Two words sum up the Christian Gospel. Two words boil it down to its barest essentials and its deepest truth. Two words are the bedrock on which all the rest are built.

They are not “God loves.” No doubt those words are true. We read those words when we read the story of Nicodemus come to Jesus at night. “This is how God loves the world. . . .” said Jesus.

They are not “God gives.” We read in the same story, in the very same sentence that the manner of God’s love is expressed in God’s gift. “This is how God loves the world: God gave his only Son. . . .”

But they are not God gives, either.

Neither are they “Jesus saves,” or  “God accepts.” They do not include the words grace or faith or sin or salvation. They don’t include God or invoke two of the three persons of the Trinity. They aren’t found in any Creed or Confession. They aren’t particularly religious words at all.

In fact, the words don’t even comprise a sentence.

These are the words: “And Peter.”

Why?

Do you remember Peter’s last words to Jesus?

“Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.” A powerful declaration of loyalty. We are going to die together, Jesus. I will be with you to the end.

Words that must have been hard to say. After all, they come right after Jesus’ prediction that Peter would deny him. “Before the rooster crows twice,” Jesus had just said, “you will deny me three times.”

Imagine how those words slammed into Peter. Peter—the spokesperson for the disciples. Peter—who though he often got it wrong, was always there. Peter—who with James and John formed the core of the core of Jesus’ confidantes.

Jesus words must have cut him deeply. They could not but have wounded. “I know you Peter. Better than you know yourself. You will deny me.”

And Peter’s response “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you,” well, they sum up Peter don’t they? Immediate. Passionate. Brash and bold. I am going with you to the end, Jesus. All the way to the death.

There is no reason given in Mark’s text to doubt Peter’s truthfulness here. No reason given to allow suspicion over whether he really is genuine. Peter believes and feels the depth of these words.

And he means them. “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.”

Not only does he mean them. He backs them up. Even if he does not stride with Jesus in to council’s chamber, even if he does not stand with his Lord as he is falsely accused by the religious elite, he goes a fair bit further than the rest.

Mark tells us that at the point of his arrest, “all of them forsook him and fled.” The three in the inner part of Gethsemane. Peter James and John. The three who had seen Jesus transfigured in his glory, seen him talking to Elijah and Moses. They ran. The rest—the remaining 8, the other anonymous disciples—they all ran too. Everybody fled.

One anonymous disciple—and tradition suggests it may have been Mark himself—ran so quickly, he ran right out of his clothes. “He left his linen cloth and ran off naked,” so the Scriptures say.

All of them cowards. All of them deniers. All of them betrayers.

All except Peter.

Peter only goes so far. And then he remembers his promise: “Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.” And as those words echo in his memory, his flight away from Gethsemane slows. First to a jog. Then to a walk. Then he stops.

Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.

And he turns. And he walks, and then he jogs, and then he runs. Peter alone runs to the courtyard. Peter alone follows.

Only Peter.

Quietly. Surreptitiously. Scared out of his wits, Peter enters the courtyard and finds a fire. He strains to hear the goings on in the great room above the courtyard.

And then, he is recognized.

A serving girl takes note of him: “You also were with Jesus, the man from Nazareth.”

And Peter replied, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But of course he knows. He knows that he has been found out. And he moves away from the fire to a darker, more secluded part of the courtyard.

But the girl won’t leave him alone. She follows after and begins to shout to the rest, “This man is one of them!” And Peter denies a second time.

By now, however, the secret is out in the open. One of the bystanders recognizes Peter’s accent. “Certainly, you’re one of them. You are a Galilean.”

And now, every bit as eruptive, every bit as passionate, every bit as brash as he was before.

But now, his words are these: “I swear to God, I do not know this man!”

“Even though I must die with you, I will not deny you.”

“I swear to God, I do not know this man!”

Peter made two declarations that night.  Peter believed one and knew the other was a lie. And he wept.

That’s all. He wept. He did not repent. He did not undo his lie. He did not, in the end, own up to his allegiance and follow his Lord. He did not deny himself. He did not take up his cross.

He wept.

Tears. Fear. Remorse. Crushing guilt. But no change of behaviour. No indication of repentance.

