John 3:13-17
There’s a moment in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest when Miss Prism, the governess, admits to having written a novel. Cecily expresses the hope that it does not have a happy ending, and Miss Prism says:
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
In fact, as opposed to in fiction, the good often end unhappily. The world is full of innocent suffering – look no further than Gaza, where children are dying for lack of food, for evidence of that. And on Holy Cross Day we reflect on the supreme example of innocent suffering and of self-emptying love.
Today’s Epistle explores that idea of self-emptying love.
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…”
What Paul is saying is that Jesus chose to accept the limitations of human life, including our vulnerability to suffering and our mortality. The Cross is a reminder that even our most painful experiences, physical and emotional, need not separate us from the love of God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way:
“Through every event, however untoward, there is access to God.”
He was in a Gestapo prison when he wrote those words, and he was executed shortly afterwards.
Today’s Gospel explains why Jesus emptied himself. It offers the whole Christian message in a few verses. Jesus foretells his own death on the Cross:
“…so must the Son of Man be lifted up…”
And then speaks of God’s purposes:
“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.”
In that single sentence that Jesus utters the little word “so” –
“…for God so loved the world...”
Words can have several meanings, and, over time, they shed some meanings and gain others. I have no doubt that the teenagers with whom I once worked as a teacher would understand the word “so” in this context as meaning “very much”. They would say “That’s so unfair” or “That’s so the right thing to do”, and I once overheard, at a bus stop, one girl saying to another, “That’s so my bus.”
To read this verse from St John’s Gospel as meaning “God loved the world so very much that he gave his only Son…” would not be a misunderstanding, for the Incarnation and the Passion of Christ are evidence of the extent of God’s love for humankind and on Holy Cross Day we are reminded of the extent of God’s love.
But that isn’t what the word translated as “so” in today’s Gospel actually means. A more accurate translation would be “God loved the world in this way – he gave his only begotten Son…” Jesus is commenting on the nature of God’s love, and only indirectly on its extent. And what he is saying about the nature of God’s love is firstly that it is self-giving – it involves God coming into the world to redeem it and accepting the human condition in all its joys and sorrows. Secondly, he is telling us that God’s love is universal. The world, in the original Greek, is “kosmos” – not just Planet Earth but the whole of creation. “God so loved the cosmos…”, not “God so loved members of a particular race”, nor “God so loved the citizens of a particular nation state, nor even “God so loved followers of a particular faith”. Because it is universal, the love of God is also unconditional.
But unconditional love requires a response, and the response may or may not be forthcoming.
“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.”
The second half of this verse is often used as an argument that salvation is only possible for Christian believers, for those who assent to the doctrines of the Church.
That seems to me to be a dangerous narrowing of God’s purpose, as though God were saying “Respond to my love by agreeing with me on the fundamentals of Christian doctrine.” That’s a misunderstanding of the Greek word translated here as “believes”, for that word isn’t merely or even mainly about assenting to propositions. It’s more about trust and response and the kind of understanding that comes from experience.
When we humans love, the response we hope for is not that another person will agree with us on all issues, but rather that someone else will love us. The purpose of God’s self-giving, self-emptying, universal and unconditional love is, surely, to evoke from human beings a love of exactly the same kind. To believe in Jesus is to respond to him with that kind of self-giving, self-emptying, universal and unconditional love. And that leaves open the possibility that those who have never heard the Christian Gospel, and those who have found aspects of Christian theology baffling and unacceptable, may nevertheless have responded in the way that the self-giving, self-emptying God both shows us and seeks to evoke in us.
Miss Prism’s preferred type of fiction involved the good ending happily, and the bad unhappily. In the light of Easter, the Cross isn’t the story of the supremely good person ending unhappily, for self-emptying, self-giving love triumphs in the Resurrection and today and every Sunday is a celebration of that.