John 3:16 - Part 5

I began this service by putting up the words "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG" in bold lettering via Powerpoint.

Don’t take that personally! The last time I saw those words they were among hundreds of provocative sound-bites being flashed up on stage at a U2 concert in front of 60,000 people

But as we draw this series in John 3:16 to an end, I know I’ve had to shed some wrong ideas as we’ve got beneath the skin of this most well known of texts.

Is God fed up of this world he’s made? John 3:16 says 'No' – he loves it with a passion.

Is Jesus just another prophet, another good man? No – he’s the only begotten Son – made of the same stuff that God’s made of.

Is ‘believing’ just agreeing to certain propositions about God? No – it’s far more than that. It’s about deciding to trust God with everything that you are.

And is the word ‘perishing’ a metaphor for the fires of hell? Well, when you actually look at it, Jesus doesn’t use the word hell even once in John’s gospel, and only a handful of times in Matthew. He speaks about judgment a great deal in all four gospels, but he uses a wide range of metaphors to describe it; and it’s the idea of decay and destruction that are to the fore rather than punishment.

So in that vein, it’ll come as no surprise to you today, as we come to consider the words Eternal Life, that they’re probably not about heaven, and they’re probably not about a life that goes on and on and on for ever.

Let me try and explain why, and then go on to suggest what these words do mean.

The words we translate ‘Eternal Life’ in the Greek are zoe aionios which means – quite literally – the life of the ages. There are several words for life in Greek: Bios, your physical life; Psuche, the life of the mind; Zoe – spiritual life – part of your being that’s in connection with God. Hopefully we get that bit.

But aionios is a wee bit trickier. Our words ‘eternal’ or ‘everlasting’ don’t really do the trick because as soon as we hear them we think of time and duration, But that’s not really the sense of the word in the Greek. Aionios is more about where something originates, than how long it goes on for.

It’s more about the quality of something rather than the quantity.

For example, in the letter to Jude, mention is made of the 'eternal fire' which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. But those fires aren't still raging! The fire is 'eternal' because it comes from beyond, from eternity, not because it goes on and on and on.

So the phrase ‘Eternal Life’ isn’t so much about a geographical place called heaven, as a kind of Life that God wants to bless us with. A life that has its origins in eternity.

There are other places in the gospels where Jesus talks directly about heaven – there’s a perfectly good Greek word for heaven – the word ouranos. But he doesn’t use it here.

And that’s because he’s not talking about heaven at this point – he’s talking about this life that has its roots in eternity, in God himself. A life that deep down we all long for, even if we don’t recognise it.

Hard to get your heads round, I know, but bear with me!

Now let’s think about that longing for a few moments.

If you pay a little attention to yourself and to the people around you, it isn’t long before you start noticing what seems to be a universal truth about human beings…

Earlier this week I was in the bank, and it was quiet enough for the teller to start chatting to the woman in front of me in the queue:

“Is that you just back from holiday” she said.

“Aye – we were in Bulgaria”.

“Did you have a good time?”

“Aye it was great – lovely and relaxing. But then you have to come back home again don’t you?!”

“Aye it’s always the same – you look forward to it for ages and then it’s over before you know it”.

We’ve probably all had that conversation! But what I want you to notice is the wistfulness behind the words. There’s a longing being expressed; a gut-level longing for things to be different in some way.

And when you start paying attention to yourself and to the people around you, you start noticing that same wistfulness cropping up all over the place.

A man takes himself outside to sit on the back porch and light up a cigar. It’s a solitary sacrament he reserves for a bad day. Under the open sky he sheds the claustrophobia that comes with too much talk, or too many misunderstandings. He sucks in the bitter smoke and then, in one breath, consigns it to the breeze. In his mind he cradles the angry glow of the exchanges that led him here, but in the cool night air they quickly turn to so much grey ash. He finds himself wishing that things could have turned out differently.

A woman wends her way through the kitchen, clearing up the mess that everyone else seems oblivious to. She unloads the washing machine, sticks on the second load of the day, all the while rehearsing the mental checklist which tells her the kids are ready for school – packed lunch, water, snack, homework, gym kit, waterproof jacket.

Horseplay in the hallway doesn’t improve her mood; sometimes it feels like they deliberately try it on when their dad’s offshore. She carries so much of the responsibility she feels like a single mother sometimes, albeit a married single mother.

After the usual brinkmanship and cajoling, the children are finally ready to go. She’s tired out before the day’s really begun. She knows her life is more than this, but there are times when she wonders.

And today, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, families in many countries are kneeling at gravesides, or wishing they had a grave to tend, because their loved ones were spirited away in the black clouds that rose as the towers fell, and they were never found.

We have to step lightly around their grief this morning; keep a respectful silence in deference to their anger and their regrets. But rising up within all of us on a day like today is the unspoken yearning to live in a world where such things no longer happen.

