Lectionary Commentaries for March 10, 2024
Fourth Sunday in Lent

Though I’ve never been much of a baseball fan, I’ve seen plenty of games on TV over the years thanks to my baseball-loving husband, son, and son-in-law. Which means I’ve seen plenty of “John 3:16” signs behind home plate, eagerly displayed by would-be Christian evangelists.

My husband, who came to Christian faith and was baptized as an adult, assures me that it doesn’t work, at least not on him. He sees it as a “believe it or else” warning sign, like the “Jesus or hell” sign I recently saw displayed on a freeway overpass. Such approaches to evangelism would just push him further and further away from faith and church. (What did work for him, he has told me, was a gently shared story of faith from one of his coworkers at a part-time job when he was in college.)

But the intention is noble, and the choice of text is apt: many interpreters believe that John 3:16 is indeed a summary—and a powerful one at that—of Christian theology both in John’s Gospel and in general.

Context

John 3:14–21 is roughly the second half of the great story of Nicodemus’ nighttime encounter and conversation with Jesus, recounted in John 3:1–21. By the time we get to the start of our Gospel text for this week, Jesus’ words to Nicodemus have broadened to become the voice of the Johannine community addressing the readers/hearers of that later time. The conversation proper between Jesus and Nicodemus is reaching its end by verse 11, where the text shifts to the plural pronouns: “We speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen, yet you [plural in Greek] do not receive our testimony.” (We again find the singular in verse 12.) Thus does John address the synagogue of his time and the outside, unbelieving world of the readers’/hearers’ time and place.

Just one word

Black leader Mary MacLeod Bethune (1875–1955), who grew up as a young girl in the Jim Crow South and whom Allen Dwight Callahan describes as “educator, activist, and presidential advisor,” writes:

With these words [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.¹

This is a powerful witness and reading of our text that not only appropriates it for deep personal faith but at the same time sees and indicates some of its wider applications.

In the context in which I live and work and serve the church—a deeply progressive region in the United States—we could justifiably expand the text’s reach still further:

• Neither Jew nor Gentile nor any other ethnic group;
• Neither Catholic nor Protestant nor those of any other or no faith at all;
• Neither Black nor White nor Brown nor any other race;
• Neither straight nor LGBTQ+;
• Neither those belonging to any of the opposing political parties

The list could go on; you get the idea.

How might this application be broadened in your specific ministry context?

The worldwide reach of God’s love

“For God so loved the world …” These words indicate yet a different sort of broadening of Jesus’ message in our text.

We should note that while “world” in John’s Gospel certainly refers to everything in all creation—“the world came into being through him ” (1:9); “All things came into being through [the Word], and without him not one thing came into being” (1:3)—the world is often used to refer specifically to those realms within the human community that resist or are hostile to God and Christ, as in John 7:7 where Jesus says: “The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify against it that its works are evil.” Boring and Craddock are crisp: “While the world is often pictured in the Fourth Gospel as hostile to God, it is also God’s creation. God loves his enemies, those who have rebelled against him, and is thus the model for Christian love.”²

This reference to the “world” introduces another axis along which God’s love expands, includes more and more, grows deeper and wider—as we move through the text.

Homiletical ruminations …
While so much more could be said on John 3:16 as a whole, the preacher might do well to stop here, ponder, and consider queries such as the following:

Does the congregation include folks in the distinct categories mentioned above?

• In its worship life?
• In its community outreach?
• In its prayers?

In what specific ways does the congregation reflect the love of God for the “world” into the surrounding community?

• In their eucharistic theology?
• In their outreach practices?
• In other ways?

Notes

1. Quoted in Allen Dwight Callahan, “The Gospel of John,“ in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), where it is in turn quoted from Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America (New York: Vintage, 1973), 136. Bethune quotes the King James Version for the key word “whosoever,” which Callahan describes using the lovely phrase “the inclusively indefinite relative pronoun.” The Revised Standard Version revises this to “whoever,” which is in turn modified in both NRSV and NRSVue to “everyone.” (Interestingly, both the New Revised Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition translate the exact same Greek word as “whoever” in verse 15 and as “everyone” in verse 16.) Though less poetic and powerful, this latter is the most strictly faithful to the Greek word used here, pas. But the meaning is the same.
2. M. Eugene Boring and Fred B. Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 298.

At first, the text has an often-repeated theme from this wilderness period: The people complain, “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food” (Numbers 21:5). The people complain, God provides, and repeat. The pattern is familiar, except the complaint here is directed against God. It is usually directed against Moses or Aaron. Does the complaint directed to God instead of Moses prompt a different response? 

