"For God So Loved The World..."

Sometimes it feels like life is merely a performance. 

We perform our jobs. We perform for our friends. We perform for our children, for our spouse, for our parents. Sometimes this performance may come more easily than at other times, but always it feels the same—that we are driven to perform, to project our best self to the world, and, in so doing, receive love, acceptance, and validation. 

Sometimes our faith can feel like this, too. Sometimes it can feel like Christianity is just one more thing we have to perform. We have to be good and do the right thing to live the right way and follow Jesus’s example.

You might be able to fool people for a little while. You might be able to make folks think you’ve got it all together. But you can’t fool God. And so your faith makes you feel empty and tired, and, in the end, you just end up feeling exhausted.

Recently, the Sunday lectionary had us reading those famous words from John chapter 3: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life.”

This well-known verse comes amid a conversation Jesus is having with a man named Nicodemus in the middle of the night. Nicodemus is intrigued by Jesus and his teachings, but presumably fears what his fellow Pharisees would think of him associating with such a controversial figure. (Jesus has just driven the moneychangers from the Temple, remember?) Nicodemus has a lot to lose in being seen with this Jesus. And so, under the cover of darkness, he goes to speak with him. 

Judging by the first thing he says to Jesus, I imagine that Nicodemus felt his faith had gone a little flat. Perhaps he even felt for a while that his faith had become more like a performance, and less like a divine encounter.

“Rabbi,” he says in John 3:2, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” Nicodemus wanted to know and feel the presence of God, and he could sense that presence in Jesus’s countenance.

In their exchange, Jesus reminds Nicodemus of one of the most important things about God: “…God so loved the world.” John reminds us powerfully that it isn’t what we do for God that ultimately matters; it’s what God does and has done for us. It isn’t about our performance or our attempts to play a good Christian on TV. There is no grace in that. Faith isn’t a performance. Faith is trust. 

Faith is trusting that God loves us as much as he claims to love us. This is what Jesus was sent to demonstrate for us, and we, like Nicodemus, need to hear this message again and again and again. We need to dwell—to abide—in God’s presence, knowing that God’s love for us and for the world is greater and more wondrous than anything we could ever imagine.

It’s there that our faith will come alive. It’s there we will find hope. It’s there we will find rest for our souls and the strength to carry on. It’s there we will find what we need to love others like Jesus loves us. Because ultimately it isn’t about us. It’s all about God. And that’s truly Good News.