God Loves the World
Lent 2003

Week of March 31, 2003

Lectionary Readings

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3; 17-23
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

The Gospel reading this week includes what are perhaps the six most well known words in all of Scripture: “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16). But to listen to some Christians, God is not primarily characterized by love; He is a God full of fury, violence and vengeance. He is a tribal god of war who favors some nations over others, a warrior god rather than a prince of peace. We see this on a global scale, and even in our own personal lives.

After the World Trade Center catastrophe last September 11, some prominent Christians portrayed America as, alternately, the object of God’s wrath or as the instrument of God’s wrath. Right after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, Jerry Falwell construed the events as divine punishment rather than as a human tragedy. On his nationally televised program he claimed that the wickedness of pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, and People for the American Way were one reason God had punished America. “I point the finger in their face,” said Falwell, “and say, ‘you helped this happen.’” Pat Robertson, a guest on the show, nodded in agreement, saying, “well, I totally concur.”

In this view God is the violent punisher, not the indiscriminate lover. This view reminds me of Jonah who was angry at God who was gracious to the pagan Ninevites, and of James and John whom Jesus rebuked because they wanted to call down fire from heaven to destroy the Samaritans who did not welcome Him (Luke 9:51-56). No, Jesus revealed to us the heart of the Father that He is the friend of tax gatherers and sinners who longs to redeem them, not their enemy who wants to destroy them. He lovingly and indiscriminately causes sunshine and rain to fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike (Matthew 5:45).

Others see our country as a sort of righteous vanguard and as the instrument of God’s wrath. In his March 11, 2003 commentary called Breakpoint (“One Last Chance”), Charles Colson urged that he was praying and fasting that war with Iraq would be unnecessary, but that should it prove necessary, he understood war to be “entirely biblical...Christians don’t see war with Iraq as aggression or even as primarily a military action. We don’t see it as conquering or defending territory. Rather, it is...an act of Christian love.” War as an act of Christian love? I wonder what an Islamic person would think of this definition of the horror of war as an act of love on the part of Christianity’s god.

Or again, we might not understand everything, but according to pastor Charles Stanley of Atlanta, “throughout Scripture there is evidence that God favors war,” and so Christians have a duty to submit to our government’s decisions about Iraq, not protest, and “support the war effort in any way possible.”¹ In the views of Colson and Stanley, God uses righteous America to cleanse the world of unrighteousness, to exact his punishment on wicked nations and people, to free enslaved countries whether they ask for it or not, and to export western democracy and free market capitalism around the globe. Whereas for Falwell and Robertson America is the recipient of divine wrath because of certain people groups, for Colson and Stanley we are the dispenser of divine wrath defined as love.

In my own life I find it all too easy to internalize these notions of a capricious, cosmic deity. A faculty friend recently shared how his childhood memories of God were those of hell, damnation and fear. These are tragic caricatures or distortions of the loving Father portrayed by Jesus. The metaphors are endless. God is the spy, the kill joy, the perfectionist parent for whom nothing is ever enough, someone who punishes your every mistake, the accountant who tallies your every debit, the disciplinarian, or the judge. Brennan Manning summarizes this dreadful misunderstanding when people characterize God as

the one who catches people by surprise in a sign of weakness---the God incapable of smiling at our awkward mistakes, the God who does not accept a seat at our human festivities, the God who says “You will pay for that,” the God incapable of understanding that children will always get dirty and be forgetful, the God always snooping around after sinners.²

This god is full of rage. He is unpredictable, capricious, arbitrary and erratic. He is fickle, vindicative and retaliatory. One could only relate to such a god with fear and apprehension. But this god is also decidedly not the Christian God whom Jesus reveals in the Gospels.

Thomas Merton, the famous Catholic monk, once observed that a saint is not so much someone who has become good, but someone who has experienced the goodness of God.³ Our Lenten introspection should lead us not to fear but to freedom as we are reminded that God so very much loves the world; He did not send His Son to condemn the world (John 3:17). He loves all Iraqis as much as He loves all Americans, whether straight or gay, liberal or conservative. He loves me. He loves you. He loves us now, just as we are in our real selves, not later, nor as our idealized selves, not the selves we wish we could be or even want to be. This is the loving Father of Luke 15 who celebrates the return of the prodigal son and never allows him to apologize before lavishing a party on him. This is the God of John 8 who forgives the woman caught in the very act of adultery before she even asked for forgiveness.

God so loves the world. When we come to experience the indiscriminate and lavish tenderness of God, says Manning, we live with an impeccable sense of feeling safe in His presence.⁴ His love banishes our fears. The glory of the Gopsel is not that we love God, however desireable that is, but that He first and foremost loves us (1 John 4:10). Christian maturity, then, means that “we know and rely upon the love God has for us” (1 John 4:16).

¹ www.intouch.org/War/index_38027182.html.
² Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 1990, 2000), p. 39.
³ Ibid., p. 26.
⁴ Brennan Manning, The Wisdom of Tenderness (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 2002), p. 40.