We live in an age that’s very sceptical toward any claims about universal truth. And yet here, in the heart of human experience we find just that very thing. A universal truth. And it’s this.

We all long to be in a better place.

We wish our workaday life was a bit more fulfilling.
We wish our relationships could always be plain sailing.
We wish we could have things back the way they were before age, or illness or death crossed our threshold uninvited.

Some of our wishes are noble and others are less so; but in different ways we all long to be in a better place.

What would your better place look like, this morning? It’s worth thinking about. Here’s a little tool to help you chew that one over.

How would you finish this sentence… if only I could…..

Go back in time and do things differently
Get that break I’ve been waiting for for so long.
Get out from underneath that responsibility
Become a different person..
Make him or her into a different person

You can fill in the gap for yourself. But there’s a gap to be filled in all of us, I think. We all long to be in a better place, in some way.

And there’s nothing new under the sun. It was just the same back in Jesus’ day.

Jewish thought held that there were two eras of time. Two ages. There was ‘this age’, or ‘this present age’ in which life was a constant struggle between right and wrong, good and evil. It was this age in which we lived and moved, and in which the story of salvation was being worked out.

And then there was ‘the age to come’, an age of glory and wonder when God would finally be all in all – when evil would be put in its place and the world would become what God had always wanted it to be.

One age characterised by dispute and dischord. One by harmony and joy. One by fragmentation and one by reconciliation. One now and one still to come.

And according to the Hebrew scriptures, the primary quality of life in the age to come is right relationships. Things get fixed between us and God, between us and each other, between us and the creation.

21 They will build houses and dwell in them – says Isaiah.
they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them,
or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree,
so will be the days of my people;
my chosen ones will long enjoy
the works of their hands.

25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox,
but dust will be the serpent’s food.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,”
says the LORD.

This is life in the age to come. And to a degree, it sounds like a fairytale.

But maybe that’s the thing about fairytales – maybe they keep popping up across cultures and generations because they’re an echo of a deeper truth that won’t be silenced. The truth that there is an age to come – an age marked by the joy, peace, meaning, loving and knowing that flow naturally when we finally experience God as our all in all. And when Jesus talks about Eternal Life - that's what he's talking about.

Life in the age to come, eternal life, heaven, whatever you want to call it, it all boils down to one thing - knowing God. And if you were listening carefully to this morning’s reading, you might have picked that up already. As Jesus prayed with his disciples on the night that he was betrayed he said:

“Father, the hour has come. Give glory to your Son, so that the Son may give glory to you. For you gave him authority over all humanity, so that he might give eternal life to all those you gave him. And eternal life means knowing you, the only true God, and knowing Jesus Christ, whom you sent."

Eternal life, at its simplest, is knowing God and receiving the life that he offers us.

And the twist Jesus brings to this story is to insist that that eternal life can start now, if you want it to. By the grace of God, you can bask in tomorrow’s sunshine today. You don’t have to wait for it. You can have it now.

What do you have to do? Jesus has already told us in John 3:16. Believe! Trust God with your life. Surrender. Then, as well as you can, develop the disciplines and habits that will keep you close to him: keep his life growing inside you. That’s what it means to really believe.


We started out by recognising that there’s something in each of us that wants to be in a better place. We all share that feeling in different ways. It’s part of the human condition.

But as I go on in life, I’m beginning to learn, ever so slowly, that very often the answer to that longing is not to give in to it. Sometimes it is, but often it’s not.

When I keep company with Jesus in prayer, I discover that although my desire is often to be in a better place, his desire is that I learn to be better in the same place.

If I live my life, following my desires I can end up like a fool, chasing the rainbow’s end. I never get where I want to be

But if I live out of his life, his age-to-come life, I grow. A little bit of the harmony and peace and love of the age to come spill over from the future into the now, and help transform it. A little piece of the kingdom begins to come.

The life of the ages would say to the woman in the bank queue

“Don’t pine for Bulgaria, darling! It sounds like you need to find a bit more peace and leisure in the life that you’re living”

“Don’t nurse your grievances, man on the back porch. You are forgiven. Now go and forgive and make things better”

“Your life is more than your tasks, busy mother. You’re far more than that, you know”.

“You have so much love to give, dear families kneeling beside those graves. You were, and are, deeply loved. Are there others around you who now need the blessing of the love that you long to give?”

This is what happens when the life of the age to come starts to take root in us. Ever so slowly, perspectives, attitudes and behaviours begin to change.

Think back to when I asked you to finish the sentence, “If only I could….” What would it look like if God’s eternal life could come and fill that place within you that longs for things to be better? What would that mean for you, and for those around you? Because that's what God wants for your life.


Today the building work at Ground Zero will pause for a few short hours. Progress over the past decade has been painstakingly slow, but at last the outline of the new buildings is beginning to rise above the Manhattan skyline, filling the aching void left by the twin towers.