And so it is that the last words Peter speaks in the Gospel of Mark are these: “I do not know this man you are talking about.”

But Jesus knew Peter.

As Thursday gave way to Friday, Jesus knew Peter.

As he stood before the religious elite, Jesus knew Peter. As he stood before Pilate, Jesus knew Peter.  As the soldiers mocked him, Jesus knew Peter. As he was being nailed and lashed to his cross, Jesus knew Peter. As he hung on that cross, suspended between heaven and earth, bearing in his body the sins of the world, Jesus knew Peter.

In the silence of Holy Saturday, Jesus knew Peter.

When the women went to the tomb on Easter Sunday morning, Jesus knew Peter.

And now you know why “And Peter” sums up the good news of Easter, the good news of the Gospel.

Now you know why there are no better words than “And Peter” in the entire Bible. “Go and tell his disciples and Peter.”

Jesus knew and never stopped knowing Peter.

The crucified one kept faith with Peter when Peter’s faith failed. The Risen one would not release Peter from his loyalty, now.

And Peter—Peter who boasted.

And Peter—Peter who fled.

And Peter—Peter who denied.

And Peter—Peter who did not repent.

Go and tell his disciples and Peter. And All of us who, on our own, ares beyond hope.

Every name of every disciple, every denier, every last unrepentant one of us is kept and known and bound up in that name. Each of us is Peter.

And the Easter message of the angel is as true for us as it was for Peter.

“Go and tell his disciples. And Peter. And Tim. And Anne. And Glenn. And Gwen. And Amanda. And Riley. And Calvin. And Rachel. And Patti. And Chris. And Mary.

He has gone ahead of us. And he will meet us soon.

Amen.

Here is a link to the mp3.

(1) Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.

Forgiveness is almost a platitude. But how hard is it to forgive when we have really encountered evil? That is something only the victims of evil have a right to speak to. Their words are words to which the rest of us must listen, long and hard, before we utter our own.

There are some in this parish who have been on the receiving end of evil, who have known the suffering that comes from cruelty far more directly than I and all of us ever want to. They have spoken to me about how hard it is to say with the one they name as Lord, “Father, forgive them.”

Forgiveness is hard not because it is a denial of judgment, but because it is a response to judgment that says, I let go of my call for justice. You are guilty. You have wronged me. You are condemned not by my ill-will, but by your own actions.

AND, I refuse to call out for penalty or punishment.  That is what forgiveness is.

And that is the first word from the cross.

It is fitting that the first word should be a word of forgiveness, for that is what the cross is all about—it is God’s hard medicine to cure the world’s sins, but mine. And yours.

In that word, we have God-in-Christ’s pronouncement of judgment on our situation. The world has gone wrong. The world has rejected God’s love. The entire human race, crystallized in the judgments of select Jewish and Roman leaders and the actions of the their lackeys, has passed its own judgment on the fullness of God’s presence dwelling among us. And we have decided to get rid of it at all costs.

It will not do to hear this first word applying to someone else. The Jews did it; the Romans did it; whatever. “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” is the haunting question asked by the old spiritual song. The answer is given by B.B. King and Bono in the song, “When Love Comes to Town.”

I was there when they crucified my Lord
I held the scabbard when the soldier drew his sword
I threw the dice as they pierced his side,
But I’ve seen love conquer the great divide

I was there and so were you. We cannot look at others. We did this to the Son of God. His first word is a passing of judgment. And until we hear it as judgment, we cannot hear it as Gospel.

But it is Gospel, too.

Father forgive them. That is God’s own response to God’s own judgment. God’s own response to his determination that the world has rejected his reign, God’s own response to the fact that, in the words of the prophet, “each has turned to his or her own way,” is not to demand penalty punishment. It is to intercede for forgiveness.

Father forgive them. The first word, is first a word of judgment and then a word of grace. Both facets are true. And judgment and grace are spoken not simply for the soldiers “just following orders,” but for all of those who are taken up in their actions. They are spoken for Caiaphas and Annas and the Jewish leadership. They are spoken for Herod and Pilate. They are spoken for Peter and even for Judas. And they are spoken for me. And you.

