Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year B
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish
but might have eternal life.— John 3:16
This is certainly the most cited verse of the New Testament in current American culture: on posters held up from the crowd at sporting events, on the bottom rim of In-N-Out Burger drinking cups, on the eye-black of Tim Tebow, and for the ladies, on the shopping bags of Forever 21. One finds it on bracelets, posters, country road signs, all over.
More authoritatively, the words are now part of the rite of the Mass in the form of the Roman Rite approved under Pope Benedict for the communities of the Anglican Ordinariate, as part of the so-called “comfortable words” spoken by the priest or deacon in connection with the general confession of sins. Most Christians, one can safely suppose, whether Catholic or not, can recite at least this verse of Scripture, even if they know no other by heart.
What is the deepest meaning of these words, which can explain their intuitive attractiveness to Christians?
Let’s consider first of all that in our religion, which is that of Jesus Christ, we are commanded to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength, and we are told that loving our neighbor as ourselves is a commandment just like the first: the love of God. This is so true that Our Lord sums up both commandments of love in one commandment, which he calls a “new commandment”: Love one another as I have loved you.
How does God love us? Well, he is the very source and model of the commandment of love. This means that God loves us as he loves himself. He would not give us, who are made in his image and likeness, this commandment of love, if he himself did not exemplify it. After all, St. John the beloved disciple tells us that “God is love.”
So how does God love himself? By the procession of his only Son, and of their Holy Spirit in an infinite communion of love called the Blessed Trinity. This supreme goodness and life and beauty has chosen to share that infinite life with angels and men. So when we say that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life, we mean that God loves us as he loves himself, with the love of the Father for the Son, which is their Holy Spirit. In this sense, then, God models the fulfillment of this commandment of love of God and neighbor by giving us himself in the Holy Trinity as our life and happiness, that is, by loving us as he loves himself.
Now this is a very deep reality, and it tells us about how we are to love our neighbor. We love our neighbor, as Christians, not only as one for whom we need to observe the Golden Rule, although that is a start, but precisely as one who is, like us, made in the image and likeness of God. We love our neighbor in imitation, in participation of the mysterious community life of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This reality gives our loving intentions and actions a power greater than any other in the whole world. It is why St. Paul tells us that, unless we have the love of God in us, all our best qualities and virtues are nothing, and that this love never fails, even though heaven and earth will pass away. Love is what had made us and what keeps us in being and will ultimately save us. This is because it is the very life of God, and our very mysterious destiny in him, who, in the words of St. Paul in today’s second reading, has prepared for us—from all eternity—such good works as we are to walk in on the way to eternal life.
What this share in eternal life will be is utterly beyond our present knowledge. Paul tells us that we are God’s children now, but what we will later come to be has not yet come to light. When it does, we will know God, as now we are known by him, he tells us. This has something to do with God’s knowing us and loving us as he knows and loves himself.
This love is the source of the great security and consolation that so many have intuitively experienced over the centuries in hearing these “comfortable words” of the Savior. As the apostle says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” If he did not spare his only Son for our sake, will he not give us all good things, namely himself?
In short, we belong to God, we are the effect of his love, and not just of a love for his creatures as lesser beings, but of his love for himself, which is himself. This is not pantheism or Gnosticism or New Age ideology. The fact is that the mysterious way in which God in the Holy Trinity identifies himself with us is far sweeter, and more powerful, and more profound, and more precious to him than it ever could be to us. And whatever it is it will make pantheism seem like some weak conception. That is why God came, taking our very nature so as to become, not only our God, but in the same divine Person the first of our neighbors, and indeed, “the firstborn of all creation.”
So let everybody who knows you know also that you are convinced that there is nothing more secure and more real and more powerful than the love of the Father in Christ Jesus. And see to it by your loving deeds that you have begun to understand just a little bit what it means when we say, “God so loved the world…”