come, here and now, to the light of Christ, and do their deeds in God. In other words, those who believe in Christ through their actions in this life are already eternal life in God.

There is a very interesting textual variant that occurs just before our passage. In John 3:13, one verse before our passage, many manuscripts and therefore most modern translations read, “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.” Three important, reliable manuscripts, however, read “No one has ascended into heaven but he who is in heaven.” The implication is that if Jesus during his earthly ministry could be on earth and in heaven at the same time, so can his followers through the gift of his Holy Spirit. Those who believe in him have eternal life.

And this proclamation of eternal life, realized here in the present, echoes throughout John’s gospel. In chapter 5, Jesus will say “Truly, truly I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life (v. 24). In chapter 6, Jesus says simply, “He who believes has eternal life.” (v. 47) A few verses later, Jesus places this belief in the Eucharistic context and says “he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life . . .” (6:54). John the evangelist proclaims more boldly than any other gospel writer that to believe in Christ is to act in Christ, and to act in Christ is to receive eternal life in the here and now.

Modern philosophers, whether they knew it or not, have agreed with John the evangelist on his view of belief, action and final judgment. Wittgenstein wrote that, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” Albert Camus wrote that, “There’s no need to stand about waiting for the Last Judgment – it takes place every day.” And Franz Kafka said, even more succinctly, “Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment; in reality it is a constant court in perpetual session.” Modern philosophy agrees with John, but do we agree? (*see reference notes below*)

I invite you to submit the insights from today’s gospel passage to the test of your own experience of belief. How has your belief expressed itself in action? Or to put it negatively, how would your actions be different if you believed in your heart that God were dead and that the Christ event were meaningless? When has choosing to act out of faith and love for God filled you with new life? When have you received a glimpse or foretaste of eternal life through loving God and neighbor?

When we meditate on it, does not this eternal truth that has come down to us through the ages resonate with the truth of our lives in our day and time – “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

Note: Quotes from Camus, Wittgenstein and Kafka from A Portable Apocalypse: A quotable companion to the end of the world, by Alan Appel, Riverhead, New York, 1999.

Exegetical arguments come from Raymond Brown’s The Gospel According to John, C.H. Dodd’s The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel, Xavier Leon-Dufour’s Lecture de l’Evangile selon Jean, Pheme Perkins’ “The Gospel according to John” in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Saint Augustine’s In Iohannis Evangelium, and my own thinking.