(2) I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” It’s a rather feeble prayer, isn’t it? Pathetic, even. A gambler’s last hope, the last refuge of a thief, and a cynic’s final bulwark against despair. “Remember me.”

There is no repentance here—no I am sorry for my sins. There is no penitence—no if I could I would make restitution to those I have harmed. There is only this plea, “Remember me.”

What would the magistrate who had passed sentence say in response? No doubt, he would have said something like: “We will remember you. Or if not you in particular, at least that your actions brought about the appropriate punishment. And our memory will be a deterrent to others. We will remember that you died the death of a sinner. Because that is what you are.”

What would have this man’s victims have said had they any voice at all? “How can we ever forget you? You robbed us of our daily bread and left us hungry. You took from us the means to live and left us to die. For your own gain, you sent us into poverty and we have yet to recover. You destroyed our lives as surely as if you had simply killed us. We will never forget. Now die the death you deserve.”

He knows it, too. He said himself to his foul-mouthed accomplice, “we deserve to be here.”

What audacity! What insolence that, having recognized in Jesus an innocent man and perhaps much more, he should ask him to remember. “Remember me.”

And Jesus—the incarnate God, who wrote the law on the very fabric of the universe, who has declared himself again and again to be on the side of victims and against their oppressors—Jesus should have stood with the magistrate victim both and spoken with their voice. “I will remember you,” he should have said, “now, die in your sin.”

But he does not say that. “I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise.” To this thief! This criminal. This impenitent and unrepentant man. He receives God’s free gift of salvation there. In response to that prayer that is at once feeble and audacious.

Before we get too wrapped up in our offense, however, let us look at our prayers. They aren’t much more than the thief’s, are they?

We are, in the end, very comfortable in calling the fire of God’s judgment down on others while we stand a safe distance away. But we do not stand a safe distance away. All of us, the Scripture says, have gone after our own ways. All of us have done what was right in our eyes. And when we’re honest, the most we can manage is this thief’s “remember me.”

And Jesus’ answer to us is the same. “I assure you, today.” Our assurance lies not in ourselves. Our assurance lies not in what we have done, nor in what we have left undone. “I assure you, today.” Our assurance lies only in the goodness of he who pardoned the thief on the cross and who extends his pardon to all who trust in him.

All because of your goodness, Lord, in your love, remember me.

(3) Dear woman, here is your son.

She stood there. Watching. Seeing it all unfold even as she was wrapped tightly by cords of utter helplessness. She stood there. Weeping. The sword now passed through her own soul, too.

Jesus’ dreams were not hers for him. Jesus’ mission was not what she wanted it to be. Jesus was always, even as a child, at one step removed from her.

And she loved him. She loved him through fevers and skinned knees. She loved him when he left the family business to become an itnerant preacher. She loved him as she went with her children to find him and to restrain him when she didn’t understand his preaching.

She loved him at the wedding when she goaded him into continuing the party. She had no idea what had happened, but somehow he had managed to solve the problem. How had he gotten that wine? From whom? Where? No matter. He had solved the problem and she loved him.

She loved him now as, still not understanding, she saw his mission end in failure and he prepared to breathe his last.

And he looked at her. “Woman, behold your son!” It was not an invitation to look upon him one last time. It was the creation of a new family. From now on, Mary would become part of the family of the apostle whom Jesus loved. He entrusted her to him and him to her. And from that very hour, the Scriptures say, she was taken into his home.

“Woman behold your son.” With these words, Jesus creates, in death, new life, a new family. The family made up of his mother and his messengers. The family into which we have been incorporated by our baptism. That family is the Church.

That is the family that is created by the death of Jesus. A family created by word and water, a family sustained by bread and wine.

So it is that, through the Cross of Jesus, we live in the same house as Mary, as John, as Peter. We are part of the same family as angels and archangels and all of have served God in every age.

He is the ground and guarantor of our communion.

“Woman behold your son.”

With those words, Jesus relativizes ever other prior claim to loyalty, whether to family, to clan, to tribe, to nation. Those bonds—which are real enough—no longer can ever come before the bond of loyalty to the one who made a new family in his death and invited us into it by the waters of baptism.

