Lent 4B: God loves even when the world has gone mad

If scripture were rock music John’s account of the Gospel would be Procol Harum’s Whiter Shade of Pale; it is amazing stuff: mysterious, at times dreamlike, half of it incomprehensible. You are left wondering where that came from. Which is why John’s account very nearly didn’t make it into the Canon; it was almost rejected.

Despite the fact that letters and Revelations bear John’s name, it is highly unlikely that any other text from his hand is available to us, since it is linguistically and theologically different to anything else.

It was par for the course in ancient literature to  give a text kudos by adding a respected author’s name to it, as in the Gospel accounts.

John the Beloved disciple of Jesus would have been long dead before the account we know as John came to be completed. Maybe the text that some will remain alive until the day of Jesus’s return was a response to those who claimed the Gospels could not have been written by a disciple or eye witness as they were so long after the events they depicted.

Like Whiter Shade of Pale, John’s account was a one off, a one hit wonder some of whose lyrics continue to inspire and mystify in equal measure. Like Whiter Shade of Pale it too carries some classic lines; the most remembered of course has to be

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

I have been preaching 44 years and not once have I used this as a text for a sermon, because like one of those tracks that get overplayed on the radio you are left without the awe that it should inspire, the sense of something new.

I have of course referred to the verse over the years of course, how could I have not, but I have never felt the need to use it as the text for a sermon not before today.

Today, more so than ever before in my lifetime, we need to know love, in particular God’s love for the World.

I get the impression, more than an impression act, because it is very real, that there is an underlying concern for the World, for the future, for how everything is going, more so than at any time in my life thus far. Putin’s attack on Ukraine has left us again realising that once a dictator unleashes brutal force without a thought for the consequences, there is no telling how this will be checked because if someone gets used to killing tens of thousands, millions matter not. The result is some NATO countries considering entering the war. The situation in the Middle East is being used by those whose agendas include anti-Western values, anti-democratic systems, and anti-capitalism to win over the well intentioned to a common cause. The result being a weakening of common decency, a failure to enforce the rule of law and no go zones in our University campuses and on our capital’s streets for members of the Jewish community who have again become the target for hatred. Meanwhile the climate crisis continues unabated.

We have never needed an awareness of God’s love for the world more than we have today. It is as if we have slipped back to the 1930s again with extremism on the rise, antisemitism unchecked, and tensions spilling over in numerous parts of the World.

Only this last week Christians have been massacred in Sudan, churches burnt and 80,000 Christians fleeing for their lives, and hundreds of Christian girls taken captive in Nigeria. Who will march on our streets for them?

Last month Pakistan deported one million refugees back to Afghanistan, thousands of them Christians. What will be their fate? Who will march for them?

There is a silence all too loud when it comes to the rise of extremism here and elsewhere in our world – unless it fits particular agendas.

So what does it mean for God to love the world?

What would Jesus have considered the world to be? His region of it? The empire? The known world? The world that was yet to become known to a 1st cent middle Eastern Jew?

Debates ensued in previous decades about how much knowledge Jesus would have had of the metaphysical world. For eg whether Jesus would have thought the world to be flat, as did everyone at the time, or whether his knowledge would have surpassed every living human and all knowledge centuries before everyone else – that the earth is in fact a globe. The consensus in the debate was that Jesus the human would have thought of the world as flat because the divine had emptied themself and become human, as concluded by the writer of Philippians.

Whether Jesus thought of the world as flat or a globe is immaterial – the writer of John’s account would have thought of the world in a very different way to us today.

John did not have access to 24 hr news channels, or FaceTime to connect relatives on the other side of the planet in a nanosecond. His world would have been much smaller than ours; but the sentiment was still the same. Everything, everything and everyone, was loved by God, so much so that God was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to prove it.

God had prevented Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac, God would not step in again to rescue his own Son.

What does ‘the world’ mean?

Like the other gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and at the time of writing John’s world was still coming to terms with the destruction of the Temple.

The Temple had meant the world to most of the Jewish communities. Only the theology and practise of three of the sects were not connected so tightly to the existence of the Temple. There were the Essenes and the Pharisees and a third sect was the Jewish believers of Jesus. They too were not so connected with the Temple. The Temple did not mean the world to these three groups.

Though the destruction of Jerusalem was devastating for the people, akin to the fall of Jerusalem six centuries earlier, the faith and beliefs of the Pharisees and the followers of Jesus were less affected. It was these two sects that would go on to evolve into modern day Judaism and Christianity, for their world was not connected to a Temple, their world was much more fluid and linked to their daily lives.

The big question for us is ‘what is our world’ that God loves so much?

What loss would devastate us so much for us to conclude that our world had been destroyed? You will not need me to give examples. You will know what your world is – what it is, who it is, or what you value above all else.

The first text I learnt as a child was ‘Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.’

My heart was one with my Grandma who died when I was four, she was my treasure, and I hers. This meant that my world collapsed for a while.

God loved that world that I had lost. God would love that which I would come to treasure in the years ahead, God still loves this world that is now my treasure.

It is this world we treasure that God loves; this world that is probably our nearest and dearest; this world that is probably where our heart lies; this world that is probably vulnerable, fragile, and limited, it is this world that God loves. Your life, your time, your own love and affection, this is what God loves; God’s love is one with your love.  And God’s love is one with all those who cherish the righteousness, justice and truth of God.

The love that is eternal, not the passing fancy of a celebrity, not the narrow minded bigot, the self-centred politician, uncaring ideologue, not the one with hatred in their hearts, nor the one that prefers the headlines they agree with rather than the integrity and complexity of the small print.

For God so loved the world that is emerging and evolving into the light that God gave us as the example by which to live, the example that will save us from the darkness and despair of a world gone mad.