Lent 2 2026

John 3.1-17

For God so loved the world than he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

We do not really need a survey to tell us that John 3.16 is among the most well-known verses in all of the Bible. But, in case we were in any doubt, this is what a 2022 survey commissioned by the charity World Vision tells us, based on people’s Internet searches. By a very very long shot, more people searched for John 3.16 than any other verse of the Bible. 

As with everything, the popularity of this verse has a history. Martin Luther is often quoted as having said that it is “the gospel in miniature”. I’m afraid that I don’t know my Luther well enough to know if he actually said it. It’s not in his extended commentary on John’s Gospel, though it is clear there that he’s a fan. He says, for example:

[I]f you want to find God, then inscribe these words in your heart. Don’t sleep, but be vigilant. Learn and ponder these words diligently: “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Let him who can write, write these words. Furthermore, read them, discuss them, meditate and reflect on them in the morning and in the evening, whether awake or asleep!

Not quite as pithy as saying that John 3.16 is the gospel in miniature, but really the same sentiment. In any case, it seems Luther really put the verse on the map—but even so, it really only achieved its cultural ubiquity in the great religious revivals of the 19th century in the United States. 

By the early 20th century, it was among the bits of scripture that parents taught their children to memorise, as Billy Graham recalls his mother doing to him. Graham’s own evangelistic crusades did more still to cement the text in the American lexicon. In the 1980s, one Rollen Stewart was often seen at large sporting events, in his rainbow-coloured wig, holding up a sign that just said “John 3:16”, and the TV cameras transmitted that sign to millions of viewers. Stewart would eventually be found guilty of kidnapping and hostage taking.

It is not difficult to see why this verse is so beloved of Protestants, and of evangelicals in particular. Luther was very keen on its emphasis on faith, as distinct from works. And, as we know from our reading this morning, it comes in the context of Jesus talking about being “born again”, a theme that could be said to define evangelical Christianity. What’s more, Jesus is here speaking to a single person, Nicodemus: and this scene works perfectly in evangelical Christianity’s emphasis on the personal relationship between the individual and God. 

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All this is well and good, and there is certainly a time and place for such readings of the text. But I want to turn our attentions elsewhere this morning, somewhere that the evangelical, Protestant readings might not think to look.

For God so loved the world, it says. The kosmos, it says in the Greek: a somewhat grander word than our “world” perhaps. But also a philosophically polyvalent one. To the neo-Platonists, the cosmos is almost divine, an emanation of and therefore quasi-continuous with God. To the Gnostics, on the other hand, the cosmos is almost an aberration, an error on the part of God’s incompetent underlings tasked with making the physical world. Two quite different pictures. For St Paul, shaped as he was both by Hellenistic philosophy and Jewish apocalyptic theology, sort of brought the two together: the cosmos is good, but it is corrupted. 

St John’s intervention follows on from this, in a way. It resists the neo-Platonist deification of the world; and the Gnostic demonising of it; and it goes a step beyond Paul’s diagnosis of the situation. St John insists that God loves the cosmos. The question of good or evil is sidestepped altogether, as is that of createdness and corruption. John’s God does not care about the nature of the world, nor its current status nor the causes thereof. All we need to know is that God loves the world: the whole world, warts and all. 

And it is, here, the world that God loves. Not just Christians, certainly. Not even just humans. Certainly not just Nicodemus, though of course God loves him too. In Lent especially, it can sometimes seem that God wants us to hate the world, and certainly the enjoyable parts of the world, the parts made of chocolate and containing alcohol, perhaps. But nothing could be further from the truth. 

All the things that we love about the world—the the sound of pancake batter sizzling on a skillet, the smell of coffee in the morning, a warm embrace on a cold night, the view of the Downs from the Rectory dining room [I’m going to miss that view.]—God loves them too. All the things that make life worth living—the peal of children’s laughter, the bouquet of a well-aged malt, the tenderness of a lover’s kiss, the otherworldliness of rainbows—these are also what makes the world worth saving.

God is not a snob. God has catholic tastes in things, having made it all, loved it into being in the first place. Whatever we have given up in Lent, we must not make the mistake of supposing that we give it up because it is unqualifiedly and irredeemably bad, even if our relationship to those things might be, in the status quo, unideal. 

God is, never has been and never will be, in the business of obliterating things, only always and everywhere redeeming them. Perhaps that will help us to think about our Lenten disciplines too. How can these things, which we have given up in Lent, be redeemed? For ourselves, but also for the world. How can these things become real forces for good, and not just meaningless and fleeting pleasures? Such is Christian hopefulness that we believe that everything can be saved, can be redeemed, can be transformed for the good of the world. Nothing is too big and bad, but also nothing is too small and trivial to be an active participant in the kingdom of God. 

I always give up buying stuff online for Lent: I guess, to take my own advice here, I should be thinking more about how online-shopping can be redeemed for God’s kingdom, how it can serve this kingdom’s ideals of justice and peace. Let me know if you have any ideas.