John 3.16
A sermon preached at St Margaret’s Church Nedlands on Trinity Sunday 31 May 2026
What to say on this first Sunday of a new chapter in the life of St Margaret’s? Something basic, I thought! You may have seen someone wearing a tee-shirt with just John 3.16 on the back. A Christian would know exactly what it meant, but for others it was probably a puzzle. John 3.16 is probably the best known sentence in the New Testament.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
You may have a Red-Letter Bible, where all the words of Jesus are printed in red. But are these Jesus’ words, or John’s, who wrote the Gospel. I think probably John’s. But does it matter? Only when I was halfway through preparing did I register that today was Trinity Sunday. I looked for Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but only found the Father and the Son. But John 3 was the set reading, so the Holy Spirit must be somewhere. Of course! Jesus told Nicodemus he must be born of the Spirit, if he was ever to enter the kingdom of God. But also, Peter tells us that prophets were “carried along by the Holy Spirit” as they spoke the Word of God, and John was certainly a prophet. So, John 3.16 is the Word of God, whether it is Jesus’ words or John’s.
Jesus has been talking with a Jewish leader: tells him he will never see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. Then he makes the extraordinary claim that he has come from heaven to give life to everyone who believes in him. This is where John adds a word of explanation: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
A sentence says something about something. It has a subject and a predicate. The subject here is God. The predicate is what he has done: he loved the world and has given his Son. Sorry for the grammar lesson, but there are a lot of elements here: God, God’s love, the world, God’s Son, belief, perishing, and eternal life. I guess John 3.16 is much known because it puts together a lot of important realities; it’s not a bad summary of what Christianity is all about.
Let’s start with God: who or what is God? A friend told me “God” was a meaningless concept; he did not know what I meant when I said God. He was being smart; God made him. He may have thought no one made him, but the idea that someone did could not have been unknown to him. Whether we are atheists, agnostics, or whatever, we are all aware of the possibility that someone, God, made the world. Richard Dawkins thinks people who believe in God are idiots, but he knows what we are talking about. There is no evidence for God, he says. But nothing could be further from the truth. Imagine you were God, wondering how you could make yourself known. How better than by creating a world, throwing a canopy of stars over it, and peopling it with thinking creatures. “Ah, but it might have just happened,” say the skeptics. And so we find ourselves where we are today, with some believing there is no God, some believing there is, and the majority not caring either way. So, does it matter? It matters terribly, if God is real. Just in terms of common justice, to live in a world that someone has made for you, and not to give them a thought, or ask how we should live in his world, is an injustice.
Jesus told a story about a farmer who planted a vineyard, built all the buildings, provided all the equipment, and then put it in the hands of tenants. When the tenants failed to pay the rent—to cut a long story short— he turfed them out. So let me say that the truth will out. If you are like one of those tenants, banking on there being no vineyard owner to come and claim his own, don’t be surprised when he does.
God is eternal, powerful beyond imagination, creator and sustainer of all there is, and deserving of our thanks and praise. But we have turned every one to his own way, as Isaiah says. So let’s talk about the world.
There are 3 words in Greek for “world.” Ge means the ground, as in geology. Oikoumenemeans the people, as in ecumenical. The word John uses is kosmos. A kosmos was a broach or a cameo. The word came to mean the planet, or the universe (cosmos), because the world itself is a cleverly designed unity. But it means more than the physical world: the way people have organized the world is impressive, with its economies, monetary systems, politics, education, media, sport, religions, military, communications, and a million other things, all blended together to make a working system. So the word could almost meant “the system.” And the thing about the system is that God has been shut out. This is the way John useskosmos. It is the world organized to exclude God. You could say, “God so love the system,” not meaning the system itself, but he loves the planet and its people who work the system, though they have turned against him.
The world-system is very good, actually. Our own country is organized beautifully for its citizens—so long as you ignore the indebtedness, our defenselessness, the abortions, suicides, crime, anti-semitism, and loneliness. The world looks after its own. But the centre is wrong: God has been excluded from his rightful place. Kosmos is often an evil word, not just because the system keeps throwing up horrors—think Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Myanmar, Sudan—but because God has been excluded from his place. Listen to the news. Look at what is taught in schools. Where is God? Mother Nature and smoking ceremonies is as close as you will get, But Nature and ancestral spirits never created anything. The world has rebelled against its Creator. So much so, that when he came as a human being he was put to death.
And this is the world God loves, our world. We can even put ourselves in its place, because it is not the rocks and trees that have gone wrong, it is the people, and we are part of it. God loves us.