May God, who loves the world, fill the spaces where we ache, where we long for things to be better, with his own eternal life. And may that life teach us to be better, and live for his glory, right where we are.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.

Jesus Wants To Ruin Your Life

This morning, with the help of the apostle Peter, I want to try and explain why it’s Jesus’ intention to ruin your life for you and why, in the long run, that’s actually a very good thing.

The passage we read together this morning is strange for a whole host of reasons, some of which we’ll dip into later. But the strangest aspect of this passage is why it’s there at all.

Last week we read the story of doubting Thomas in John chapter 20, and if we’d read right on to the end of the chapter, we’d have heard these words:

“In his disciples' presence Jesus performed many other miracles which are not written down in this book. But these have been written in order that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through your faith in him you may have life.”

Now could that sound any more like a conclusion? John is surely winding things up, here, isn’t he? I’ve told you about some of the things that happened through Jesus, I could have told you lots more, but I’ve put these down so that you yourselves can believe in him.

A perfectly good way to end a gospel. But it’s not the end. It’s the gospel equivalent of a false summit, because after chapter 20 comes chapter 21.

And there are some strange discontinuities between chapters 20 and 21 which have puzzled careful readers for hundreds of years.

Why does John end his gospel, only to keep going?

How come the disciples are suddenly in Galilee when in the previous chapter they were in Jerusalem?

How come they don’t recognise Jesus if he’d already appeared to them twice in the upper room?

But the most pressing question is why, if they’ve already seen him, been convinced of his resurrection, been empowered by his Spirit and commissioned to continue Jesus’ work in the world, why are they heading back to their boats and their nets?

Well there are plenty of hypotheses, but no one definitive answer to that particular puzzle, and for that reason alone we probably shouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.

What’s fascinating, though, is that John, or someone from his religious circle, thought fit to add what amounts to a PS to the entire gospel. Someone came to the conclusion that the material recorded in John 21 was just too important to leave out.

So let’s reflect on why that might have been.

“After this”, John tells us, “Jesus appeared once more to his disciples at Lake Tiberias” which is just another name for the Sea of Galilee.

Seven disciples were there – five named and two unnamed. Peter, James, John and Nathanael were all locals in Galilee, and it’s possible that the other three were as well, although we can’t be sure.

After three years on the road, these men were coming home, but it’s a strange kind of homecoming. They’d risked everything to go off after this itinerant preacher, and everyone knew what had happened to him, though there were whispers that he’d come back to life somehow.

And my guess is that the returning disciples had a muted kind of reception.

Mothers would embrace them and look into their eyes with concern.

Long-suffering wives would sigh and shake their heads; pounding the dough just a little bit harder.

Children would smile but keep their distance, trying to gauge if these men they once knew were still the same.

Neighbours would look them up and down, and long to know more, but respect, or fear, meant few dared to ask anything of them.

Everywhere they went, eyes would follow.

I wonder how many days it took of feeling like a square peg in the round hole you used to call home before Peter decided he had to go fishing.

We all do it, don’t we?

When life’s uncertain and we don’t know how things are going to pan out, we always seek out the comfort of what we know best.

We can do it positively – we ring or visit people we trust; we throw ourselves into work or leisure that preoccupies us for a while.

Or we can do it negatively by hiding in our addictions.

But when the going gets tough – we all head for that place where we can forget the world for a while and lose ourselves in something.

For Peter, it was the freedom of pushing away from the shore and leaving behind everyone and everything but the task in hand. The slap of water against the sides of the boat; the weight of the nets in his hands; the wriggling silver treasure stolen from the depths. This was what he knew. He was a fisherman. He needed to be back on the water.

And so that’s where he went; and the others followed him.

What would you give for a conversation with Peter at this point in his life?

What was he thinking?

Had the pressures of the last three years, and most especially the last few weeks brought him to the place where he just wanted to hide for a while?

Did his heart surge when he saw Jesus alive again after the resurrection, and crash almost immediately when he remembered how he’d betrayed him?

Should we think of his going fishing as a kop-out, or as a long deep breath that might allow him to find his bearings?

Did he think he could just return to his old life and pick up the pieces again?

He certainly tried. But as luck would have it, they spent the whole night fishing and caught nothing.

And we know how that feels too., don’t we? When the places we run to for solace don’t deliver on their promises.

“Have you caught anything lads?” a voice calls from the shoreline.

“No” they bark – tired and frustrated.

“Try casting your nets on the right side of the boat” says the voice. And because, as commentators will tell you, it’s sometimes easier to spot a shoal of fish from the shore than on the sea itself, they do what he says. And the nets instantly fill.

“It’s the Lord” says John. And in that moment, something snaps within Peter. He jumps over the side and starts swimming to shore, and there they find Jesus barbecuing some fish and baking some bread for them. Not the acts of a ghost or an hallucination, and this, perhaps is part of the reason John wanted to include this story.

