John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son” seems to be almost everybody’s favorite Bible verse. I don’t mind being a non-conformist when called to be and I have been known to get a conceited pleasure out of being one, but this is among my favorite verses too. However, the very popularity and familiarity of the verse can perhaps dull us to its power to impact our lives.

I will work with what seems an innocuous question: What is the world that God loved enough to send the Son into it? The word kosmos in normal usage had a neutral connotation, meaning the world in general, the world that happens to be. This corresponds to normal usage in English. In John’s Gospel, however, the word has a highly negative connotation, closer to the negative connotations of “worldly,” only much stronger than that. Most New Testament scholars interpret the word as John uses it as “the world-against-God, the world in rebellion against God,” as I learned it in seminary. Curiously, much preaching on this particular verse, including my own, seems to make it an exception; thinking of the world in a neutral way. But what if this isn’t an exception? What does this verse look like then? What does the world hostile to God look like, and what kind of deity would want to get messed up with it?

The reading from Numbers gives us a snapshot of the world against God. One would think that their deliverance from Egypt would earn some gratitude on the part of the Israelites, but all they do is grumble angrily about the hardships in the wilderness. (Num. 21: 5) When attacked by poisonous snakes that image their poisonous behavior, they repent. That’s something, but they Israelites show a pattern of turning against God time and time again when things get tough. The snake Moses puts on a pole saves the people. This smacks of sympathetic magic but surely God is telling us something here. What we have is poison driving out poison. Many medicines operate on the same principle; the Greek word pharmakon from which we get the word “pharmacy” means both medicine and poison. Somehow, God uses the poison of rebellion to cure the rebellion, perhaps because the plague reveals the truth of the poison of their rebellion. Paul writes that to the Ephesians that they “followed the ways of the world”—using “world” in much the way John does—following the desires and thoughts of “the flesh.” (Eph. 2: 2–3) One could say they were deserving of wrath because they embodied it.

In the John’s Gospel, we see much of “the world” in the sense of the rebellious world. The debates between Jesus and the enemies John calls “The Jews” are very intense. Their accusations that Jesus is possessed of a demon when he offers them freedom from sin make them look demon-possessed themselves. (Jn. 8: 48) These debates make painful reading on account of their ferocious character. In contrast to the frenzied emotive outburst of rebellion in these debates, John also shows us the cold calculating style of rebellion. When Lazarus is raised from the dead, they react to the resurrected life with a plot to kill Lazarus as well as Jesus since people are following Jesus because of this resurrection. And then there is the cold calculation of Caiaphas who says that it is better that one man die for the people than that the whole people perish. (Jn. 11: 50) John seems to have no love for these enemies of Jesus. Surely God can have no love for them. John’s dramatic portrayal of their enmity tends to reinforce our own rejection of these enemies. But these enemies are the kosmos. They are the kosmos God loved deeply enough to send his beloved son into it.

Right before John declares this love on God’s part, Jesus alludes to the serpent in the desert: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” (Jn. 3: 14–15) Jesus has turned this unsettling and cryptic gesture into a prophecy. The poison of rebellion on the part of Jesus’ enemies leads to Jesus being raised on a cross and the poison of this rebellion becomes the cure for the very same rebellion. In Ephesians, Paul, who himself had been a rebellious enemy of Jesus, experiences this very same love that motivated God to give God’s only begotten Son to make him, and us, who were dead in transgressions, alive in Christ. Not only alive, but raised up with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly realms. (Eph. 2: 4–6)

All of this sounds great–and it is beyond great–but John warns us of the judgment that the Light came into the world and we preferred darkness to light. (Jn. 3: 19 ) As the kosmos works to protect its rebellion to this blinding light, it falls into blinding darkness. How? If we slip into the default neutral understanding of “world” in the great verse proclaiming God’s love, we think this “world” is us—the good guys, and the world in rebellion is some other world—the bad guys who rebelled against Jesus. Paul had no illusions of this sort after his Damascus experience. But do we see the truth of our own grumbling in the deserts in life? Do we see ourselves as part of the kosmos Jesus loves in spite of our rebellion? Asking ourselves these questions as honestly as we can is a fundamental Lenten practice. Further on in Ephesians, Paul stresses that Christ’s raising us to His life has destroyed the barrier that had polarized Jew and Gentile–the ultimate embodiment of an us vs. them spirituality in Paul’s day. If we think this love is intended for us and not for them, we have fallen deeply into the darkness, preferring it to the Light that came into the world. Being among those who believe and have eternal life, then, is not a mental act of thinking something is true; it is about opening our eyes to the light, letting that light blind us, and then stumbling in the light instead of in the dark. It is this bumbling and stumbling that leads into the quality of life that is eternal life where there are many rooms in the Father’s house. (Jn. 14: 2)