“Deep
Reading John 3:16”
John
3:14-21
March 22, 2009
Of all the passages of Scripture that can be identified simply by book, chapter and verse;
John 3:16 has to be at the top of the list. But what about John 3:14 or John 3:15 or
John 3:17: these verses probably don’t sound all that familiar, do they? So why
bother reading them at all?
These “other” verses are read alongside of John 3:16 not just so that the
overall reading can be longer, but because they help us to grasp at a deeper level just
what Jesus tells us in John 3:16.
Please listen for how the Spirit is addressing us this morning through God’s Word
found on page 88 of your pew Bibles from the Gospel of John chapter three verses fourteen
through twenty-one….
14And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be
lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
16“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so
that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
17“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order
that the world might be saved through him. 18Those who believe in him are not condemned;
but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the
name of the only Son of God. 19And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the
world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20For
all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not
be exposed. 21But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly
seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
This is God’s Word to us…
Even if you are not Internet savvy, it won’t surprise you to learn that the Internet
is changing how we interact with our world. For example, last March, the editors of
the New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every issue not to
important and timely articles, but to summaries of articles that appear elsewhere in the
paper.
Management explained that they made this change to address two complaints they were
hearing. One was from readers who said they didn’t have enough time to read the
fuller articles. The other was from readers who said that because there was so much
in each issue, they often overlooked articles they really cared about.
One observer, however, says that the change is also evidence of a larger trend in our
world, on which may not be for the best. Author Nicholas Carr, who writes about
technology, business and culture, says that the new feature of summarized articles was
driven by how the Internet is rewriting not only our reading habits, but also the circuits
in our brain that have to do with cognition.
Carr cites a recent study by University College London which shows that as people view
material online, they usually skim rather than read deeply. They hop from one source
to another and rarely return to the web page they’ve already visited.
Generally, the study showed, people read no more than one or two pages of an article or
online book before they leap to another site.
Nicholas Carr has noticed a similar behavior in his own reading even when he is not
online. Whereas he used to read pages of material comfortably, he now finds that his
concentration drifts after just a couple of pages. He admits to getting fidgety and
easily loses the thread. He writes, “I feel as if I am always dragging my
wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has
become a struggle.” And in an article about deep reading he writes:
The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just
for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual
vibrations those words set off in our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by
the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for
that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster
our own ideas. Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
So what if we were to deeply read this morning’s passage from the Gospel of
John? Granted, not every verse in this passage is on the tip of your tongue, but
most of us can usually rattle off the gist of John 3:16, which is often called “the
gospel in a nutshell.” And while there may be some truth to that, it also
leaves us with the assumption that if we can simply recite John 3:16, we’ve pretty
much gotten the whole Christian message and the rest of the Bible is mere commentary.
Then again our morning’s second reading was not just John 3:16, was it? For the
full context of this gospel nut, we would need to start reading at verse 1 of chapter 3,
but the assigned passage starts with verses 14 and 15, where Jesus makes reference to an
incident from the Old Testament, involving a “serpent in the wilderness”.
The fact is, many people who know just John 3:16 are not going to have the foggiest idea
what Jesus is talking about in verses 14 and 15 or why the story of a wilderness serpent
serves as an introduction to verse 16. That verse of verses, of course, tells of
God’s love for the world and of God’s sending His Son so that everyone who
believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. So what does a serpent in the
wilderness have to do with that?
Reading John 3:16 and thinking you’ve got the whole story is sort of like reading in
hop-skip fashion on the internet. You may, in fact, get the basic nugget of what you
are reading or researching, but you will probably miss the in-depth kind of understanding
that comes only from deep reading, from living with the Scriptures.
One way to start viewing this morning’s passage in its larger context is to imagine
that there is a hyperlink in verse 14 that takes us back to Numbers 21:4-9. So
let’s jump back to that story for a moment, but unlike current internet reading
practices, we are going to return to the John passage we started with, and thanks to
Numbers, we’ll have a better understanding of what Jesus was getting at in John 3:16.
