John 3:16-21
Christ Chapel, Seminary of the Southwest
April 30, 2025
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I’ll admit, I have not had the most mature relationship with John’s gospel. One reason for this is old-fashioned GenX contrariness: John 3:16 is the best known verse in the New Testament, frequently written on signs draped over railings at sports events and concerts, sold on bracelets, t-shirts, and all manner of things. It’s popular usage supports a relationship with Christ that I often find too individualistic, and even at times shallow.
If everyone seems to like something, my contrary nature insists, I cannot like it.
What. Ever.
Like I said, immature.
I also struggle with the strong binary language in John’s gospel. Do this, and you are saved. Do not, and you are condemned. Simple. Black-and-white. Harsh.
This condemnation has been the foundation for fire-and-brimstone preachers for centuries. Act right, believe right, or suffer for eternity without relief or mercy. It’s what you deserve.
Take verse 18, for example: “For those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe because they are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” The Reverend Johnathan Edwards cited this verse in his famous – or infamous, depending on your hermeneutic – sermon titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in the year 1741. That sermon has the most fire and reeks the most of sulfur of any sermon I have ever read. Frankly, I don’t like it.
When I find myself resisting a text like this, it is always a sign that I need to slow down, quiet my mind, pray, and focus on reading exactly what is on the page. Something jumped out at me in verse 18 when I read it again last week: the phrase “condemned already.” Already.
If Jesus says he is here not to condemn the world but to save it, and we are already condemned, then Jesus isn’t threatening condemnation, he is observing what exists. We are already condemned, not because divine condemnation is the default we have to earn our way out of, but because we condemn ourselves.
In reading it this way, I heard something that I needed to hear, and maybe you do too—this passage is also about overcoming shame.
Shame is something we have all experienced, right? It is a universal human experience. The very first human emotion named in the bible is the shame Adam and Eve feel when they realize that they are naked. Shame is something I have wrestled with a lot in my life, and at those times when the shame is at its strongest, all I want to do is hide away and not be visible to anyone.
There are many varieties of shame: the kind we feel when we know we have done something wrong, or not dome something that we know we should have—the shame of sin.
There is the kind of shame that results from experiences of trauma, the internalized shame that can corrode a person’s very self over time. This kind of shame can make someone feel separated from God, unlovable and unredeemable. I have heard sin defines as anything that distances us from God, and if this is true, then this kind of shame is a sin inflicted, a sin undeserved.
We can experience shame when we are not addressing something in our lives that we know we should, but are avoiding to protect our self-image, our reputation, or to maintain the status quo for the comfort of others.
There is collective shame; the kind that can occur at a cultural level in the wake of an atrocity, or a war, or the recognition of the impacts of structural injustices and oppression. Shame is a tool of empire, as the liberation theologians teach us.
Humans are an inherently social species, and I have read that shame evolved as a way for people to maintain social order; shame tells us when our behavior is putting us at risk of being shunned by our community. Shame tells us when we are causing harm, and in this way, it is a companion to empathy—and it can guide us toward better, more compassionate behavior.
For these reasons, shame may be necessary, but I fear that shame is too good at its job. It easily becomes toxic inside of us. It’s simply too painful for many of us to bear, and we hide it away in the dark corners of ourselves. It can even prevent us from changing the very behaviors causing us to feel shame in the first place.
It can cause us to isolate ourselves from God, from our families, our friends, our communities, and our own bodies and emotions. Internalized traumatic shame can make us feel like we are so fundamentally broken that we will never truly belong. Shame weakens us in mind, body, and spirit.
God recognizes the power shame has in us in some of his first interactions with us; when Adam and Eve felt shame and fear about their nakedness, God kneels in the dirt and makes clothing for them, to ease the pain of their shame.
Even in those times when we bring it on ourselves, God eases the pain of our shame.
We need help to overcome it. It isn’t something we can do on our own. Shame like the venom of the serpents in the book of Numbers, requires intervention. God commanded Moses to make the bronze serpent and lift it on a pole, so that the people may look upon it and be healed. God knew the people needed something they could see, something to make them look up and experience divine redemption.
We forget the lessons of redemption. We return to being mired in our sins, in behaviors we know are harmful to our selves and others, in injustice. In shame. We lose sight of ourselves as the beloved children of God. As worthy of God’s love.
Enter Jesus, sent to redeem us in a new way. Jesus redeems us through forgiveness, regeneration, absolution, cleansing, purification, exoneration, grace, and salvation. Yes, Lord. Please.
I believe this is what Jesus us saying when he speaks about bringing the light, about being the light sent from God. Shame cannot live in the light.
People love darkness more than the light not only to hide the actions that we don’t want others—or God—to see, but also because exposing our shame is painful and vulnerable. It feels like a terrible irony that the one thing that relieves us of shame, and the one thing that absolves us of sin, is the hardest thing to do; making it visible to others. We must share it with other people, even if we only share it with our priest in the rite of reconciliation, and we must show it to God.
As Leonard Cohen sings, that’s how the light gets in.
We can never know with certainty how people will react when we disclose those things we most wish we could keep hidden. It is a risk: we may be shunned just as we fear. Our relationships may not recover. We may lose friends, lose family, lose a partner. Exoneration and forgiveness may not come from people, no matter how much we crave it.
However, we can trust that when we show God, when we hand over the sins we have done and the sins done to us, when we cry out the pain of our shame, God will listen. God will listen with an incomprehensible grace, and God will forgive.
It sounds so simple, but it isn’t easy. The courage that faith requires can be hard to find and hard to sustain. We need examples, someone to show us how. Someone who lived among us, suffered with us, someone who died at our hands. Someone we lifted up in a pole; our greatest shame—and by the grace of Jesus, our greatest redemption.
For this is God loves the world. He gave his only Son to show us how to love one another so well that shame has no chance to move in and begin to erode the center of us.
Shame makes being a good disciple so much harder. It requires courage to love when we don’t know how, when we are drained, when the world has us angry, scared, and confused. We will never love perfectly.
How beautiful is it, then, that perfection has never been expected of us? We will fail and we will cause harm. We will get up and try again.
All we are asked to so is what is true in God.
And we will, with God’s help.
No shame required.
Amen