4th Sunday in Lent
Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
John 3:14-21
[Jesus said:] 14“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son-of-Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16For God loved the world in this way, that God gave the Son, the only begotten one, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
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The Enormity of the Gift
Grace to you, beloved of God, and peace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
I am sure you are acquainted with a gift exchange game called white elephant. If, by chance, you are not familiar with it, everyone in the game buys a gift for a certain price and puts no names on it. The participants then draw numbers to decide the order by which they will choose their gift. All they have to choose their gift is the package or what you can feel with your senses, weight, shape, smell, the sounds it makes when you shake it, etc. Idealistically, you don’t know who brought which gift except your own. When your turn comes, you can choose a gift or steal a gift already picked. Then, the person whose gift was stolen can pick a new one or steal from someone else whose gift has not been stolen yet. There are multiple possible outcomes, making for the fun of the game.
Some people like to add to the fun by being, well, mean. Sometimes, they purposefully buy a very low-priced gift – I think this has been mostly outlawed these days – or they get one they know nobody in the group will like and place them in very nice packages. Sometimes, they get creative; they pack other things with the present to change the sound it makes when you shake, or they put a lot of stuffing to prevent it from making any sound at all. Other people like to play with multiple packing layers until you end up with tiny little things, which can be either disappointing or, for instance, a very cool gift card. Perfumes may be added to throw away the senses, etc. The lesson you learn about playing with a white elephant is that you never, ever judge a gift by the package.
For the Christian believer, no gift is greater than the love God demonstrated to us through Jesus Christ. However, some among us, the baptized, the born anew from water and spirit, for one reason or another, don’t seem to like the package of this massive gift. There are those who don’t like the image of a son being killed. Why did someone innocent, without sin, need to go through abuse, injustice, torture, and die so God could be satisfied and the punishment that we deserved taken away? The image of a scaping goat in the form of a child does not sit very well with them. I would say they miss that it was God who chose to give up power and part of who God is and be lifted up to the cross to prove that God cannot be defeated even by the worst inside of us.
Others don’t see how the gift was effective. If the lamb of God was to take away the world’s sin, why don’t things get better? Why do human beings keep launching against themselves over the fear of scarcity instead of embracing the abundance that came with the gift? Why don’t we sit at the table to eat like that anymore? Well, remember, we are free to reject the gift. After we unwrap it, we may not like what we see, leave it at the party host’s house, and walk away.
There are those yet, especially us Lutherans, who scratch their heads and raise their frown when the biblical text seems to suggest that there are some strings attached to the gift. God loved the whole kosmos, everything and everyone, so much that God gave up a part of who God is to prove his love for us. Everyone who believes that God did this will never die but live. Jesus did not come to condemn anyone but so that the kosmos, everything, and everyone, be saved through him. However, those who do not believe are already judged.
Or, we are indeed saved by grace through faith. We can’t earn it. It is not our own doing. It is indeed a gift. Nonetheless, good works – that is, trust in God and good acts to others – should follow such faith, wrote the Reformer. If it doesn’t, faith is false and not true (The Smalcald Articles: III, art. xiii, par. 2).
Pastor, we believe! I don’t disagree.
Nonetheless, it is kind of like this. Imagine God gave us unsolicited money for swimming classes. The instructor gave all the information necessary so we would never drown over rip tides, rough seas, etc. But then we drown, either because we used the money for something else and did not take the class or did not trust what we were taught. We got to use the gift for what the gift is meant for! If it is a jar of expensive perfume, should we waste it on anything or anyone else but Christ?
God’s beloved, from birth to the cross, the package was never meant to be pretty. It is wrapped in rags encrusted with dirt, blood, and tears. But the gift is so magnificent that it has the power not only to wash away the crusts but also to transform the rags into fine linens embedded in the fragrances of spices and perfumes. It has the power to restore us to what we were meant to be from the beginning: agents of forgiveness, mercy, love, restoration, and truth. We were meant to be the ones who get things to become better for others.
God always had one outcome in mind for the gift of faith: that everything and everyone would be well and thrive. The more the gift of faith is put back into trusting God’s promises and the well-being of what surrounds us, the better everything becomes and the closer we get to the light of the world. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Amen.
Bridging Faith 