Of course our Roman Catholic brethren turned out in thousands to cheer their Pontiff. Of course, there was curiosity that made many want to get a glimpse of the new Pope—“Who is this? What is he really like?” But what emanated from beneath that sea of umbrellas was something far more than the enthusiasm of one Christian community, or the desire to catch sight of one who has been much in the world’s news in the few months of his tenure. I can describe it only as a yearning for something different from the passing excitements of our secular city, a longing for someone who expresses another dimension of our human condition, for a living symbol—not of political power or material success, or the affluent society—but of the missing element in our restless, consuming, and undirected world—faith and hope and love.
Let me put it simply. This man exuded Christian love. And by that I don’t just mean that he seemed to be a genial, kindly man with an encouraging word for everybody. I’m speaking of that formidable and revolutionary Agape that is at the heart of the Christian Gospel. It proclaims, against all evidence to the contrary, that God loves us—and not only us but every single human being on this planet. It soars towards God with an answering love for him, and it finds expression in a warm compassionate caring and concern for every man, woman, or child who crosses our path. The Pope was among us as a man of high intelligence and profound experience of the tragedies of our age who openly declares in every word and gesture: “God loves us.” And without qualification he summons our generation to express again our love to God in worship, prayer, and a holy obedience. It is this divine love for which so many hearts are aching. But what brought it down from the clouds where so many Popes and prelates, and Protestant preachers have hidden it, was the sight and the voice of a real human being with a twinkle in his eyes, a man who obviously preferred the gift of a t-shirt from a teenager to listening to official orations. So with all the Scottish covenanting and Ulster Protestant blood in my veins, I salute him as a man for this season, a very human symbol of the divine love from which our generation longs, and as a loyal servant of Jesus Christ our common Lord.
With gratitude for this irruption of the holy and the human into the drab procession of the sordid, the violent, the self-centred, and the callous that seems to fill the headlines and the TV screens, let me turn to the most familiar and best-loved text in the entire New Testament. Perhaps it’s not as familiar now as it used to be. Perhaps, even to those for whom it is familiar, it no longer speaks with life-changing power. Can we hear it again, as if we had never heard it before? For here is the answer to the question we are sometimes asked: What is this Gospel that churches talk about? What is the Good News that all who call themselves Christians are supposed to believe and to live by? Is it just that God is love, and we are supposed to love him and our neighbor in return? That is true—but it is not the Gospel. We don’t need the New Testament to tell us this: it’s all there in the Old. Is it, as some would put it, that we ought to be more like Jesus? That’s true, too, but I don’t call that Good News. In fact for me to be told that God expects me to be like Jesus and will judge me accordingly could at times be very bad news. No; the Gospel isn’t a message about what God is like, or what you and I ought to be like. It’s about what God has done, and what he keeps on doing. It’s not a formula to give us a guilty conscience. It’s a way to get that conscience clean. It’s not another demand upon us but a word of hope and liberation. It’s the news of God’s rescuing love. Listen: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Something happened. In this Gospel God’s love is not idea but action. When we say “God is love” that can be just an idea. And we often accept it as such—just as we accept the idea that the sun is always shining out there even though we may be fogged in or passing through the hours of darkness. But the moment someone constructs a house that is warmed by solar heat, the rays of sunshine are trapped and concentrated on one specific place and become the energy we need. So the Gospel gives us far more than a vaguely comforting thought that the whole of creation is being sustained by the love of God. It tells us that this love is a divine energy that came to a burning focus in Jesus Christ. “God so loved that he gave his Son.” The Lord of the universe cared enough about his human family to give us his human Self. At one particular time and place Christ came. The love of God was translated into flesh and blood and visited our planet as one of us. And he came without security guard, one of the poor and powerless with no weapon but that love. And we know what happened. For a few short years this concentrated energy of love blazed warm and then it seemed as if the switch was pulled, and Jesus died. But Easter morning broke the news that he was alive again and that love was released into the whole world by the little company that believed in him. And this morning there is hardly a tiny corner of the world where his Church is not celebrating the feast that commemorates his victory.
We may often wonder why God tolerates the antics of the human race with all its cruelties and horrors. This summer a French friend of mine who has nothing to do with any church but loves to grow crops, tend animals or float in his little yacht under the Mediterranean stars, said to me with sudden vehemence: “I consider the human race the dirtiest and most villainous species that ever soiled God’s world.” The trouble with such judgments is that we are always tempted to exclude ourselves. Let God obliterate Ninevah, we say with Jonah, but keep my little Jerusalem safe. But God, you remember, did not destroy Ninevah—and God has not yet wiped out his human family. For God is love, and obliteration is not the way of love. And God so loved that he let Jesus come and die—why? Just to show us up in our selfishness, our hatreds, and our indifference? No. He tells us why he sent his Son—“so that everyone that believeth should not perish but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”
This energy of love that was concentrated in Christ is the Good News for all the world to hear. It was lived out in a real Jesus in a real place among real people at a particular point in time. But, after the Resurrection, his energy of love was passed to those who believed to be spread by his Church across the centuries and across the world. “You shall receive power,” said the Risen Lord, “after the Holy Spirit is come upon you; and you shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”
Yes; “God so loved the world.” This rescuing love was meant for the entire human family. How often it has been translated: “God so loved the good people; God so loved the people to whom Jesus came; God so loved the western world in which his Church took root.” But we cannot throttle the universality of this glorious text. He didn’t give his Son in order to add another religion to the repertory of the human race. His love was not directed exclusively to the kind of people we might find congenial. It was the world for whom Christ came to live and die and rise again, the Cosmos with its kaleidoscope of races, colors, languages, affluence, poverty, ideologies, and clashing hopes and fears. It is this universal appeal of God’s love in Christ that this Pope is symbolizing in his travels and his pronouncements, and that we today experience as we share in a Worldwide Communion with Christians from every continent and island.
The world. Every time that word comes up on my typewriter I pause. For it seems to appear too often. And I hear a voice whispering: “Beware of abstractions. Beware of generalities.” It is so easy to talk glibly about the world that God loves, and neglect to fill it with real people—your next door neighbor, the kid playing in a garbage-ridden street just a few hundred yards away, the beggar on the steps of a European cathedral, the refugee child on the frontier of Cambodia, the boat people. So let me turn to this other word in our text. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” That “whoever” focusses the love of God on one single human being, as if for the moment there is no one else. That whoever is you.
There’s divinity in this famous text—but there is also an intense humanity that embraces each one of us just as we are, just as John Paul II broke away from the crowd and the speeches to hoist a little girl into his arms. Have you noticed how often the Gospels tell of Jesus singling out one man, woman, or child, as if he had come to heal them alone? As we receive the symbols of God’s universal love in Christ today, surrounded