NOTES for Joh 3:16-21
In the words of Christ that we read today in the Gospel of John, what theological language calls the “economy,” that is, God’s design for our salvation, is formulated with striking clarity. We absolutely must listen closely to these words; we absolutely must learn to experience in our hearts the reality of the Creator’s love of which the Lord speaks. God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son for the salvation of all! The Son of God came not to judge the world—for who could withstand the judgment of the Almighty?—but so that the world might be saved through Him! If we entrust ourselves to this revelation, our whole life can be filled with an astonishing joy that no one and nothing can take from us.
There is much evil in the world; injustice and oppression triumph in it. The world is full of innocent suffering, and death awaits every human being. All this is true, and all of it would be grounds for pessimism and resentment against God were it not for God’s will for the salvation of the world, of which the Lord speaks today. To all our questions—“Where is God when people suffer?”, “Why does God tolerate all this?”, and “How could He allow it?”—we receive an answer in these words of Christ. The world is filled with the evil and suffering that people have brought into it, but God not only refuses to accept this triumph of evil; He has also given us a way out. Light has come into this world in Christ, and all of us are called to it. In these Paschal days, when we celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death, this passage sounds like a true hymn of victory.
Today the Church also commemorates an astonishing man, the prophet Jeremiah, who six centuries before Christ announced to us this design of salvation. Jeremiah lived a life full of suffering, hope, and disappointment. He witnessed attempts to revive faith and the destruction of Jerusalem; he proclaimed God’s call to faith and salvation, and he was killed because the will of the Almighty that he proclaimed did not accord with ideas of national greatness and prestige. When Christ asked His disciples whom people considered Him to be, they named only three prophets, saying, “Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah” (Mt 16:14). This is important because Jeremiah is a rejected prophet, suffering because of his love for God and for his people and painfully experiencing the tragic rupture between them.
As we glorify the prophet’s feat, let us recall today the chief promise that the Lord gave through him around 600 BC and that was fulfilled in Christ Jesus: “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I remained in union with them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No longer shall they teach one another, brother saying to brother, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know Me, from the least to the greatest, says the Lord, because I will forgive their iniquities and remember their sins no more. Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and ordinances to the moon and stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar; the Lord of hosts is His name” (Jer 31:31–35).