Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fourth Sunday of Lent 2024

The first prize I ever won was awarded at Sunday School for colouring the text ‘God is love’. Generations of children have done the same, painting or embroidering these three words from the First Letter of John.

When candidates for ordination are interviewed, they are always asked about the Gospel. What do they believe? Can they express it or at least give an outline? The answers vary. Everyone has their own testimony. But without fail they will speak of God’s love, whether for them or for the world.

The author of the Fourth Gospel, St John, manifestly believed that God is love. ‘God’, he writes, ‘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’ (3.16). We might expect an evangelist or an ordinand to talk like this. But the same is true of many who would not claim to be particularly Christian. Their sense of Christianity is roughly that God loves us and so we ought to love one another. 

Believers have their religious experiences. Others hold to their rough and ready belief in God. Atheists live with their confusion. But, all of us, whatever our belief, make another assumption. We treat love as though it were essentially a feeling. Like all feelings it may then turn out to be temporary. This accounts for the banal recipes that are supposed to transform the world. ‘Love makes the world go round’, which ends up as a soft drink advertisement for ‘perfect harmony’.

To be foolish in proclaiming the Gospel is not new. Eagerness has frequently led Christians to behave strangely and even stupidly. But God seems to be able to cope with us. Even the Church manages to survive. But there is a danger. We may come to believe that we possess a scheme for saving the world: ‘If only people loved everyone else, as I do because God loves me, the world would become a better place.’ Gradually our ideas of love are reduced to mutual fondness and we restrict love to mutual affection between friends.

This morning’s gospel reading (John 3.14-21) challenges all this. In his night-time conversation with Nicodemus Jesus speaks of trust and distance. He says, ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life’ (3.14-15). Here, as always with John, we should read the text on a number of levels. But ‘lifting up’ must first refer to his crucifixion.

A cross was raised above people and the victim was separated from them. By being hung up Jesus was literally distanced from people. A crucified man was also the object of public disgust, not admiration. The crucified Jesus was in another sense also separated from the rest of humankind. Later in John’s gospel, Jesus says again, ‘When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself’ (12.32). By his separation Jesus is saying he will draw everyone into a new closeness with him.

Distance is an ingredient in loving trust. It is not the whole. But it is the key, if we are really willing to entrust ourselves to others and allow them to use us. It is through being generous with ourselves that we find we come into greater closeness with people. Distance and closeness, trust and intimacy, then combine in a profound experience of what we call love.

In his book Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, W H Vanstone, tells a story which illustrates this in an unforgettable way. He told of a surgeon who was called upon to carry out an extremely complicated brain operation in a London hospital for the very first time. The operation was performed upon a young man of great promise for whom, after an accident, there seemed no other remedy. It was an operation of the greatest delicacy in which a small error would have had fatal consequences. In the outcome the operation was a triumph, but it involved seven hours of intense and uninterrupted concentration on the part of the surgeon. When it was over, a nurse had to take him by the hand and lead him from the operating theatre like a blind man or a little child. He was utterly spent, exhausted, emptied by his generous self-giving.

That is what the work of Christ on the cross is like. It is a generous self-giving in which God spends and is spent for the sake of humanity. When we see the cross in this way, we are better able to deal with the tendency to want to manipulate others, especially those to whom we are drawn.

Nicodemus approached Jesus at night under the cover of darkness. He has acknowledged Jesus as someone who has come from God. He is perplexed by his insistence that no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born from above – of water and Spirit. We enter the conversation when Jesus looks back to the incident described in this morning’s first reading (Numbers 21.4-9). He draws a parallel between the way that Moses lifted up the serpent on a pole in the wilderness to heal the Israelites and the way that he too, as the Son of Man, will be lifted up on a cross. Both images —the serpent and the cross—are models of God’s saving acts. Both offer a perspective of what love involves and how entrusting need never be mere self-concern. The serpent and the cross display to us how God’s entrusting of himself to us is his way of loving us.

In the Weimar Edition of his Works Martin Luther writes that the cross puts everything to the test. ‘Blessed,’ he says, ‘is the person who understands.’ It is not just that we look at the cross, but that it scrutinizes our belief, including what we believe about the cross itself. It is the core of Christianity. It is not doctrine or dogma. First and foremost, it is a story. That is why, central as it is to the Christian faith, it still impresses itself on non-believers.

Nicodemus is drawn to Jesus but perplexed by his teaching. Yet at the end of the gospel, and this time just before nightfall, he assists with the burial of Jesus’ body. His discipleship may have taken awhile to develop through the time when he stood up for Jesus on a point of law and was mocked for his pains (7.50-52), to the moment when, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, he performs the last act of love he can for this strange dead teacher (19.38-42).

Throughout his gospel John recognizes the cosmic implications of a new world re-created and re-formed in the ‘lifting up’ of Jesus on the cross. There is no doubt about the direction of his narrative. It is the climax of the story. And when we get there, we find that the glory, the final revelation, the completion of Christ’s work uses the same root verb that the Greek Septuagint uses in Genesis (2:1) to describe the completion of the old world, the old creation. ‘Tetelestai’: ‘It is finished’ (19.30).

I end with these words from a poem, God’s Easter Uprising:

In the daily transactions of living,
In the simple concerns of each day,
A heaven may open like blossom
Like children learning to play.
The truth of God’s Easter uprising
Beyond doubt will never be proved,
But drawn by faith’s deeper perception
We know through his Love we are called.