4th Sunday of Lent (God so Loved the World)

Within this Gospel is one of the most widely known verses of Scripture, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life”. Why is it so popular? Well maybe it reminds us of something about God that we often fail to comprehend—that He is love and all He does is motivated by love.

We can probably conceive that God loves the world, but I suspect any of us could fail to sufficiently grasp the deeply personal love that God has for each of us as an individual. St. Augustine once said, “God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love.”

We talk about love in lots of ways—perhaps often misunderstanding it—but in saying that “God is love” (1 John 3:18), it’s not to say that He is one kind of love among any others, nor should God be understood as one more thing among others that demands and uses our finite resource of love; no, God is love. And so, in any way that we are capable of authentically loving it is because the One who is love, lives in and through us.

And we need this image of God, for any way we’re stuck on an image of a stern and angry God. Yes, the Scriptures speak of God’s anger,  including today’s first reading, but let us remember, God’s anger is borne of his longing for our well-being, which too often we don’t want for ourselves.

But furthermore, in whatever way we reduce God to being angry and vengeful, I wonder if we are projecting our own tendencies and behaviors. In other words, we make God in our own image: one whose sense of justice corresponds to ours, such as when we see the bad guy in a movie, violently blown away, and the odd satisfaction it brings. It can make us come to regard God as one who likewise finds satisfaction principally in punishing us for our misdeeds and waywardness. But as today’s Gospel makes clear: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him”.

And even more, there are some who cannot allow themselves to believe in a God, whom they regard as so cruel, as to kill His Son. It can sound just like that, because of the limitations of human language and human concepts. We use the terms God the Father and God his Son—largely because they’re the terms Jesus used—terms given to help us distinguish the Persons of the Holy Trinity. So, maybe it’s better understood this way: Jesus is God, and thus Love personified. He came among us. As a gesture of love so powerful, he faced and accepted cruelty and death, to give us a way beyond the effects of death and the stronghold it bears on us in this life.

In whatever way you have difficulty feeling the love of God, I’ll suggest two ways to help.

·         The first is to meditate upon the image of the crucified Jesus. While it doesn’t necessarily satisfy all the problems of the world on an intellectual level, that image can change our hearts. Spend some minutes, uninterrupted and without distraction, gazing upon that ultimate manifestation and expression of God’s love.

·         The second is this: go out of your way to reveal God’s love to other through an act of kindness. Not simply to those who are in your circle of friends and family. Instead, reveal love to those to whom you have no accountability and do it in a way that would surprise them.

Even as we consider God as love, we must never lose sight of our need for His mercy, because we are sinners who need to amend our lives. We hide in the shadows, even as Jesus calls us into light. But it’s God’s love that is the surest way to draw us into the light. While it’s true that our fear of being separated from God—hell—can help to move us in the right direction, ultimately, it’s love that will bring perfect conversion of heart. If we really knew how much we are loved—truly knew it—all the disorder of our hearts that interrupts our ability to love would eventually whither.

God so loves you that He gave His only Son, or said another way, that God the Son suffered and died for you. Even in the worst moments of your past and in the moments you hardest to love, God still delights in you. He so loves you that He was willing to take the path before you, to light the way. He loves you as though you are the only one He has to love. If you and I would just surrender and receive that love, it would change everything.