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Rev. Hannah Lovaglio’s Sermon: Second Sunday of Lent, March 1, 2026
Not to Condemn.
John 3:1-17
March 1, 2026
I heard it said this week that religion can do one of two things. It can expand our world, or contract it. That is, it can be used to answer all the things that are seemingly unanswerable – which is in effect to constrict or contract our worlds, making everything nice, neat, and fitting in it’s box, black and white so to speak.[1]
Or it can be used to invite wonder, curiosity, and the humble recognition that all which seems unanswerable remains ultimately unanswerable. This leaves us with open arms and open postures, ready to receive goodness and grace where we least expect it, ready to hold and embrace those suffering, rather than fix or dismiss them.
Here, at Central, and I believe within the Reformed Presbyterian branch of Christianity in general, our aim is to expand the world. The things that we can neither fathom nor bear may one day have answers, but we won’t race to them. That’s the spirit’s work, not ours. We meet the inevitable ebbs of life with the expectation of grace, mercy, goodness and love in the midst of it.
The life of faith is a life of questions, not answers, one that requires trust even as it makes room for doubt. One that enacts belief more than spouts it. With this in mind, we turn to the Gospel reading from John, chapter 3.
Nicodemus is a religious man. He is a man people turn to for answers, and instruction, and clarity. He is an authority on God, and authority within the religious community, and he finds comfort in his, and a close second, God’s authority.
And yet, the man of answers finds himself in need of answers. Jesus confounds him and his beliefs, Jesus upends what he thought was capital T Truth and remains beyond his ability to explain or understand.
Who is this man named Jesus? He seems to be sent by God, but I’d like to go and see for myself.
The only problem is, Nicodemus goes to see when visibility is quite low. He goes in the cover of the night.
He is seeking, yes, but how much does he expect to find in the night?
He has courage to name what he does not know, courage to come and see – but not courage enough to let others know he has come to see. In the words of Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, whose study on the book of John we’re reading in the Sunday morning seminar, “it takes courage to admit what we do not know and to seek answers; it may take even more courage to let others know that we are seeking, that we do not know everything, that we may need help.”
The conversation that follows leaves Nicodemus more confused than before, and us with him. In search of answers, we only find more questions.
Nicodemus begins, Rabbi, you must be sent from God.
Jesus replies, amen amen, or so be it so be it. Which is an odd way to begin.
No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. Where the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke have plenty to say about the kingdom of God, through preaching and parable and prayer, John will only refer to the Kingdom of God right here in chapter 3, and not again.
The kingdom cannot be seen, or even heard, but it can be sensed. The kingdom of God is a moment of clarity, when all the senses recognize or are caught up, are soul aligned – the kingdom of God is being washed over by peace, or rapt with recognition, clarity beyond understanding, sudden purpose for all, not just part, of our being. The kingdom of God is multidimensional – both transcendent and imminent – completely out of this body while fully in this body. It’s being born again, like a biological birth but also wholly other than a biological birth. It’s flesh brought to spirit. It’s knowing something is real but neither seeing nor comprehending it.
Layer upon layer, double meaning upon double meaning, Jesus keeps laying it on thick. It requires more study than can be done in one sermon but suffice to say:
Nicodemus is thinking literally, but Jesus is speaking metaphorically. And all the while, Jesus never stops to clarify or make it plain, he just adds more layers of multiple meaning. He never gives us a key to unlock the meaning, an a is to b as b is to c clue. To get it you’ll have to give yourselves over to it, fully, in the light of day.
And for now, Nicodemus will stay in the dark. This interchange leaves him confused, lacking courage and imagination, and stumbling back home to what feels safe and certain. He will return in the Gospel of John, which I find promising. He didn’t give up the search, even if he kept getting it wrong, kept expecting less than the full measure of God’s love and power.
And to this midnight conversation I bring that same original question – will we use religion, in this instance, to open up what is possible, or to close in what is acceptable? It seems we can only understand the conversation if we first take the posture of open vulnerability.
Nicodemus couldn’t fathom, or hold Jesus’ multifaceted answers to Nicodemus’ rather limited questions because his posture was one of fear, hiding, constriction, and the answer he sought was more the same. Jesus invited him to a different disposition.
