John 3:16

Last week I spent a day at our cathedral as Day Chaplain. It is an interesting thing to do and one of the duties is to climb up into the pulpit every hour and encourage people to stop and pray for a moment. Most of the hours most people stopped, some joined in the Lord's Prayer, some took photos. But at three in the afternoon when I asked people to stop and pause a while it seemed as thought everyone did - for just a moment this busy building was silent and still and it almost felt like you could have reached out and touched God.

This tangibility of God's presence and God's love is hard to put into words without it sounding rather syrupy or overstated - but it is real. Yesterday the Eucharistic reading included that famous verse - John 3:16;

"‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life"

This verse has turned up on just about every sort of merchandising but it is chosen with good reasons - it sums up both the eternal love of God and the very immanent love of God revealed and incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ. John has this tension surrounding love throughout his Gospel - he starts with creation, both small and quiet, whispered in the breath of a word and huge and roaring as all that we know comes into being.

God, in John, is both familiar and mysterious and this is a tension which we experience throughout our Christian life, Jesus is both friend and saviour - something which we are so used to hearing that I doubt we very often pause to consider its magnitude. Strangely though, this tension between the beginning and the end is not an impossible place to exist in - if we are basing our confidence in God's love and not our own ability or propensity to respond to that love. Otherwise, when we are too self reliant, Jesus can turn into a nice but ineffective mate or God can get so far away as to make transcendence impenetrable.

We are reminded constantly by moments both by deep and comfortable silence and by the presence of the noise of life around us of God's love. A love which sent a saviour to walk with us as shepherd, sustenance and guide, as home and final destination but also a love which is so huge that we will never touch or understand but a small part.

These days we might call this verse of the Gospel a mission statement. The who, why and what of Jesus. However, as with any mission statement, this verse really is only a summary and it takes the rest of the Gospels and, indeed, a life walked with Christ, to begin to flesh out what this great saving love of god might actually mean to humanity.