Living in a Good Story: judgement and exposure
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21 (see below)
“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up, that everyone having faith in him might have the life of the Age. For God so loved the world as to give the Son, the only one, so that everyone having faith in him might not perish but have the life of the Age. For God sent the Son into the world not that he might pass judgement on the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever has faith in him is not judged; whoever has not had faith has already been judged because he has not had faith in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement: that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were wicked. For everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light, for fear his deeds will be exposed; but whoever acts in truth approaches the light, so that his deeds might be made manifest – that they have been worked in God.”
Shout out to Rev Parry… I’m enjoying his reflections on the beatitudes (the good life). Blessed are the ‘poor in spirit’ meaning something like ‘blessed are the powerless’. The powerless have a good life. Why? Because of how the story is going, because of hope and anticipation. The good life, it seems has everything to do with what God is doing and how the story will end. In short the good life is the life lived in a good story.
This is not a common way to think in our society. The common way to think is that the good life is when you set your own goals and achieve them. Jesus way is about living within God’s goals and God’s action.
So I’m taking a break from the Beatitudes to talk about The Good Story… what it means to live life in a ‘good story’. The Christian word for that is ‘gospel’
Today’s reading from John 3 is so popular, because it is a gospel story, it gives us a story to live in. God loves the world so much that God does something? The key question is ‘what is God up to?’
6 weeks ago I did John 1 – “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” That’s the indestructible creative power of God. And the ‘logos’ of divine light (the word) John says, becomes flesh. Today I’m excited to take this idea of redemption a step further. Here we are dealing with the idea that the human condition might not be a lost cause for God. And that is what God is up to.
So here we are in chapter 3 of the gospel and John tells us (in the words of Jesus to Nicodemus) that God loved this world so much (in spite of everything), that God gave ‘the Son’… this is code talk for Jesus. For John, Jesus is at the centre of sorting out the human condition.
The section we read for today started with an obscure reference to the Old Testament about Moses lifting up the snake or serpent in the desert. We’ll come back to that, cause I think it’s a fascinating reference, a fascinating metaphor for the impact of Jesus. But first let’s look at Jesus as the vehicle of God’s redemption.
For God so loved the world, as to give the Son, the only one, so that everyone having faith in him might not perish, but have the life of the Age [God wants everyone into the life of God’s kingdom] for God sent the Son into the world, not that he might pass judgement on the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever has faith in him is not judged, whoever has not had faith has already been judged because he has not had faith in the only Son of God. And this is the judgement: that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light, for fear his deeds will be exposed, for whoever acts in truth, approaches the light so that his deeds may be made manifest – that they have been worked in God.
This is a complex passage… and a more literal translation like this helps us see it with fresh eyes. What are some of the clear things:
- The purpose of Jesus life (as the light of God) is not to pass judgement on the world. Passing judgement is what the judge does at the end of the court process, sometimes translated “condemn”. That is not God’s plan.
- But we have a problem, our life is perishable, like rotten fruit we are in a process of perishing that needs to be arrested. God doesn’t want anyone to perish.
- In order that we don’t perish another kind of judgement comes into play. There are two interesting things about this judgement
- Firstly it has already happened (past tense)
- Secondly, it is defined by John as a kind of ‘exposure’.
“And this is the judgement: that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for everyone who does evil things hates the light and does not approach the light, for fear his deeds will be exposed,
Our deeds are exposed. Our perishing processes are shown for what they are. It’s like when you go tramping and get to the mountain hut and need to go to the loo. Where do you go? (Longdrop). It’s like a light shone down a long-drop. It is the exposure of things we do not want to see. Jesus life shines a light down the long-drop. Judgement is what God’s goodness feels like or looks like when you don’t want to see it (say that again). What we get from Jesus is not future destruction but an exposure that has already happened
6. Faith is knowing the shame but walking towards the light. Judgement is a kind of shaming of human society and human beings (strong word). And what you get from that shaming/exposure is two kinds of people. You get people are still avoiding the light. And you get people of faith who have come to love and walk toward this light – they know the mess we are all in, but they still walk towards the light
In short God is not willing that we destroy ourselves or our planet so God gives us what we often don’t want to see – truth. God exposes Godself to us in a way that exposes us to the truth about ourselves.