But go back to that moment in the boat where Peter hurls himself into the lake and starts swimming for the shore.

To my mind, that’s the moment when Peter realises that Jesus has, in the nicest possible way, ruined his life for him.

Ruined how?

Ruined in the same way my tolerance of instant coffee was ruined the first time I tasted a cup made with freshly ground coffee. Having experienced the real thing, I could never willingly go back.

Ruined in the same way Hugh Grant was ruined in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Having fallen in love with the enigmatic American played by Andi McDowell, no other woman would ever be good enough; not even the woman he was standing beside at the front of the church and mistakenly about to marry….

Ruined in the same way I was ruined when I first heard the Australian guitarist Tommy Emmanuel, who is, in my humble estimation, the greatest acoustic guitar player in the world. Ruined because having heard him play I long to be as good as him, but I know fine well I could practice from now ‘til Kingdom come and never come close. But for all that, part of me still wants to try.

Jesus, in the nicest possible way, has ruined Peter’s life for him because having spent time with Jesus, the things Peter loved which gave him his identity, good though they were, could never have the same allure again. The ground of his being had shifted. His centre of gravity had shifted irrevocably toward Jesus.

Knowing what he knows; seeing what he’s seen, he can’t go back to his old life even if he tries. And the moment he realises that, he leaps out of the boat like a salmon and swims to shore, because if his old life’s ruined, he wants his new life to begin as soon as possible.

I am glad to be able to stand here today and say to you that - in that sense - Jesus has ruined my life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This collar counts for very little; it’s certainly not a guarantee of holiness. I stumble my way through the days like everyone else and most of the time I don’t think I do an especially good job of being a Christian. But the little I’ve got to know Jesus by keeping company with him over the years has convinced me that I can’t build my life on any other foundation.

In that respect, I’m ruined, thank God.

Like Peter, there are times when I want to run away, to put distance between myself and God, to retreat into the comfort of what I know for certain and can manage. But as I sit there, like Peter, bobbing up and down on the water, I know in my heart of hearts that I won’t find what I’m looking for anywhere else other than in the company of God. I always end up swimming back to shore.

Let me tell you a secret. I feel like an alien and a stranger in this community quite a lot of the time. There is such conspicuous consumption. I sit in my car at the school some days and watch these enormous shiny automobiles roll up, many of them costing more than our first flat did.

So many people seem to live for these things; it’s like their identity is bound up not in who they are, but in what they own. And I feel neither envy nor admiration as I watch them climbing down out of these fantastic wagons. It’s more like a kind of sadness I feel.

In that world, I’m a dead loss and I know it. I don’t really care what I drive as long as it gets from A to B reasonably fast and reasonably economically. I don’t really care what kind of shoes my 4 year old wears as long as they keep her feet warm and dry. I don’t really care where we go on holiday, as long as we’re together and we have a good time.

Jesus has ruined my chances of ever feeling at home in the world of competitive consumerism – thank God

I’m reminded of an old spiritual we used to sing in Sunday School when I was a child:

“Turn your eyes upon Jesus – look full in his wonderful face.
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of his glory and grace”.

The things of earth will grow strangely dim – that’s a good way of putting it, I think.

One way of living has been ruined for me; and a new life, a different kind of life, is slowly emerging from the rubble.

I wish I could tell you it was all plain sailing and wonderful, but that would be a lie. I have days when it feels like it’s coming together and days when it feels like it’s falling apart. But in the middle of it all I’ve become convinced in the core of my being that the secret to the kind of life I want to lead is found in this man cooking fish and baking bread on the shoreline.

I’ve come to see that life is not about what I can make of myself, but what God, in his generous hospitality, can make of me.

He’s woken something up inside me. A longing to live well. And I know that even if I practiced from now ‘til Kingdom come, I’d never get to where he wants me to be. But for all that, part of me still wants to try. The ground of my being has shifted.

How about you?

Have you tasted enough of Jesus, have you been with him enough for him to begin ruining your life a little? Messing with your priorities and your plans? Rocking your boat?

Has the tantalising scent of baking bread and barbecued fish reached you across the water, sometimes? Giving you a sense of the possibilities that lie elsewhere if you dare to leave behind the security of what you know.

Has your knowledge of Jesus inflamed any desire in you for a different way of living?

It seems to me that today, Peter in the most vivid way possible is showing us the heart of the existential decision we all must make. To keep a tight grip on the lives we have with all their comforting familiarity, or to plunge into whatever the Galilean might have in store for us, and put our lives into his hands.

“Whoever wants to save his life will lose it” says Jesus “But whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”

The good news today is that Jesus wants to ruin this thing you call your life. But only so he can draw you into a better one.

Thanks be to God for the promise and the challenge of his word.