4TH SUNDAY OF LENT B
Here in the middle of Lent, we could sure use some joy. I think that’s why, centuries ago, someone thought it would be a good idea to call today Laetare Sunday. In Latin, Laetare means, to rejoice. So today is, Rejoice Sunday. And what better Scripture passage to bring us joy than today’s gospel reading…God so loved the world.
If you don’t take anything else away from today’s gospel, be sure you take that with you: God so loved the world! These five words not only tell us that God loves us, they also describe the way God loves us. And how does God loves us…
- God loves us by sending his only Son to give us eternal life
- God loves us by saving us from our sin.
- God loves us by shining the light of Christ into the dark places in our lives.
- God loves us by drawing us into that light.
Why would God bother to love us in this way? It seems rather foolish of God to waste divine love on a sorry lot like us. He keeps loving us through our rebellion, through our complacency, through our poor attempts to control our lives and the lives of others in our own way. If this was anyone but God, we’d laugh at how foolish his love is.
But that’s how God is! God doesn’t love us because of our worthiness. God loves us because God is love and that’s how he operates.
How are we like Nicodemus? What keeps us in the dark, preventing us from turning toward the light?
Remember the rich young man who comes to Jesus and asks him what more he must do to inherit eternal life? When Jesus tells him, the young man goes away sad. We don’t know the end of that story. We don’t know if that young man ever comes back. The gospels never mention him again.
But later on – during Holy Week in fact – we do hear about Nicodemus again. We’ll see him at the foot of the cross with Joseph of Arimathea, taking down Jesus’ broken body and preparing it for burial. Did he finally come into the light? Did he eventually experience that spiritual birth that Jesus is talking about?
I think so. I think his actions demonstrated an awakening to the light of belief in the Son of God.
Nicodemus shows us that sometimes we don’t experience that flash of lightning moment of faith. More often than not it’s a process of understanding. Most of us probably can’t identify one big moment when we could say this is when faith happened to me. It was all the little moments of insight and experience that leads us to profess Jesus as Lord.
Jesus challenges us to step out of the darkness into the light of his saving grace. Jesus challenges us to make him the Lord of our entire life, not just the churchy part of our lives.
For God loves you in this way: He gave his only Son, so that if you believe in him, you will not perish but you will have eternal life…The cross is the ultimate expression of God’s love. God loves us. God demonstrates his love for us by self-sacrifice and demands that we love one another as he has loved us.