We have just heard what some
say is the most famous verse in the Bible. And indeed, if anyone were to say to
me, “I’ve only got time to memorise one Bible quotation, which should I choose?”,
I would recommend John Chapter 3 Verse 16:
“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.”
But of course the Bible is more
than just one verse, and Christianity is more than just a religion of the book.
It is a religion of a Person: Jesus. That Person is God’s complete revelation
of himself. It is that Person who speaks to us through the Bible with all its
different kinds of writing from various times and situations. It is as though
we see the face of Jesus throughout the Bible, but through a lattice of different
kinds of style and workmanship.
So there is a lot in the Bible
that leads up to the full revelation of God in Jesus, a lot that prepares the
way. We see something of that in today’s readings, because there is a
progression that runs through them.
In Genesis, going back to the
dawn of human history, Abraham is called by God and believes. He is called to
leave. To go on a journey, he knows not where. He is called from beyond, out of
the society and the home that he has known. Even in today’s world his call
might seem daunting, but to an ancient society it is incomprehensible apart
from faith. It is almost taboo to leave your ancestral home. It is a call which
truly comes from outside.
But here we see the beginnings
of the Church. The Church, “ekklesia” in Greek, means those who are “called
out”. The Church is the community formed by God’s call to come out of their old
way of living and seek the new life that God offers. In the Church the call of
Abraham continues.
Abraham has to leave behind
more than just the place where he had lived to set out into the unknown. On
that journey he finds he is also called to leave behind old ways of thinking. He
is called to leave behind an idea of life bounded by death: although he and his
wife are very old, God promises him children, indeed, he will have more
descendants than the sand of the seashore. He is called to leave behind a
culture of ritual violence, when the Lord
intervenes to prevent the sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac. In all this Abraham
has to follow in faith to a place he does not know. From a human perspective this
is risky, even foolhardy. But it is God’s initiative and God proves himself
faithful. When God calls, we can trust God and follow.
Now there was a promise made to
Abraham, a promise of blessing. “In you all the families of the earth shall be
blessed”. St Paul in the letter to the Romans tells us what this blessing is:
grace through faith, available to everyone. Abraham’s descendants are all who
live by faith, all those who have heard God’s call to leave behind what they
know and follow in faith. Thus all the families of the earth are blessed in
Abraham.
But what is the goal of this
journey of faith? In our Gospel reading today Jesus tells Nicodemus, it is the
life “from above”, the life of the Spirit.
There’s a pun in the Greek in
what Jesus says, the phrase translated “born from above” can also mean “born
again”. And Nicodemus only gets the
second meaning, being “born again”, and he doesn’t understand how that can
happen. “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”
In terms of the life of the
flesh, biological life, this is incomprehensible. But the “birth from above”
that Jesus is talking about is the birth of the Spirit, a new kind of life
altogether.
Eternal life is the life that
God lives, life without limit, giving itself without ever being diminished. And
this is what Jesus promises us. Eternal life is not biological life stretched
out for ever. It is the very life of God given to us by his Spirit, raising us
to union with him.
The life of the Spirit which
blows where it wills reflects the journey of Abraham, go to a land that I will
show you. The spirit brings freedom to follow in the adventure of faith. There
is no map! And this life is offered to all, it is entirely God’s gift, given
out of love for the world.
And the world stands utterly in
need of that love, that gift of new life. The world is still in the place that
Abraham left behind, fixated on sacrifice, violence and death. The world God
loves is the world which is so centred on death that it will crucify the Lamb
of God.
When Jesus is crucified it is
as if the whole of human history draws together into a point at that moment.
All the ways in which humanity has gone wrong from the beginning are there on
Calvary, nailing the victim to the cross. And the victim nailed to the cross
forgives his murderers, and in them everyone and everything. God in his love
for the world gives himself on the cross, placing himself at the centre of our
darkness and sin.
And having given himself to us
in our darkness, he can also give himself to us as life. Jesus was raised from
the dead, and our death-bound human culture was broken right open so that God’s
new life could come flooding in. The theologian James Alison has written: “It
was not just that God loved his son and so raised him up, but that the giving
of the son and his raising up revealed God as love for us”.
When we say (with John’s
Gospel) that the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world, we don’t just
mean that individual sins are forgiven. It is the whole human condition,
everything that humanity has been from the beginning, that is caught up in
God’s love, and forgiven and made new. A new beginning if offered to all:
instead of being trapped in our death-bound desires, Jesus enables us to be
caught up in the desire of God for the world, which is love.
Jesus is the completely
transforming encounter with God who is love for us. In him humanity is called
out of its old death-bound imagination to share the life of God.
This is God’s gift to us. We do
not need to strive for it, we cannot earn it. It is offered to everyone, no
exceptions, whoever you are and whatever your life has been. The new life of
the Spirit is “from above”, from beyond us. God’s call comes to us to leave
behind our old way of living and to follow in faith. And all we have to do is
believe his promise. The land that he will show us is eternal life, the life
that God lives, his love given for us and to us so that we might love
eternally. God’s promise did not fail for Abraham, it did not fail for Jesus. It
will not fail for us.
We, the Church called out from
the world, are part of that same call, that same story, that same promise. God
is faithful. He keeps his promises. And he so loved the world, and you, and me,
that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish
but have eternal life.
No comments:
Post a Comment