We do not know, but what comes next is not the pattern we have seen since Exodus 15. God sends what the New Revised Standard Version calls “poisonous snakes.” The Hebrew words mean “fiery snakes” or “burning serpents.” As some commentators suggest, this word could represent a painful bite from a poisonous snake, and the New Revised Standard Version seems to adopt that reading. But the same word appears as “seraphim” in Isaiah 6:2 and refers to the beings that protect God’s throne, so this may indicate the snakes’ otherworldliness or that they are directly from God. Either way, these snakes bit the people, and “many Israelites died.” 

This is not the response the wilderness generation had come to expect. However, the narratives in the book of Numbers have shown God’s growing anger at the people and their complaints. In Numbers 11, God burned the edges of the camp (11:1–2). Later in the same chapter, God gives them the meat they so wanted “until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you” (11:20). 

Then in Numbers 14, God states, “Not one of you shall come into the land in which I swore to settle you, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun” (verse 30). Then here in chapter 21, God sends snakes to bite the people. There is no intervention from Moses, as in Exodus 32, either. This is not how we like to see God, and this text can confirm every belief in the “bad Old Testament God.” Yet, at the same time, we know there are consequences for our actions. This text calls on us to struggle with theodicy and how our actions impact God. The question to contemplate is, “Can we push God too far?”

The story continues, and the people go to Moses, confess that they sinned, and ask Moses to pray for God to remove the snakes. Moses prays, and God instructs Moses to “make a poisonous [Hebrew: fiery] snake and set it on a pole so everyone who is bitten can look at it and live” (21:8). Moses makes a snake from bronze and puts it on a pole as instructed. It works, and when the people are bit, they look at the image and live. So the story implies that the snakes remain an ongoing threat. The bronze snake only preserves life going forward; it does not appear to help the people who have already died. 

Why make the bronze snake? Does Moses violate the commandment against idols (Exodus 20:4–5) to save the people? Does God instruct Moses to make an idol? Later, Hezekiah sees the people’s devotion to this image as a violation of the Torah because they “burned incense to it” (2 Kings 18:4). He destroys the image. It seems there is no end to the issues we find in this puzzling text. 

It is good for us to be uncomfortable occasionally. We should struggle with understanding God and our relationship with God, and there is no better time than Lent to stretch our knowledge and faith. We need to be reminded of the freedom of God to act, and that some of God’s actions are startling to us. We also need to contemplate how our actions impact God and others. 

The text does not report why God is finally fed up, nor should we. Indeed, the text does not see God’s response as out of line or problematic. To complicate the issue further, Deuteronomy remembers God as delivering the people in a wilderness that was “an arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions” (8:11–16). God delivered the people as they traversed a land filled with snakes. So, is this text an example of God saving the people from what was an ongoing threat, as implied by the Deuteronomy text? It deepens the mystery of the text.

There are many unanswered questions here, but one thing is clear: it is about God and God’s relationship with these people. These people have challenged God again and again: These people who wander and at times have reason to worry and complain about food and water in this “arid wasteland filled with poisonous snakes and scorpions.” These people who have such an identity as Pharaoh’s slaves that they cannot reimagine themselves as God’s people and cannot place complete trust in God.

It is difficult to preach the Gospel text for today and not engage its referent text here. Preachers must avoid making the New Testament text superior, especially since it contains the greatly loved John 3:16. Any indication of supersessionism must be avoided or called out for what it is. If the Old Testament text at its heart is about God and God’s trying relationship with the people, then the John text reflects the depths of God’s love for the people, for they will act no better in the New Testament than in the Old. They are still refusing to listen to God, even as God incarnate lives among them. They are willing to kill their own salvation. 

God, sin, theodicy, relationship, faithfulness, belief, and trust are a lot for a Sunday morning in March. Yet, these problematic texts stretch and grow our theological muscles. They force us to think of God in terms that are not our normal neural pathways. This text, with all its issues, is good for us. 

The appointed psalm comprises two sections of the lengthy song of thanksgiving, Psalm 107.¹ A quick overview of the entire psalm will be helpful to understanding this portion. (For once I do NOT suggest doing the whole psalm.)

The entire psalm consists of an introduction followed by six stanzas. The first four of these stanzas follow a common structure.

The introduction is a standard call to praise—“O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever.” But then a certain type of person—“the redeemed” that God has “redeemed from trouble”—is called to praise. And they are described as those:

           … gathered in from the lands,
              From the east and from the west,
              From the north and from the south (verse 3)

Then follow the four formulaic stanzas, which share a common structure:

Stanza 1   Those gathered from desert wastes
Stanza 2   Those gathered from darkness, gloom, and prison
Stanza 3   Those gathered from sin, illness, and hunger
Stanza 4   Those gathered from the sea

Here is a brief look at the common pattern that structures these four stanzas:

• “Some were …” [a dire “trouble” is named]
•  The trouble is described
• “Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble”
• “And he saved them from their distress”
• The rescue is described
• “Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to humankind”
• A closing word of praise

Each of the groups of people who are in trouble and then are redeemed from their trouble in these stanzas can be likened to a group of pilgrims, rescued and gathered in by the Lord to worship and praise in Jerusalem.