Woman, behold your son.

In this new family, water is thicker than blood.

(4) My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?

“He descended into hell.” So we confess when we say the Apostles’ Creed, at least in the old language. Into Hell is better than to the dead, it seems to me. For it is more evocative.

“He descended to the dead” could be a simple gloss on the previous words. “He was crucifed, died and was buried.” It could be a metaphorical “really,” emphasising the reality of Jesus’ death.

The older language of the descent into hell reminds us that it this is no mere underlining of the previous sentence. He descended into hell. He descended into the realm of godforsakenness. He died, as the reformer John Calvin puts it, the one great death of the Sinner.

And that descent is captured in the heart-rending cry in which Jesus makes Psalm 22 his own. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The descent into hell, then is real. It does not merely reaffirm the reality of Jesus’ death but names it as a peculiar kind of death. It is not the mere sundering of body from soul. Jesus’ death was his being undone by the wrath of God poured out against all sin; it was his surrendering fully to God’s enemies—the unholy trinity of sin, death and the devil; it was his taking on himself the dirt of the world’s sin, and feeling excluded from the love of his Father, which he had known from all eternity.

He who knew no sin, St. Paul wrote, became sin.

He descended into hell. My God, why have you forsaken me?

In 1988, Pope John Paul II explored the meaning of the cry with these words:

“In that experience, in that cry, in that ‘why’ addressed to heaven, Jesus also established a new manner of solidarity with us who are so often moved to raise our eyes and words to heaven to express our complaint and even desperation. . . .

“[Jesus’ human soul was reduced to a wasteland. He no longer felt the presence of the Father, but he underwent the tragic experience of the most complete desolation. . . . The external events seemed to manifest the absence of the Father who permitted the crucifixion of his Son . . . . That silence of God weighed on the dying Jesus as the heaviest pain of all. . . .”

And that cry continues to echo. It is the cry of human suffering that has now been taken into the very life and heart of God for the healing of the world, for the forgiveness of sinners, for the radical welcome that God now extends to you and me for the sake of his Son whom he did not, finally, abandon.

He descended into hell. He cried the opening words of the 22^nd Psalm filling them with a despair that even the Psalmist did not know when he first penned them. My God, My God, why have you forsaken me? And with those words, he spoke for all God’s suffering and sin bound creation. He spoke those words also for God and as God, who has made the world’s suffering his own, that the world might enjoy his life and salvation.

(5) I thirst.

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the camp executioner refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.

The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. “Long live Liberty!” cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. “Bare your heads!” yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. “Cover your heads!”

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive…

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. Behind me I heard the same man asking: “Where is God now?”

And I hear a voice within me answer him: “Were is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows. . . ” (Elie Wiesel, Night)

“I thirst.”

You might not see it. “I thirst,” is simple and straightforward enough on its own. But Jesus is still quoting the Scriptures he memorized as a child in synagogue in Nazareth.

This time, he is quoting Psalm 69: “they offer me sour wine for my thirst.”

It is a full expression of the agony endured by God the Son, the man, Jesus of Nazareth. And they are not his own words. They are the words of another. Another who was himself just like us.

“Tis mystery all! The immortal dies. Who can explore the strange design. In vain the firstborn seraph tries to plumb the depths of love divine.” So wrote the Anglican hymn-writer, Charles Wesley in the second stanza of And Can It Be.

Yes really, really dies. And really—really—suffers in the agony preceding death.

I thirst.

Two simple words taken from a Psalm in which the writer calls out to God to deliver him from cruel and uncaring enemies. Two words in which are capture the reality of the suffering of a human being.

This is no concept. No philosophical discussion of atonement. This is the suffering of a body broken and exposed; a body suspended between heaven and earth; a body dried out by sun and wind and torture.

This the real human suffering that God has made his own.

There is no comfort in the phrase God suffered for us. No relief, no sense of meaning given to our own suffering. It means nothing to me that God suffers as God. Because I’m not God. And I will never ever know or experience just what kind of suffering that is.

But human suffering? That I know.

None of us knows the suffering of another, mind you. And my own life has not known much. But I have suffered. And so have you. Many of you have suffered more than others, and more than I ever will.

