In 1937, a man by the name of John Griffiths found a job tending one of the railway bridges that crossed the Mississippi River. Every day he would control the gears on the bridge that allowed the barges and the ships through.
One day John decided to allow his eight-year-old son Greg to help him. He and his boy packed their lunches with great excitement and went off to work. The morning went quickly and at noon they headed off for lunch, down a narrow catwalk onto an observation platform about 50 feet above the Mississippi.
John told his son stories about the ships as they passed by.
Suddenly, they were jolted back to reality by the shrill sound of an engine's whistle. Looking at his watch, John realised to his horror that it was 1.07pm that the Memphis Express was due any time and that the bridge was still raised.
He calmly told Greg to stay put and then ran back to the controls.
Once there he looked beneath the bridge to make sure there was nothing below and as he looked down he saw something so terrible that his blood froze.
There, lying on the gears, was his beloved son. Greg had tried to follow his dad to safety but had fallen off the catwalk.
Immediately, John realised the horrifying choice before him: either to lower the bridge and kill his son, or to keep the bridge raised and kill everyone on board the train.
As 400 people moved closer to the bridge, John realised what he had to do. Burying his face under his arm, he plunged down the lever. The cries of his son were instantly drowned out by the noise of the bridge grinding slowly into position.
As the train passed by a conductor was collecting tickets in his usual way. A businessman was casually reading a newspaper. Ladies were drinking afternoon tea. Children were playing. Most of the passengers were engaged in idle chatter. No one saw. No one heard the cries of a heartbroken father.
Now I don’t know for certain if that’s a true story – the little bit of digging I did on the internet didn’t turn up any confirmation – but it’s definitely gut-wrenching. You’d need a pretty hard heart not to be gripped by the tragedy of that father’s awful dilemma. To kill his own son, or to spare him and see hundreds of others die.
I first read that story in a book of illustrations for use in worship, and it’s there because the authors wanted us to get a feel for what God the Father must have gone through in watching his Son Jesus dying on the cross: one innocent man dying so that the many might be saved. And sure enough, just as in the story, most of the many coast through life blissfully unaware of the immense sacrifice that was made on their behalf.
But there are aspects of that story that leave me very uncomfortable if we’re meant to take this as a picture of what was happening in the events around the cross. Not least the fact that the boy who died didn’t choose his own fate. It was imposed upon him. There’s a world of difference between dying involuntarily in a terrible accident, and choosing to die so that others might be spared. One is tragic, the other’s heroic.
And in this story, both the father and the son seem like powerless victims of circumstance. But is it ever right to think of God as powerless? Doesn’t the Bible portray the cross as part of God’s purposeful plan of salvation rather than a drastic contingency dreamt up to stave off disaster?
Again, some tough questions. And hopefully John 3:16 will shed some light on them this morning.
Last Sunday we spent some time in the first clause:
For God so loved the world
Today we’re taking in the next few words which say:
He gave his one and only Son.
And before we get into the whys and wherefores of Jesus being given to us, let’s spend a moment thinking about those words ‘his one and only Son’.
Why ‘one and only Son?’’ There are plenty of places in the Bible where ordinary believers are called ‘sons of God’ or ‘children of God’. In one sense we could think of the whole human race as God’s family.
What’s special about Jesus that makes him ‘God’s one and only Son’?
Well the Greek word John uses here is monogene which literally means only begotten. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, and that’s probably how many of us learned this text when we were kids “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten son”.
But what is begetting?
Well CS Lewis reminds us that there’s a big difference between begetting and creating.
When I create something, I make something different from myself. I create a song, or a batch of scones, or a piece of furniture.
But when I beget, I beget something of the same kind as myself. A tiger begets tigers; a donkey begets donkeys; a human being begets a human being, and God begets…… God.
God has many created children – the whole human race, and within that those who belong to the family of faith. But he has only one begotten Son.
It’s a bit early for Christmas carols, though with the weather we’ve been having…..! But I’m sure you’ll remember these words from O Come All Ye Faithful
God of God, light of light. Lo he abhors not the virgin’s womb
Very God, begotten not created….
Christian orthodoxy has always held that this Jesus is of a different order. He is fully human, but at one and the same time, he is fully divine as well.
And that is so important to grasp.
Not least because in the context of the story we heard earlier on, we realise that what’s going on on the cross is not a father forcing an innocent third party to die for our sake. That would be tragic and unjust. Cruel, even.
No - It’s God himself, in the person of the Son, going to the cross on our behalf. For your sake and for mine.
So many of us think of God as the one to fear, who’s angry with us and our messed up ways until Jesus steps into the breach and convinces him to change his mind. That’s bad theology.
Remember what we said last week– for God so LOVED the world, he gave his one and only Son. God loving, God giving, God coming, God living, God dying, God saving. It’s God, God, God, from beginning to end. No third parties.
Now with that firmly established, I want us to think a little about the business of Jesus’ being given.
For God so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son.
So why did he give him?
Well given what we’ve been saying, it seems glaringly obvious, He gave him so that he could go to the cross for our sake - that’s beyond dispute.
But I want to argue in closing that that’s not the whole story.
I did a wee study in John’s gospel as I was preparing for today and though Jesus rarely says that he’s been ‘given’ by God he often says that he’s been ‘sent’ by God, and I spent some time looking at those verses to try and find out what he thought he had been sent to do.
And what I discovered was really interesting – to me anyway! 34 times in John’s gospel alone, Jesus says that he has been sent from the Father. 34 times! And yet not once, in those passages at least, does he say that he has been sent to die. He says it elsewhere, but not in those passages. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
He tells us that he’s been sent to bring light and life to the world, to bring judgment, to preach the good news of the kingdom, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and recovery of sight for the blind, to elicit belief in those who see and hear him, to speak a word that leads to life; on occasion, to even bring division. But in these verses at least, he does not speak of his death.
And that tells us something, I think. It tells us that Jesus wasn’t only sent to die. He was sent to show us how to live.
Humour me for a moment.
I want those of you who are old enough to picture an image from John F Kennedy’s life......
Now raise your hand if you’re imagining his assassination.
That’s what we remember about Kennedy, isn’t it? Maybe those of you who are older or have done some reading know his politics or a bit about his private life, but many of us know precious little about the man or what he stood for. We just know that he was shot in a cavalcade in Dallas in 1963.
Sometimes I wonder if, in rightly focusing upon the significance of Jesus’ death, the church across the centuries has minimised the importance of the way he lived his life.
We gladly share his body and blood in bread and wine, we hope to share his salvation. These are the fruit of his death.
But are we as eager to share in the fruit of his life? His poverty; his selflessness; his hospitality; his passion for God? His detachment from material things, his commitment to prayer, his acceptance of the outsider?
Do we do him justice if we seek to profit from his death without seeking to imitate his life?
In the New Testament, Jesus death is often portrayed as both the ultimate sacrifice and the end of sacrifice. But St Paul reminds us that there is one form of sacrifice still left – “Offer your bodies as living sacrifices” he says, “holy and pleasing to God – this is your spiritual act of worship”. In other words, worship is about how you choose to live, not where you are at ten or eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.
For God so loved the world, he gave his one and only Son: not solely that he might die, but that he might show us how to live.
And that same Son, as he prepared to leave his disciples, commissioned them with these words which echo down the centuries to you and me today. “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you”,
May God give us the wisdom and the grace to go and live well, for his sake and the sake of this world that he loves.
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