In the first stanza, one thinks of the exodus and those who were wandering in desert wastes. In the second stanza, one thinks of the exile and those who were caught in the exile, in the gloom of forced labor and bondage. Skipping ahead to the fourth stanza, one thinks of those caught in storms at sea—especially one thinks of Jonah and the righteous gentiles who were caught with him in the storm.

The foolish pilgrims: “Some of you were sick because you’d lived a bad life”

In the third stanza—which is the appointed psalm text for this Sunday—we immediately run into a major translation problem. The New Revised Standard Version reads, “Some were sick through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities endured affliction.” The New International Version, by contrast, reads, “Some became fools through their rebellious ways, and suffered affliction because of their iniquities.”

The Hebrew word in question—‘ewilim—simply means “fools.” The NIV offers the straightforward translation. NRSV “corrects” to the text—changing ‘ewilim to cholim, “sickly ones,” but it does so without external textual support. This correction is both unnecessary and without support—it also obscures the theological point that the stanza seems to be making: sometimes our sin is that we are stubbornly foolish. And when we are, our foolishness can lead to our own suffering.

Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message Bible captures the sense well: “Some of you were sick because you’d lived a bad life, your bodies feeling the effects of your sin. You couldn’t stand the sight of food, so miserable you thought you’d be better off dead.”

The psalmist reports that these foolishly sick ones then cried to the Lord in their trouble and he saved them from their distress.

“He sent out his word and healed them”

The description of God’s saving help for this group of pilgrims is fascinating: “He sent out his word and healed them.” The phrase “sent out his word” (dabar) is as enticing as it is mysterious. What could it look like for God to send out the word? Similar phrases occur in a few other places in the Psalms and once in Isaiah, always in the context of the Lord’s sovereignty over creation:

He sends out his command (‘imrah) to the earth;
        his word (dabar) runs swiftly.
He gives snow like wool;
        he scatters frost like ashes.
He hurls down hail like crumbs—
        who can stand before his cold?
He sends out his word (dabar), and melts them;
        he makes his wind blow, and the waters flow. (147:15–18)

Praise the LORD from the earth,
        you sea monsters and all deeps,
fire and hail, snow and frost,
        stormy wind fulfilling his command (dabar)! (148:7–8)

These phrases in Psalms 107, 147, and 148 call to mind the creation story in Genesis 1, in which God creates by speaking the creation into being. A phrase in Psalm 104 also comes to mind: “You send forth your spirit, [living things] are created” (verse 30). One also thinks of the famous passage in Isaiah 55, where the prophet likens God’s word to the rain that falls from heaven and does not return until it has accomplished the thing God intended it to do.

These similar phrases in other passages help one imagine what the psalm means when it says, “He sent out his word and healed them.”

The “word” here most likely refers to God’s power to sustain creation from moment to moment. The Lord speaks the word, and creation bursts into being. The Lord speaks the word, and blizzards rage with snow and hail and wind. But the Lord speaks again, and snow and hail melt.

The pilgrims who were sick in Psalm 107 spoke a word of prayer, crying to the Lord in their foolish suffering. The Lord spoke the word, and they were healed.

What then? Well, following the logic, another kind of word is necessary—the word of praise: “Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works.” But also a word of witness: “Let them tell of his deeds with songs of joy.”

The Word made flesh

Because the Gospel reading for this Sunday comes from John, one final intertextual connection seems appropriate. The Gospel of John says that Jesus himself is the Word made flesh and connects Christ the Word with all creation. It feels appropriate to lay John 1:1–4 out as if it were a psalm:

In the beginning was the Word,
  And the Word was with God,

And the Word was God.
  He was in the beginning with God.
  All things came into being through him,
  And without him not one thing came into being.

What has come into being in him was life,
  and the life was the light of all people.

A friend of mine often says, “God has spoken a word of love and life to all creation. His name is Jesus.” I believe it is not too much of an exegetical stretch to think of Jesus as we sing or recite the word of Psalm 107: “He sent out his word and healed them.” Let them thank the Lord.

Notes

1. Commentary first published on this site on March 14, 2021.

As is common, the lectionary today sections off a shorter passage from within its larger context. What immediately precedes chapter 2 is most pertinent for our passage at hand. God raised Christ and “seated him” at God’s side (1:20), a symbolism that expresses the power God has granted to Christ (1:21). God subjected everything to Christ’s authority—including the ekklesia (see also 5:23)—for the sake of the ekklesia (1:22–23). As Christ’s “body” in the world, the ekklesia is the “fullness of him” (1:23). In that spirit, chapter 2 begins. 

