Thursday in the First Week of Lent

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. (John 3:16)

This is it: the Gospel in one sentence, the Summary Statement, the one that people quote via chapter and verse reference on license plates and tee shirts and signs held up on camera at football games. Everything you need to know about the Christian message is here.

Which of course means that there is far more going on here than first meets the eye. The sentence seems direct and self-evident enough. But there are words here that have depths and nuances and extended clouds of meanings that defy too-easy definition: love, gave, believe, perish, eternal, life.  Or, for that matter, God and Son. Each of these words points to relationships and relationships of relationships that can link up in different ways.

For instance, many people interpret this verse to mean that God "gave" his Son Jesus to die for us, to be the substitutionary atonement for our sins, to pay the price that we ourselves are too weak or too sinful to pay, so that God's wrath could be appeased; and that by "believing" that this substitution has been made, Christians are now freed from the death-sentence of sin so that we will not "perish" but have "eternal life" in heaven.

Others interpret this verse to mean that God "gave" his Son to live for us, to be the incarnation of the divine Wisdom and Word, to demonstrate in his own body and activity what a human life lived with divine love looks like. We in our turn "believe" in that divinely lived human life, not simply by accepting assertions about it as true even if we can't prove them, which is what we often mean by the word "believe," but by doing our best to live that way ourselves, by "believing in" the example of Jesus' life to the degree that we let its core values become our core values too. Living our lives with Christly core values puts us in touch with "eternal" realities in the heart of God, God's own love and generosity and creativity that are always and everywhere at work, through all the changes of time and space and temporal process, always expressed in ways appropriate to just that moment and just that experience. To live in touch with eternal divine activity means that we become self-transcending: in each and every moment of our experience there is something that transcends the moment, something not simply limited to the moment, something that enters into the world around us and God around everything and carries on the divinely inspired love and creativity of the moment. That self-transcendence saves us from "perishing," as the moments of our lives enter more and more into God. "Eternal life" in this sense is not just something for heaven after we die, but a quality of God-presence we enjoy and share in thick of this life.

And the root of it all is love: "God so loved the world that he gave his Son." Love is that which transcends the perishing of the moment and opens the way to living in eternal divine reality. The Gospel in one sentence comes down, I think, even to one word, noun, verb, and imperative all at once: Love.