We do not all suffer the same pain or to the same degree. But we all suffer. It is the one experience alongside birth and death that every human being will share in.

And another has taken that human experience and made it his own. And he has taken our own words to express it! I thirst.

That is not the cry of a God pretending to suffer. Hovering six inches over the cross of his sin; six inches over the gallows at Auschwitz.

I thirst.

That is not the cry of a God suffering in his own unique god-like way. Remote and removed and uninvolved with us

I thirst.

That is the cry of the God who suffers as a human. Who knows human suffering and dying because he has suffered and died as a human being. Who was there, as Elie Wiesel wrote, with that child on the gallows.

(6) It is finished.

It is finished. It might sound like an exhausted and desperate announcement. “I have nothing more to give.” Or “It’s finally over.” The last words of a broken man.

But in the Greek language of the New Testament, it is one single word of triumph. Tetelestai! It is accomplished.

Jesus mission was  completed. There was nothing more left to do.

He had displayed the love of God to the full. He had displayed the wrath of God against all that would harm God’s good creation. He had engaged fully with the enemies of God, fighting them not with armies, whether of angels or men, but only with the Word of God. He had inaugurated the Kingdom of God.

And now, it is accomplished. God law has been upheld. God’s enemies have been defeated. God’s people have been drawn into fellowship with God and each other in a kingdom that will never pass away.

It is accomplished. His saving work is done.

In our own following of Jesus, there is to add to it. We do not bring in the promised kingdom with our works of mercy and justice. We do not heal the world of sin through our own mission and discipling work. We do not save ourselves through our asceticism, our own pursuit of holiness.

All of those things are important. None of them is what saves us.

In our own failure to follow Jesus, there is nothing that can take away from it. Our own participation—known and unknown—in systems of oppression and in justice. Our own thoroughly inadequate and sin-stained presentations of the life-giving Gospel of God. Our own inability to be holy enough.

All of those things are serious lapses. None of them can undo us.

Our works neither save nor damn.

Why?

Because his work is sufficient. And his work is accomplished. It is done.

Because his work is finished, none of us is ever finished—over. Done. Passed by. Hopeless.

Because his work is finished, we have fellowship with God and with each other. A fellowship bought by the precious blood of Jesus. By his life poured out on this Friday we call Good.

On this Friday, it was finished. And that means none of us is beyond hope.

(7) Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands.

Jesus is still, even now, praying the prayers of Israel. This time, it is Psalm 31. It is striking that at no point does Jesus depart from the faith of his ancestors. Even when in the depths of abandonment by God and brokenness in body, the words that were his were the words of Israel.

All the way through, Jesus acts not alone or on his own or apart from the faith of Israel. All the way through, the faithlessness of Israel, and with them, the whole human human race are heaped up on this one man, who stands with Adam and Abraham as a representative of us all.

All the way through, the faithfulness of Israel’s God is displayed here in the obedience of this one man that undoes the disobedience of Adam. That fulfils God’s promise to Abraham that his faith would father many nations.

All the way through, the prayers of Israel are taken by God’s one obedient covenant partner, and infused with a depth of meaning their original authors never knew.

All the way through the prayers of Israel are taken by God’s one obedient covenant partner and spoken with the meaning that their true author had intended from and for all eternity.

Father, I entrust my spirit into your hands.

The mission of Israel has been brought to its right and good end. The whole world is now to be blessed by the calling once given to Abraham.

And the blessings given to Israel are once again seen not as gifts to be kept from the world, but as gifts to be lavished upon the world.

This one Israelite has committed his spirit to his Father.

This one Israelite has committed his Father’s Spirit to us.

This one Israelite  has tied us forever to our Jewish brothers and sisters in the faith of Israel. He has given us their prayers. He has prayed them for us. And he invites us to pray them, too. He committed his spirit to the hand of his Father so that in death, we might do the same.

Here is a link to the mp3.

