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.
Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.
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