Thomas Kleinert
God loves you, honey.
You better believe it.
Where will you spend eternity? the billboard down I-65 asks you every time you drive by.
Believe or else.
Come to Jesus or go to hell.
For God so loved the world… John 3:16, or even more concise, 3:16. Write it on a poster for the endzone; use the fat marker. Ink it on your forearm. Stick it on your bumper. Wear it on your t-shirt whether you’re on campus or at the mall. John 3:16.
I don’t mean to sound mean, but I do, don’t I? The world has taught me well to scorn those who “do faith” in ways that are foreign to me. But the harsh light of my condescension is the wrong kind of bright to let me see that the intention of the meme missionaries may be of the noblest kind: to make known to the world God’s love for the world and all who live in it. In the KJV Bible I read,
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
Mary McLeod Bethune, who was born in South Carolina to formerly enslaved parents a decade after the Civil War, grew up in the Jim Crow South to become one of the most important Black educators, civil and women’s rights leaders and government officials of the twentieth century.[1] She declared,
With these words [from John 3:16] the scales fell from my eyes and the light came flooding in. My sense of inferiority, my fear of handicaps, dropped away. “Whosoever,” it said. No Jew nor Gentile, no Catholic nor Protestant, no black nor white; just “whosoever.” It means that I, a humble Negro girl, had just as much chance as anybody in the sight and love of God. These words stored up a battery of faith and confidence and determination in my heart, which has not failed me to this day.[2]
I love “whosoever” – to me it sounds like, “Y’all come. God’s love is big enough for all y’all.” Kerry Hasler-Brooks calls her relationship with John 3:16 “complicated.”
The words … are deep in me. I have no memory of learning them and can go years without reading or reciting them, and yet, in a moment, they are in my breath and on my lips, rising from that deep place: “For God so loved the world.” I remember hearing this verse in my mother’s voice as we practiced memory verses after church.
She recalls how the verse came of age, as she did, in the American evangelicalism of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.
Billy Graham recited the verse at crusades attended by thousands, who were often gifted copies of John’s Gospel. Sports fans were broadcast across the United States wearing shirts and carrying signs to games emblazoned simply with “John 3:16.” This is the John 3:16 I inherited, the celebrity verse that roared through American stadiums—football games and revivals alike—and the quiet verse whispered by my mother in my childhood bedroom with the paper doll wallpaper.
I’m glad and grateful Kelly Hasler-Brooks writes about these deeply personal resonances, because to me, rousing speeches in sports venues bring up memories that have nothing whatsoever to do with good news, only with propaganda and mass manipulation. I tense up. Hearing about “crusades” makes me suspicious and cautious; “crusades” smacks of military campaigns against infidels, only conjuring up images of violence and coercion.
Mihee Kim-Kort also memorized John 3:16 as a child, in English and Korean, along with a specific interpretation of it.
While many would easily argue for its ability to summarize the Christian faith, I remember only one interpretation of the verse. It wasn’t about God’s love for the world. It was that only those who believed in God would make it to eternal life. I vaguely understood eternal life to mean heaven, and the afterlife. It was the ultimate destination, and belief in God was the golden ticket to it. The only thing that mattered was living forever.
What kind of faith grows in fields of fear? What kind of life is shaped by a fearful faith? Is it the kind of life Jesus proclaims when he says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly”?[3] Is it?
Toward the end of his Gospel, John states in a note to the reader that his testimony is for you, plural, “so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”[4] As Mihee got older, the kind of eternal life she had imagined lost its luster. “I looked around at the people who were the most vocal about who would ultimately make it, and they were often the most judgmental [and] hypocritical… Christians.” She began to realize that, according to John’s witness, eternal life refers to a kind of life, not its length, and how it’s very much about life here and now, and not merely there and then. She found herself invited to participate in God’s love for the world.[5] She began to imagine and live her life grounded in the wondrous love that became, and continues to become, manifest in the life of Jesus, a love that drew her in rather than scaring her to heaven.
“There is no fear in love,” we read in 1 John, “but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.”[6] Perhaps the trouble began when the verse became a slogan, when it was no longer heard as part of an encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus, where Jesus talks about being born from above and Nicodemus wonders, “How can anyone be born after having grown old?” Jesus talks about the wind that “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
As listeners and readers we have a chance to understand what Nicodemus apparently misunderstands; he’s utterly sincere, just a little metaphorically challenged. “Born from above” envisions living life in ways no longer determined by blood or by the will of the flesh or by human will, but by God. What Jesus calls eternal life is life lived in the unending presence of God, not the endless duration of an individual’s existence in the most exclusive club. Eternal life is life as a child of God now and forever, life in the now of the divine presence that is without beginning or end, life that is unfolding in love without ceasing, life that is nothing but life. It is the life Jesus and the one he calls Father share, and more than share, because according to John’s testimony, never afraid to push the boundaries of language, they are this life, poured out in creation. Jesus calls us to believe, in order to be fully part of this life. Pictured as birth, believing is altogether the gift of God, and all the believer does is live and give thanks. Pictured as faith, believing is the result of something we do, and I wonder if it is anything but our continuing intention to live the life in Jesus’ name we have been given. From Jesus’ lips, I hear it as the invitation, “Come and see!” Jesus doesn’t drop slogans; he invites us to turn from easy slogans to the risk of experience. He tells me and you, again and again, “Come and see who I am and who you are becoming with me.”
In September 1954, Martin Luther King Jr. moved from Boston to Montgomery. He didn’t know soon and very soon God would call him from the pulpit to the street. He didn’t know where Jesus would be taking him. His first week in the pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, King preached on John 3:16. Kerry Hasler-Brooks writes,
That first sermon in his new home bears signs of the voice that one year later would be heard all over the globe—of the man who would stand on the shoulders of Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks, Jo Ann Robinson, and thousands of other Black women to lead the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956 that would help change the world.
“God’s love has breadth,” said King. “It is a big love; it’s a broad love. … God’s love is too big to be limited to a particular race. It is too big to be wrapped in a particularistic garment. It is too great to be encompassed by any single nation. God is a universal God.”[7]
I wonder if the preacher had sat at the feet of Mary McLeod Bethune, if he had witnessed the kind of empowerment she drew from the wide embrace of “whosoever” in John 3:16, if he had heard her declare, “These words stored up a battery of faith and confidence and determination in my heart, which has not failed me to this day.” He certainly needed faith, confidence, and determination. And so do we.
In John 12, Jesus talks again about being lifted up, and each time he does so, he speaks of his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension as a single movement, mirroring his descent in the incarnation. I find it astonishing how he describes the act of ultimate rejection and humiliation on the cross as an act of exaltation.
“When I am lifted up from the earth,” he says, “I will draw all people to myself.”[8]
I believe him.
[1] https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-mcleod-bethune
[2] Allen Dwight Callahan, “The Gospel of John,“ in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007)
[3]John 10:10
[4] John 20:31
[5] Mihee Kim-Kort https://www.christiancentury.org/blog-post/sundays-coming/nature-eternal-life-john-314-21
[6] 1 John 4:18
[7] Kerry Hasler-Brooks https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/march-14-lent-4b-john-314-21
[8] John 12:32