And so too, what we do with Jesus’ discourse offers us the same option. Will we use it to expand, or to constrict? To love, or to condemn? To close ourselves up or open ourselves up?
For God so loved the world, that God gave God’s only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish – but have eternal life.
Indeed! God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
The focus on these verses often tightens to “whosoever believeth in him” and rushes right past’s God’s love of the world – the cosmos – and its salvation. That is, the salvation of all the world, all the cosmos, all that can be seen, all that cannot be seen, all that can be known, and all that which remains unknown. It is seemingly impossible for God’s love to be any more expansive. God loves so much that God works salvation and life through until the ends, and God’s end is well beyond our end.
This text is primarily about God, not about us. In our English translation, God so loved the world sounds like a quantitative matter. The quantity of God’s love was so much, so great, so big that he gave his only son. But in the original Greek, the “so” is actually qualitative. The Greek text reads more like: For God loved the world in such a way that he gave his only Son.
God’s love took a certain shape. That shape was the life of Jesus, God’s only son. Jesus, who knew life as we know it, who was tempted like us, who grieved like us, and who exemplified for us what love is. He revealed in human form who God is and what God is about.
Peter Gomes, a minister and theologian from Harvard Divinity School who spent much of his short life speaking against intolerance, wrote this about God’s love,
“God’s love is God’s ultimate action and it is given human form in Jesus Christ, and if God can invest himself and his love in the unlikely form of a man born of a woman, who suffered as we suffer and died as we shall die, dare we invest less in humanity than God? Dare we invest less in ourselves and in our world than God? Ought we not to take the sign of God’s love for us in Christ as a sign that we are lovable and the world is worth loving? If that is so, can there be any possible limit to what we can attempt as God’s representatives in the world.”
Peter Gomes asks us, if Jesus shows us the shape of God’s love, then how will we be representatives of that love in the world? The text is about us insofar as it is about how Nicodemus responds, and then, how we respond.
And that is a matter of belief. John 3:16 says that whoever believes in Jesus would have life eternal. Believe, in the Greek, pisteuon is an action verb. In fact, this verb, “the one who is believing”, is used more in the Gospel of John than in any other New Testament book. Furthermore, the Gospel writer John never uses the word for faith, which is a noun that shares the same root as our verb.
For John, faith is always an action. It is dynamic. Believing is not a simple statement or faith claim. To believe is follow Jesus in action, to invest in ourselves and in our world selflessly. To believe is to be God’s representative in the world. To believe is to live trusting who God is and how God loves.
So more than an invitation to consider our own eternal status or to decide on the salvation of others, John 3:16 is an invitation to believe, to follow the example of God’s love as shown in God’s son, Jesus Christ.
And to believe or not believe is indeed a matter of life and death, of perishing or having eternal life.
I believe the Gospel writer John means this as a quality, not a quantity. I believe that this eternal life is something that can start right now, in fact that already has started. It is a state of being in communion with God. And to be without God, to turn away from God or to seek God only on our own terms, is to perish, to be in peril.
Eternal life is life open, life curious, life free; perishing life is life constricted, life condemned, life lived for self, and neither for God nor other. And that starts now.
God sent Jesus because the world was, and is, in crisis – in need of salvation and redemption and grace and resurrection. God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
That we would become co-workers of the works of God, loving like God in Christ, mending and repairing and healing like God in Christ. Responding to the expansive nature of God by being more open ourselves, open to being wrong, open to not having all the answers, open to goodness we can taste and see and feel and be wrapped up in, even in the midst of hardship and heartache.
This is the paradoxical truth of the Gospel: in giving we receive. In every season and most especially in Lent, we know and we proclaim that it is only by dying that we live.
Once you believe that God so loved the world, life cannot be the same again.
For God so loved the world. Yes. Thanks be to God! And do not stop there. Turn the statement around and so love the world as God.
Open, giving, joyful, ever affirming, love & life everlasting.
So love the world as God.
May it be so.
[1] Everything Happens Podcast with Kate Bowler https://katebowler.com/podcasts/what-if-happiness-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/
—
Rev. Hannah Lovaglio (she/her/hers)
Minister, Central Presbyterian Church