The Numbers story that Rick read, finds the people of Israel in the wilderness between Egypt
and Canaan in the midst of the exodus. Their route required them to skirt the land
of Edom. This detour made the Israelites cranky and it brought up complaints they
had raised to Moses before: “Our slavery in Egypt was better than this.
We’re going to die out here in the wilderness.” And then, in a rant that
doesn’t even make sense, they add, “We’ve got no food and water, and this
food we have is miserable!” Their complaint was not only against Moses, but
also against God.
Now if we were really into deep reading, we should go back even further into Numbers to
see that this is not the Israelites’ first complaint; nor is it their second or even
their third. In fact, it is at least their fourth occasion of murmuring against
Moses and God. And in response to each preceding complaint, God answered them in
some constructive way. But this time God sent poisonous serpents among them, who
bit them, and many people died.
Not surprisingly this brought those who still could quickly back to Moses with the
admission that they had sinned against both Moses and God; pleading that Moses intervene
with God on their behalf. When Moses did so, God told him to fashion a serpent out
of bronze and place it on a pole. God then instructed Moses that anyone who was
bitten by a live serpent should look at the bronze serpent and live.
Now if we return to John and look at the larger context there, we see that Jesus’
mention of the serpent in the wilderness was in a conversation with a Pharisee named
Nicodemus. This man had come to Jesus seeking to understand his mission and message,
and as they were both steeped in Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was able to refer to this
serpent story with the certainty that Nicodemus would know it and be able to use it as a
comparison to Jesus’ mission.
Thus, when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the
wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have
eternal life,” Nicodemus suddenly understood that Jesus intended to be … a
Savior.
Now in that moment Nicodemus probably didn’t envision Jesus dying on a cross and
being “lifted up” as we might imagine. But Nicodemus was at least
beginning to realize what Jesus had been saying. Jesus is saying that just as
looking at the bronze serpent on a pole enabled the ancients who were dying due to their
sin to live, so too will looking at Jesus with belief allow those dying in sin today to
begin living abundantly as well as eternally.
All this deep reading of the Bible helps us to grasp what Jesus says after the John 3:16
statement. In John 3:17 Jesus says, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the
world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Recall that in the Numbers story, the live serpents biting at the heels of the people were
agents of judgment. Yet here in John 3:17 is Jesus telling Nicodemus how his role
differs from the serpents in the wilderness. Jesus did not come to be like the
biting serpents of judgment and death. Jesus was not sent to condemn the world, but
to save it. Only the bronze serpent was a representation of the role Jesus came to
fill. Jesus came to save all those who are dying spiritually in sin.
Thus it is not enough to read John 3:16 in isolation, as a mere summary of faith.
Instead, we get far more out of it if we do what Jesus invited Nicodemus to do, to make
“rich mental connections” between the Old Testament and the gospel Jesus brought
to all God’s children.
A deep reading of the Bible will help us not only see John 3:16 as Nicodemus saw it, but
our deep reading will also help us to realize that God’s saving grace is not limited
only to the “verse of verses” or to the story of the bronze serpent on a
pole. Consider as well what Psalm 107 has to say:
“Some were sick through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities endured
affliction; they loathed any kind of food, and they drew near to the gates of death.
Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress; he
sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from destruction” (vv. 17-20).
In Numbers, some of the bitten people could have refused to look at the bronze serpent and
died. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would, but it was possible.
Likewise, we sin-bitten children of God can refuse to look at the Savior God sent us and
thus miss out on an abundant and eternal life. But why would we do that when we can
look and live!
Amen.
SOURCES:
Carr, Nicholas.
“Is Google making us stupid?”
The Atlantic, July/August 2008,
theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google.
Hoyt, Clark.
“Change can be painful, but this one shouldn’t hurt.” The New York
Times, April 6, 2008,
nytimes.com/2008/04/06/opinion/06pubed.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=Tom%20Bodkin&st=cse&scp=4.
