TODAY is the Feast of the Holy Trinity. The Gospel of St. John says: “Yes, God so loved the world that He gave his only Son that whoever believes in Him may not be lost, but have eternal life. God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world; instead, through Him the world is to be saved. Whoever believes in Him will not be condemned. He who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the Name of the only Son of God”.
John’s Gospel is different from the other three. Often, after relating some words of Jesus, John adds an explanation of the faith, which he supports with declarations that Jesus made on other occasions. That is what happened in this case.
How can this be? Nicodemus asked. To enter into the life of the Spirit, we need to know God’s plan for us. Yet no one can speak properly of such things except the Son of God. He has seen heavenly things, that is, the intimate life of God; he also speaks of earthly things, that is, of the kingdom that God brings for us.
Many of Jesus’ listeners will not accept what he says about the Reign of God; much less will they pay attention to what he reveals about the mystery of God. Jesus reveals to us that which, by ourselves, we are unable to know. Thus a Christian is not one who merely “believes in God”; we are Christians because we believe the testimony of Jesus (v. 11) regarding God and his plan of salvation.
In this plan, there was something very difficult to accept: that the Son of Mary would have to die on the cross and to rise from the dead (be lifted on high means the same). Jesus reminds them of the serpent in the desert. This episode in the Bible (Num 21) prefigured what would happen to Jesus. Of course, the Jews did not grasp the meaning of the message; in fact, they passed over all the predictions of the sufferings of their savior without understanding them.
They had to revise their ideas about other matters, also. The Jews had been praying for God to come and expected him to condemn the world and to punish the bad. He, on the other hand, sent his own Son to the cross so that the world will be saved (v. 17.
Other verses of the New Testament say that we should not love the world; which seems to contradict what we have just read: God so loved the world. The reason for the contradiction is that the word world has several meanings.
First, the world means all of creation, which is good since it is God’s work. The center of this divine work is humankind, which has come under the influence of Satan (8 34 and 44). Everything that sinful humanity creates – riches, culture, social life – is influenced, disfigured and used for evil. Hence, God sent his Son so that the world will be saved.
Yet, even though Christ’s resurrection initiated his invincible power over history, a strong current of evil continues, dragging along all who refuse to acknowledge the truth. This evil current is sometimes called the world. The Scripture points to them in saying: Do not love the world, or You are not of the world (1 Jn 2:15; 4:6).
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