In summary, there is a very different kind of judgement coming from God. The judgement of God is not the destruction of anything. The judgement of God that Jesus brings is a kind of meeting place, the meeting of light and darkness. It is not the beginning of death (as we might imagine from coming from a judge passing sentence at the end of a trial) instead it is the beginning of truth. It is the turning point of the world.
But what is John talking about here? How did this judgment happen? What did it look like?
For this I think we need to go back to the “serpent in the desert” as I promised earlier.
Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so it is necessary for the Son of Man to be lifted up
If you don’t know the story it is about a plague of snakes killing the people. They are saved from perishing because Moses lifts of up another snake for them all to look at. Paying attention to this snake is what saves them. The last thing these people are going to want to look at is another snake. It’s an odd story. And John picks it up and uses it as a metaphor for the kind of exposure we need but don’t want.
He’s talking here about the death of Jesus – the crucifixion. The death of Jesus is an act of exposure. But here’s the beautiful and deep irony, the naked man on the cross is not the one who is really exposed. The real and deep truth here is that Jesus is the moment at which the world around him was exposed. Jesus might be naked on the cross, but it is the world which is exposed
What they are doing in killing Jesus, is the kind of thing that lies at the rotten root of a perishing world, this is our serpent, our violence towards our scapegoats is killing us and we don’t know it, we think our violence is necessary and justified, we have convinced ourselves that our enemies are bad and that we need our violence.
God knows, Jesus knows, that we need to see God on a pole, scapegoated by us before we will see ourselves truthfully.
We need God to shine a torch down the long-drop of human society/history, and only then will we turn towards the light.
We talk vaguely and generally about sin in the church, but John’s vision of how Jesus on his cross shines light on sin, says something much more specific about the sin which is destroying the human world, it is not first of all pride, or rule-breaking or even selfishness (it is all of those things) it is violence. All of those things produce big and small forms of violence. And it is violence that unites us against victims, the ones we scapegoat.
Where are we judged? We have already been judged when Jesus was crucified. There we saw the truth about ourselves that we rather wouldn’t. And now we either walk in that light or we try and avoid it.
Our other reading for today, from Ephesians 2, describes us as ‘children of wrath’ (who nevertheless are being created for good works). I’ve thought a lot about that phrase over the years. It suggests to me how deeply our life is rooted in violence… not just those occasional extreme events that become news items, but that we are born into a long history of traumatisation and patterns of violence and scapegoating.
Hannah Arendt (famous post-war philosopher) responding to the way particular people had become the focus of the wrath of society after the holocaust, famously put the case that evil, in the Nazi world and in ours is woven into everyday life, in that sense it remains evil, but she called it banal. Perhaps the very reason we are so interested in the particularly dramatic representatives of evil (sometimes to the point of obsession) is that we don’t want to look at how our own lives are shaped in the everyday… children of wrath. A bit like our desire to point the finger at Donald Trump or Christopher Luxon, or Elon Musk or the owners of big oil companies rather than the way our everyday lives do battle with the planet we live on.
John says that our salvation begins when we do contemplate that… when we see the snake on the pole and are shaken out of our blind comfort and moved deeply to believe in the Son of God, a new way.
So, to tie this together. Our readings today are the kinds of readings Christians over the centuries have read and reread under the heading of ‘gospel’ – a good story. I want to finish by trying to tell John’s version of the ‘good story’ in a few sentences.
God loves the universe – it is a good place to be and God is the artist who moves it. But God is close to it all, and even this small planet is close to God’s life. God does not want human life on this small planet to perish in the violence we seem addicted to, violence against each other and the planet we live on. God takes on this violence by an act of exposure. In the drama of Jesus life, vulnerable self-sacrificing love meet our scapegoating violence. Light meets darkness. Truth impacts life. And in the resurrection of Jesus we are able to see that this love is the deeper reality, the more powerful reality, the one we can live hopefully within.
This good story makes our powerlessness, our mourning, our meekness (all those beatitude things which would otherwise seem terrible or hopeless) in fact parts of a good life, spaces of blessing, because God is redeeming it and redeeming us. Exposing the violence of our world and giving us the courage to leave it behind.
This is the Gospel of Christ.
boo to a goose 