John 3:14-21
More than the other accounts,
John’s gospel is a meditation on Jesus’ presence in the world
as an encounter, a conflict,
that seems to casts everything into sharply defined oppositions-
life and death, light and darkness, sight and blindness.
And it wrestles with how a person moves between these places,
or doesn’t.
And because John also starts at the very beginning of things,
lets begin there too.
Just as the snake slides into the poem
and the long narrative of struggle begins,
the creation account in Genesis ends by telling us that
human beings, the man and the woman,
were together in the garden and they were naked,
and they were not ashamed to be.
They didn’t know they were naked,
because there was no such thing as being naked.
Nakedness means that something is uncovered that shouldn’t be,
which isn’t how animals work;
nothing in that walked or crawled or swam
doubted that it was complete.
Nakedness is a judgement;
it requires the ability to imagine how other minds see you,
and to perceive that there is something wrong with the way you are.
The human man and woman have no thought like this;
they are creatures, confident
that they are what the LORD
intended them to be in their skin.
So the man and woman
talk to the snake and eat the
fruit of the tree of knowledge.
And what do they know then?
That they are naked.
The first act of human labor
is to sew skirts of leaves to hide themselves.
They had discovered shame.
When they heard the LORD walking in the garden,
they hid themselves away in the trees, out of sight.
So that the LORD, looking for them, called ‘where are you?”
And the human called back
and said “I heard you walking,
but I was afraid because I was naked.”
There is one of the important stories
Genesis seems to be telling about humanity:
we sense that something is wrong with us,
and we are afraid of our wrongness being exposed,
being reflected back to us
to show that we are unfit to be with.
And so we refuse to be seen, we become secret;
we hide ourselves from each other, and from God.
I would rather hide from relationship
than see that I am unfit to be with.
John shows us Jesus flinging the reach of salvation wide.
As wide as the whole world;
announcing that he was sent into the world
out of love and not anger,
not to condemn people but to save.
But some are condemned already,
Jesus tells his conversation partner,
because they have not believed in the name of the Son of Man,
which is another way of saying,
trusted in the power of God present in the Jesus.
But while there’s breath and light,
in what sense is anyone condemned already?
That might sound like the outworking of destiny,
if Jesus didn’t go on talking.
He says, the judgement that condemns is this:
light came into the world, and people preferred the darkness.
Why did they love darkness?
Because their deeds were evil.
Not, Jesus seems to say,
because they were wrapped up in misplaced desires,
in some comfortable, seductive sin.
While those who do what is true come into the light,
carrying the history of their deeds, where they can be seen.
Those who refuse to come to the light, they stand in the dark for fear,
imagining that they can remain secret there, unexposed.
In other words, the Lord came into the world
and is going about looking for them, and they are hiding.
We judge some lives good
and we judge lives to have been lived bent away from the light,
chances to love, chances at companionship, wasted.
Good and bad; part of us wants to sort the world out that way.
But here’s what you and I know well:
humanity is not divided
into those who do evil and those who don’t;
there is no hard edge to the shadow
dividing darkness and light in us and among us.
We’re here in Lent,
with its disciplines of introspection-
we’re here at all-
because we are in struggle
with the evil we accept into us and that we harbor;
that damages our capacity
for friendship with God and one another.
We do things we should not
and we neglect or outright flee things we should face;
we withhold what must be given.
We do wrong.
And we stand in need of forgiveness
again and again.
Our life as people being saved,
our life as people being transformed by grace,
is life with a gradually slackening but never absent
instinct is to pull darkness around those parts of us,
to fill up every space and silence where we might meet ourselves.
Christ came into the world determined to forgive.
To not allow what we have done,
whatever its consequences—the pathetic, petty, ordinary sins,
and the terrible, the fearful, the soul-hollowing-sin—
to separate us from God.
Whoever you are.
And saying yes to that
means trusting the God who encourages us
to a terrible step, into that space
where nothing is hidden,
because that’s the only way
to discover that what we fear will make us unfit for God
does not, and we need not be ashamed.
We will keep discovering forgiveness,
how we are being saved by a love that does not fail.
We’re given life again.