“For God so loved the world that
He gave…” How often are these words
quoted? Even at football games, banners
with “John 3:14” appear in the stadium.
Popular preachers often fall back on these familiar words to communicate
to the faithful when they do not know what else to say. What is often used and over-used is rarely heard
any more. Minds are numbed by mindless
repetition, thinking stops, and one may just wallow in the warmth of the
familiar—perhaps like a sow in mud.
Others become bored or even antagonistic at the staleness of preachers
who fall back on clichés and over-worked quotations—as if they no longer can
think for themselves, but parrot supposedly comforting words. Parrots become tedious in their repetitions,
eh?
Long have we noticed that virtually
never does anyone quoting John 3:14 continue with the rest of the passage, even
though what follows develops what has been said, and grounds the words in real
human experience. Consider how St. John
continues: “… Whoever does not believe
in Christ has already been condemned.”
Now we are getting closer to the evangelist’s intention, and now the
words are sounding more true to us—who live in a “culture of death” that
considers human life so cheap and expendable that we load ourselves up on
drugs, and even kill pre-born infants for the sake of “convenience,” or to
assert “a right to choose” to kill, if one so wishes. What gods we make ourselves.
That St. John had in mind spiritual
and moral corruption such as we experience daily, consider his words that follow
immediately after “God so loved the world….”
“Now is the Judgment: the
Light came into the world, but human beings preferred darkness to light,
because their deeds were evil. Everyone
who does wicked things hates the light, and does not come into the light, so
that his deeds might not be exposed.”
Those who quote John 3:16 so glibly seem blind to these words, which are
among the most acute analyses of good and evil we find in the entire New
Testament. Those who do evil hate the
light, they resist the truth of God, they prefer their evil deeds to the hard
work of personal conversion and actually doing good. How many Americans want to be told that we
have dabbled in evil by ignoring God, by removing the awareness of God from
schools, by allowing and even promoting the killing of infants in the womb, by
destroying our minds and bodies by drug and alcohol abuse, by distorting minds
by hardened and poisonous ideologies?
Resistance to the light of God and God’s truth is far more common in our
midst, in our communities, in our society than virtually anyone admits. In the words of Jesus to his own people: “How often I would have gathered you up, as a
mother hen gathers her chicks, and yet you refused.”
Wallowing in our wicked ways, or are
we drawn to the light? The evangelist
John continues: “Whoever lives the
truth comes to the light, so that his deeds may be clearly seen as done in
God.” If and when we Americans really
learn to do good, and reject our evil ways, then we will “come to the light” of
God, and then and only then can we be “a shining city on the hill.” There is nothing shining about evil,
self-deception, or self-destruction.
Goodness and mercy; deeds of justice; protecting human life from the
moment of conception to natural death; nourishing our youth with truth, rather
than poisoning their minds with mindless pop culture and rigid ideological
non-thinking—these are deeds that will shine forth, and show that we are indeed
drawn to the Light of God, and coming clean in His eternal presence, faithfully
doing His will, and not our own.
“For God so loved the world that
He gave His only Son….” And now you know
the rest of the story.