Suppose you made a robot. You designed it to patrol beaches and make sure no one got into trouble. But it went berserk, grabbing people’s stuff, ripping arms off, headed for the shopping mall. What would you do? Destroy it, I think, like a mad dog, and design a new one. God foresaw all the cruelties of our own time, all the atrocities of history. Why didn’t he destroy it? John says he loves it, and that means simply that he wants us to have a good future.
He says he loved it, actually. “God so loved the world …” He is speaking of a single, past act of love. God gave his only Son. Love is about wanting good for others; it is about giving.
Jesus is the only Son of his Father, the unique Son, the one who John says was in the beginning with God, and was God, and makes God known. God sent him into the vineyard, knowing that several messengers before him had been abused, and some murdered. And he sent him knowing that’s how it would be for him. The Son also knew! He agreed to go. It was a joint decision. Why didn’t they send an armed party to deal with the rebels and give the vineyard to others more worthy? There are no others more worthy! We all are part of the same rebellion. But why send a Son, whom they knew would be killed? Because only he could do the job! God so loved the rebels. Jesus goes on to say he did not come to judge the world—he could have—but he came so that the world might have be saved through him.
And so, his wonderful gift—yes, the gift of his Son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
“Perish” is a strange word; not one we use much today. My father had a horrible scar on his ankle. A perished hot water bottle burst in his bed. And We use it sometimes of deaths at sea. Those unhappy Italian divers perished in a cave beneath the sea. Truth is, the world is perishing. For all its beauty, all its pride, the impressiveness of its achievements, it is passing away, perishing.
David Mansfield tells a story about his father in his book, Long Story Short; David was recovering from stage 4 melanoma when the wrote the book, and acutely aware of his own mortality.. He tells about a visit to his aging father in a nursing home. His Dad was a prisoner of war in a in WW2. David greeted him, only to cop a blast about how terrible it was in the nursing home. He tried to reason with his Dad: the place was warm, the food was good, the care was always at hand. “Remember how bad it was in that Japenese POW camp!” “No”, said his Dad, “that was much better. There I always had a chance of escaping. There’s no escape from this place.”
I cannot get out of my mind those divers in the cave. There must have been a moment when they realized they did not have enough air in their tanks to get out; they knew they were about to perish Perishing is the story of our world. It’s our own story. That is why God sent his Son. We need not perish, we need not die; this is his promise to everyone who will trust him.
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life.
So, what in the world is eternal life? For starters, it is in this world, though a world healed of sin and death. The Bible tells us God created the world good, and is determined to make it good again. Jews divide time and history into two: this age (aeon) and the age-to-come, or the kingdom of God. It is the age that will come when Messiah returns to put everything to rights. IEternal life is aeonal life, the life of the aeon! The old Bible says “everlasting life.” It iseverlasting, but that is not the meaning of the word.
It will be a renewed world for God’s resurrected sons and daughters. Resurrection means standing up. We will be stood up again to walk in the new earth. What that will be like we cannot say, except that Jesus speaks of eating and drinking, loving and being loved, ruling and being ruled— activity no less. And it will last forever, because there will be no death. It is impossible for us to imagine a world with no death; everything we know is decaying.
As a new Christian, I joined a Beach Mission. We set up camp in a caravan park at Port Macquarie in NSW, and ran a program for children and teens. One of the young men who came regularly to our meetings was totally blind. He used to sit outside the music shop in Port Macquarie and play his guitar. I asked him had be ever been able to see, and he told me he was born blind. I asked him could he imagine what it is like to see. He said he often thought about it: it must be like something touching your eyes! There is a world all around us that the blind person is totally unaware of. The beauty of the sun and moon and stars, the glory of the sunset and sunrise, the mountains and trees, the beaches, the ocean, and the people. Imagine what it would be like, thinking sight must be like something touching your eyes, and then suddenly being able to “see.” I think rising from the dead into God’s new world must be something like that. I put “see’ in inverted commas, because it will be a different kind of seeing. Imagine seeing that world for the first time and hearing the word, “Welcome, child of God.” It was to rescue us from perishing and give us a place in that new world that God gave his Son to die and rise. Imagine seeing that world and being told you can never come in. That is what perishing means.
There is another important thing to say about eternal life. John is clear that eternal life begins when we believe. Yes, its fulness lies beyond death, in the world which Jesus will reveal at his coming again. But it actually begins when we believe. Believing carries us into a new world where Jesus is king. We become part of this kingdom. We begin to see things differently. We discover that we are loved, by the one who gave us life, and died to bring us forgiveness and true life. Life has a new dimension; we come alive to God. Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, life in all its fulness.” That means a new quality of life now, and a life that reaches into eternity, that is all that life can be.
This is what I want for us all and for me. God loves this runaway world, and the runaway me. He wants it to come back to him, to know his love, and to enjoy the new world he has prepared for those that love him. That is why he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.