All or Nothing

Nicodemus has come to Jesus at night to query this rabbi who is baffling the leadership of which Nicodemus is a part. On the one hand, as we saw last week, Jesus represents a challenge to their authority and the way they have used it. Jesus has refused the easy peace the leadership has made with Rome. And yet they cannot write him off. For even if Jesus would not perform a sign when demanded—as though he were some kind of magical miracle machine—there were signs. Nicodemus says so. “No one can do these signs,” he says, “apart from the presence of God.”

What follows is Jesus’ first major speech in the Gospel of John. It begins at verse 5 and runs through to the end of verse 21. Throughout, we are confronted by John’s love of binary combinations again, his stark “either/ors”: below and above; earthly things and heavenly things; descent and ascent; light and darkness; salvation and judgment; and the pivot between them all is Jesus.

Jesus as the center, the fulcrum, the dividing line. Jesus who forces the decision.  We don’t like this all or nothing Jesus.

I will be more forthright. I don’t particularly like this all or nothing Jesus. In Lent we all confront our besetting sins. Mine is very much like the Anglican Priest  in C. S. Lewis’ parable, The Great Divorce who, on his visit to heaven from his study in hell, said, “For me there is no such thing as a final answer. The free wind of inquiry must always continue to blow through the mind, must it not? ‘Prove all things’… to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.” In Lent, I must confront the unhappy fact that  I want a Jesus who gives me room to maneuver. I want a Jesus who gives me options. A Jesus who will let me explore a little.

But this Jesus who talks—as he did two weeks ago—about self-denial and taking the way of the cross? This Jesus who refuses easy compromises that allow Caesar and God to reign over separate parts of our lives? This Jesus who says, “this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness”? He’s hard to take.

Here’s the problem: not simply for the Anglican priest in the parable, or for me, but for all of us: John’s all-or-nothing Jesus is the real Jesus. And if we are going to take Jesus at all, this is the Jesus we will take.

At my former parish, I once had a conversation with several parishioners who loathed St. Paul. St. Paul, they said, was a moralist. St. Paul was about rules. St. Paul wanted to tell people what to do. He wanted to regulate their lives. Jesus, on the other hand, was cool. A hipster, even. Jesus went about doing good and healing and helping people. And otherwise not interfering.

I confess, I still don’t get that. Whatever his alleged flaws, Paul’s view of Jesus is so expansive, so broad, so cosmic, that it is hard to imagine any human being escaping its compass. Jesus, on the other hand, says some mighty hard things about narrow doors and needle’s eyes. About light and darkness. About the need to be “born from above.” About perishing and living. Jesus, as he gives himself to us on the pages of holy Scripture, is very all-or-nothing.

Raymond Brown, perhaps the greatest scholar of the fourth Gospel in the twentieth century has some good advice for preachers who are, like me, uncomfortable with John’s Jesus: “Do not domesticate the Johannine Jesus. It is his style to say things that border on the offensive, be puzzled and even offended; but do not silence this Jesus by deciding what he should not have said and what your hearers should not hear.”  

So, we’re going to stick with this Jesus. And we’re going to see what he says and why he says it.

Jesus likens his life and ministry to an episode from the life of Moses. The episode which formed out Old Testament lesson today. It is itself a hard story, depicting God first as sending poisonous snakes along with food to punish the people of Israel for complaining yet again and then providing healing through a snake of hammered bronze hoisted on a pole. Anyone, God told Moses, who looked at the snake on the pole would recover.

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus said, “so must the son of man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

There is an allusion to the cross here, certainly. For there, the Son of Man was indeed lifted up. Suspended between heaven and earth and there, looked upon. But the image Jesus uses is more than an allusion to his death. It is also to his resurrection. His being lifted up after his death. His exaltation. For John Cross and resurrection is one single event. And it is one single event that reveals one singular identity.

It reveals Jesus’ singular identity as the one sent from God, the one in whom the kingdom comes, the one whose identity is most fully captured when he is lifted up on the cross on that bleak Friday afternoon that we have come to call “Good.” Whenever he is lifted up, he says, whoever believes in him will have eternal life.

This lifting up, further, is the fullest demonstration of the love of God for the whole of creation. This singular eternal identity captured in a singular temporal moment is the love of God: “This is how God loves the world: he sent his only Son so that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

This is the first verse I memorized as a child. I know that it is the first verse that some of you learned as well. Those who taught us were wise to make this the first verse. Because this verse is the Gospel. Everything else hangs on the truth of this verse. If it is finally false, none of the rest matters.