The movement from “death” (2:1–3) to “life” (2:6–10) makes this passage attractive during the season of Lent, as Christ-followers anticipate the resurrection. Just as this disciple of Paul emphasizes a nonhuman force that disrupted the human condition (“the ruler of the power of the world,” 2:2), so does the author focus attention on God’s activity—through Christ—to alter the human condition from death to life (2:5). The whole passage builds toward 2:10: “We are God’s accomplishment” (Common English Bible)—a way of life that includes purposeful, human activity. 

A common image among early Christ-followers is the idea that Christ “sits” (or is seated) next to God in the heavens (see Mark 16:19; Acts 7:55; Romans 8:34; Colossians 3:1; Ephesians 1:20; Hebrews 10:12; 1 Peter 3:22). The earliest reference to this idea seems to be in one of Paul’s letters, a common confession acknowledging Christ’s presence at God’s “right hand” (without claiming how Christ arrived at this position), since Paul’s focus is more on the activity of Christ’s “intercession” (8:34; see also Hebrews 8:1–2). 

In the Gospels, Jesus testifies to the vindication of the “Son of Man,” who is seated at God’s right side (ready to act = “coming”; Matthew 26:64//Luke 22:69). In Hebrews, Christ takes a more active role in this arrangement, in passages in which he “sat down” (1:3; 10:12)—following his purification of sins—and “takes his seat” (12:2) at God’s right side. In 1 Peter, Christ also more actively takes his position, although it is unclear whether he sits or stands on God’s right (3:22). In Acts, the speeches of Peter and Stephen contain references to this image: Luke’s Peter testifies to the act of Christ’s “exaltation” symbolized in this position next to God (Acts 2:32–35), citing from the Psalms; Luke’s Stephen has a vision of Christ “standing” at God’s side (Acts 7:55). 

In Mark’s (later) longer ending, Jesus was (passively) “taken up into heaven” and (actively) “sat down” at God’s side (Mark 16:19). The general function of this image—Christ seated at God’s side—within the early Christ-following communities served to emphasize the authority Christ had in relationship to God. 

There is a slight shift in function in two letters presumably written by disciples of Paul. In Colossians, the emphasis shifts from Christ’s authority (in the tradition) to what Christ-followers should “seek” (or gain) from the arrangement of Christ’s presence “seated” at God’s right side (Colossians 3:1). In the lectionary passage, similar to Colossians, Ephesians lays out the possibility of Christ-followers receiving a position alongside Christ (Ephesians 2:6–7). To be “seated” in the heavenly places signifies a “future” hope in the present order; that is, Christ-followers ought to be less fearful of the forces that rule the present order because of God’s work in Christ and their placement in the sphere of God/Christ.  

In addition to what the Ephesians author adds to the early Christian tradition (see above), this document emphasizes attention to the heavenly sphere as a necessary activity for Christ-followers as one way to shape their earthly perspective. In this short document, the “heavenly places,” or “heavenlies” (Greek epourania), is always in the plural. Early in the sermon-letter, the author acknowledges the spiritual blessings in the epourania for Christ-followers (Ephesians 1:3). It is in the epourania where God has seated Christ (1:20). 

Moving beyond others in the early Christian tradition, God has also seated “us” with Christ in the epourania (2:6). God’s wisdom is made known—through the ekklesia—to the rulers and authorities in the epourania (3:10). Related to 3:10 is the spiritual conflict that happens in the epourania—“against the spiritual forces of evil” (6:12). Again, as mentioned earlier, the Pauline author desires to encourage Christ-followers to be less fearful of the “authorities” that rule the present order, because of God’s work in Christ in the “heavenly places”—an activity that should empower a collective known as the ekklesia to act with courage and hope. 

Not all in the contemporary Christian orbit continue to share this view of how the world works. Many of us see a more “natural” order to the world than our ancient forebears were able to envision (for good reason). Most ancients of various religious persuasions thought similarly, even if they would argue about the particulars. 

The Pauline author clearly thinks of the world as one in which external (spiritual) forces determine the activities of the human elements on the planet, and the (spiritual) conflicts in life occur due to forces beyond what we can see: “for our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (6:12). 

As the old adage goes, a person can become too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. Thankfully, the biblical author did not leave us lost in the heavenly regions of the world. Even as our expectations build toward the significance of the resurrection during the season of Lent, so the passage moves from the regions above to recognize that Christ-followers have been created for the purpose of doing good in the world (2:10). 

May the attention we give to ourselves during the season of Lent recognize God’s power granted to us to do good for those we love and for those strangers we do not yet know.