A sermon on John 3:14-21 by Nathan Nettleton

A couple of weeks ago, I had a lunch with a group of pastors including Ron Ham who used to be a pastor here with us. When I arrived at the pub where we were meeting, it was empty, and when Ron came in a few minutes later and I said that we were the only ones to arrive so far, he joked, “Either that or the rapture has happened and we’re the only ones left behind.” There are lots of people in and around churches who frequently complain that the pastors are not preaching about the end of the world and judgement and hell often enough, and for pastors like me and Ron, one of the coping strategies is this kind of humour that plays with the idea that everything has already happened, just as our critics said, but that it happened without us noticing.

In a funny kind of way, though, there might be some truth in our joking. In a very real way, the final judgement may have already happened, or perhaps more correctly, may already be happening, moment by moment. Usually when we talk about the Day of Judgment or eternal life or heaven and hell or of the final consummation of God’s purposes, we express it in future terms — we speak of it as something that will one day come in a dramatic fashion, and there is no way that Ron and I sitting in the pub will be able to fail to notice. The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke express things in this way. But tonight we heard from John’s gospel and, with a couple of small exceptions, John expresses it quite differently. The scholars call John’s approach “realised eschatology” because it expresses the vision as something that has already begun and is happening now, rather than as just a future event for which we will have to wait.

But as different as they are, I don’t think these two styles are contradicting each other. They are just expressing the same things from different perspectives. It is worth our while trying to understand John’s “realised approach” because not only is it not as well known as the other type, but it may actually be more useful in most situations because its implications are much more immediate. It gives us something to do instead of just something to wait for.

The passage we heard is a very well known one and is part of Jesus’ longer discussion with Nicodemus. It talks quite a bit about “the judgment”, even saying at one point, “And this is the judgment …”, and none of it is described as a future event. But perhaps what is most striking in this passage is it’s image of God’s desperate desire to avoid judgment. It makes it very clear that God does not want anyone to be condemned but that judgment is so unavoidable that people actually do it to themselves. It suggests that the final judgement is not God’s doing, but ours.

“God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order to save it.” And this will to save the world is born out of God’s great love for the world. This week’s reading from the letter to the Ephesians (2:1-10) spells this out even more elaborately — even though we were dead in our sins, God, who is rich in mercy, loved us with a great love… Paul goes on to talk of God showing the “immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”

John is much less flowery in his language but gives us what is probably the most famous of all the statements of God’s love: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” The agony behind that statement can perhaps only be comprehended by those who have seen their children go off to war. Making sacrifices for the love of a particular person is a bit easier to relate to, but when you think of trying to love a whole population in such a way that you’d be willing to put your own children on the line to rescue them from a danger, it is a more difficult thing to imagine.

We find it hard enough to love the people of Somalia and Ethiopia enough to sacrifice $50. We don’t know them. They don’t have names and histories to us. They are just statistics; just a news story. We can make big sacrifices for those we love, for our children, our relatives, or those whose lives are closely bound up with our own. So we’d understand it if God was willing to make a big sacrifice for his Son. But God loved the whole population of the world so much that he made the sacrifice of his Son. And it was his only Son. If you ever saw the movie Saving Private Ryan, the whole premise of the story was that if a mother had lost three of her sons, the army shouldn’t put at risk the only remaining one so they’d pull him out of battle and send him home. But God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.

Now you need to try to hold at the front of your mind that picture of the enormity of God’s love in order to understand the way John’s gospel talks about the matter of judgment. If you think about it as a future event then the progression is that God gives the gift, we respond, and then one day we are judged on the basis of how we responded. But what John is saying is that it’s really us who makes the judgment. In immeasurable love God gives the gift and then we respond one way or the other and that decision is the judgment. We judge God’s action and God’s gift, and in so doing we pass judgement on ourselves. The day of judgment is the day you encounter the love of God in Christ and decide to either entrust yourself to this God or turn your back and walk away. No other judgment will be needed. Everything else is just the outworking of your decision. Heaven and hell and all that are not some other reality that a great judge will one day decide to send you to. When you decide how to respond to the love of God in Jesus you are deciding which of those realities you will now live in — starting now. It is your decision, and God respects you enough to honour your decision no matter how much it breaks the heart of God.

In verses 19-21 John uses the image of light and darkness. You can’t live in both simultaneously and you can’t avoid the question. You will either love the darkness and therefore avoid the light, or you will choose to enter the light and leave the darkness behind you. The judgment might not be something that God wants to bring upon the world, but when the light of God’s love enters the world the judgment comes with it because people can’t help but respond. You can’t even choose not to choose. To decide to avoid making a commitment is actually to make a very significant commitment. When a train pulls into the station you either decide to get on or you don’t and once the train pulls out there’s no point trying to distinguish between choosing against the train and just not choosing at all. The consequence is the same. Avoiding the decision is a response and you have judged and sentenced yourself by your response.

So you can see why the scholars call it “realised eschatology”, because it doesn’t push the whole thing off into the future somewhere. It’s all happened and happening right now. God’s gift is now. The moment of decision is now. The day of judgment is now. The final chapter of the world’s story is written when the world encounters the gift of God’s love in the crucified Christ and either accepts or rejects the gift. The final chapter of your story is written when you encounter the gift of God’s love in the crucified Christ and either accept or reject the gift.

If you haven’t managed to hold the image of God’s immeasurable love in the front of your mind this is probably all sounding harsh and legalistic and draconian. It’s probably sounding like mandatory sentencing legislation. But the image of God’s extraordinary self-sacrificing love keeps reminding us to personalise it. I’m sure most of you know what it feels like to be desperately in love with someone and to offer them the gift of your love, of your very self, and then to live through the seeming eternity of that agonised and excruciatingly vulnerable moment as you await their response. If you know that feeling then you know that there is no such thing as not choosing. You know there is no difference between having them spit in your face and having them say, “Thanks very much but I think I’d like to keep my options open a bit longer and if nothing better comes up I’ll get back to you.”

And if you know that feeling, then you know something of the heart of God, and you know something of the broken heart of the crucified God, and you know that the day of judgment comes the moment the offer is made. God is not waiting to pass judgement on you. The anxious waiting is for you to pass judgement on God. God has absolutely no desire to condemn you, now or ever. God has sent the only Son into the world in a desperate act of self-sacrificial love to open for you a way of escape from all the world’s self-destructive wrath and condemnation. But God will not force anything on you, and as you, moment by moment, pass judgement on God and on the extravagant love and mercy of God, you are condemning yourself to living with the consequences of your own judgement. You either create for yourself a world where love and mercy and life have been rejected — a world we call hell — or you embrace the world that God is creating and offering to you where love and mercy and life are flourishing and celebrated and open to all, no matter how undeserving we may be. The day of judgement is now, and the judge is you. For God’s sake, judge in favour of love and mercy and life.