Now, here’s where things get difficult.

This divine intervention is not simply a display of divine love. It is also an act of judgment. And we don’t want a God who judges. Talking of God coming in judgment is to evoke memories of the great American Puritan, Jonathan Edwards and his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God. A sermon which, though he delivered it sitting and in a voice barely above a whisper, evoked a powerful emotional reaction from his hearers. Today, if we read that sermon, we would more likely react with embarrassment and pat ourselves on the back for belonging to a more enlightened era.

Whatever we think of Edwards’ notion of judgment, however, we can get away from John’s. John sets before us plainly the man Jesus not simply as the love of God, but also and at the same time, the judgment of God.

The man Jesus of Nazareth is God’s act of judgment, first of all, simply because his entry into history and the manner of that entry declares that something has gone wrong.  Things are not the way they’re supposed to be.If people need to be given eternal life, then it seems we lack it. For the Son of Man is not lifted up to give us what is ours already.

It is an act of judgment, second, because in sending Jesus, God judges this lack of life to be a bad thing. It is not simply declarative, but it is also discerning. To lack eternal life is to lack light. It is to live a half-life shrouded in darkness. This, says John, is bad. God judges that it is bad precisely by sending his Son to rescue us from it. God desires us to have the light and life that should enlighten and enliven all of us. He desires us to have not a half-life, but the very fullness of life. A life not bounded by death, but defined by death’s utter absence.

So it is that this act of judgment is not simply declaring and discerning. It is also loving. Jesus as the the judgment of God is also God’s act of loving intervention. Jesus entry—his descent—into our world is not undertaken to condemn the world. It is undertaken that he might again ascend and take us and all creation  with him into God’s very life. It is the deepest expression of God’s love for God’s creation. God’s care for his people.

It is no problem at all for John, that judgment and love are not opposites. One does not need to be set aside for the other to be undertaken. In the single temporal moment—the lifting up of the Son of Man—the singular identity of that Son of Man is revealed. He is the love of God on radical display and at the same time the judgment of God upon the world. His entry into his own world—as John puts it in his first chapter—is judgment enacted and directed toward the world’s salvation. He judges that world needs saving and then acts to save it. And that is how God loves the world.

What then of condemnation? Well, the first thing we have to do is acknowledge the language of condemnation whether or not we like it. The loving judgment and judging love of God displayed and enacted in Jesus lifted up is, as Jesus says in this passage, the pivot at which light confronts darkness. It names darkness as darkness. It exposes it to be a half-life, a pale and feeble imitation that is ultimately opposed to and finally defeated by the life freely offered by God.

And the second thing is to say straightforwardly that condemnation comes not from God, or from ignorance of God’s saving work. “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” That’s what Jesus says. Whatever condemnation arises as a result of God’s intervention in the sending of his son, that condemnation is not his.

It arises, Jesus says, because the presence of the light in the darkness now thrusts upon people the responsibility to decide how to respond to that light. People says Jesus in the lesson’s conclusion either love the darkness because their deeds are evil and they do not wish them to be exposed, but those who do what is true come to the light so that their deeds might be seen.

That is why the revelation of Jesus, his lifting up on the cross and through the resurrection, is the stark either/or, the pivot on which all this turns. He forces us to make a decision.

Not forced, but forces. For the moment is always present. It is not past and gone, some far away event from two millennia past, the occurrence of which has no bearing on me. It is now. It is every time that single temporal moment is re-declared in the reading of the Scriptures and re-enacted in the Eucharist.

And so this morning, the light again shines in the darkness. The life and love of God are put on full display in words and in bread and in wine. And in this moment the judgment of God is passed again. And a past event becomes a present salvation.  And in this moment we are invited again to encounter the judgment of God in its fullness. A judgment that is from all eternity, gracious and loving and oriented to our healing. A judgment that calls us from the darkness of our own devising into the light and life of God. A judgment who is a person.

The Lord Jesus who gives his life for all and to all who believe.