John 3:14-21 (NRSV Updated Edition)
“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may 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. Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
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"It’s the little words which always take you by surprise. For example, think of the word “so”. We are used to the Greek word [houtōs] being translated “so” when it appears in the phrase “For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life”. The “so” sounds as if it is intensifying the desire, as if it were a psychological description of the depths to which the One who loves is moved ...
"However, [houtōs] can be translated another way, and despite my doubts about whether this translation will have the same public reception, it seems to me to be closer to the mark. This translation treats the word not as a way of making the love intense, but of demonstrating what it looks like: ‘For it was in this way, you see, that God loved the world: that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life’ ...
"With this translation we have no access to a psychological movement in God, seen as underlying the action of giving his only Son. Rather everything that act of love means is made visible in what follows. It is as if we were to paraphrase the verse as follows: “Do you want to know how it became manifest in the world that God loves it? Well, like this: in God’s giving of his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life.”
...
"In the first reading we don’t actually learn much about God, other than that God has emotions like ours; and that an example, perhaps an especially outstanding example, of God’s emotive quality would be this act of love. In the second reading, our whole understanding of God, which we have to prune of all our projections concerning God’s emotions or subjectivity, gets to be reconfigured starting only from what God has done. That is to say, it is what has been done which comes to be the criterion for who God is, causing us, bit by bit, completely to revise any other perception we might have of God. It is not a presupposition about God which gets to dictate how we are to understand what has happened."
- James Alison, Broken Hearts and News Creations, pp. 125-127
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"The second expression that has routinely been misunderstood in this connection is “eternal life.” Here again the widespread and long-lasting assumption that the gospels are there to tell us “how to go to heaven” has determined how people “hear” this phrase.
"Indeed, the word “eternity” in modern English and American has regularly been used not only to point to a “heavenly” destination, but to say something specific about it, namely, that it will be somehow outside time and probably outside space and matter as well. A disembodied, timeless eternity! That is Plato, not the Bible - and it’s a measure of how far Western Christianity has drifted from its moorings that it seldom even realizes the fact.
"Anyway, granted this assumption, when we find the Greek phrase zoe aionios in the gospels (and indeed in the New Testament letters), and when it is regularly translated as “eternal life” or “everlasting life,” people have naturally assumed that this concept of “eternity” is the right way to understand it. “God so loved the world,” reads the famous text in the King James Version of John 3:16, “that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” There we are, think average Christian readers. This is the biblical promise of a timeless heavenly bliss.
"But it isn’t. In the many places where the phrase zoe aionios appears in the gospels, and in Paul’s letters for that matter, it refers to one aspect of an ancient Jewish belief about how time was divided up. In this viewpoint, there were two “aions” (we sometimes use the word “eon” in that sense): the “Present age,” 'ha-olam hazeh' in Hebrew, and the “age to come,” 'ha-olam ha-ba'. The “age to come,” many ancient Jews believed, would arrive one day to bring God’s justice, peace, and healing to the world as it groaned and toiled within the “present age.”
"You can see Paul, for instance, referring to this idea in Galatians 1:4, where he speaks of Jesus giving himself for our sins “to rescue us from the present evil age.” In other words, Jesus has inaugurated, ushered in, the “age to come.” But there is no sense that this “age to come” is “eternal” in the sense of being outside space, time, and matter. Far from it. The ancient Jews were creational monotheists. For them, God’s great future purpose was not to rescue people out of the world, but to rescue the world itself, people included, from its present state of corruption and decay.
"If we reframe our thinking within this setting, the phrase zoe aionios will refer to “the life of the age,” in other words, “the life of the age to come.” When in Luke the rich young ruler asks Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (18:18, NRSV), he isn’t asking how to go to heaven when he dies. He is asking about the new world that God is going to usher in, the new era of justice, peace, and freedom God has promised his people. And he is asking, in particular, how he can be sure that when God does all this, he will be part of those who inherit the new world, who share its life. This is why, in my own new translation of the New Testament, Luke 18:18 reads, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit the life of the age to come?” Likewise, John 3:16 ends not with “have everlasting life” (KJV), but “share in the life of God’s new age.”"
- N. T. Wright, How God Became King, pp. 44-45
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While I cannot disagree with Wright's scholarship, I think the analysis above leaves out an important aspect of 'aionios' ("eternal"), which is that it is not just a temporal (if not chronological) description, but also qualitative. In other words, it is not just life "of age to come" but there is also the sense of the divine: it is the life of God, or as George Macdonald puts it, "life eternal".
I would also like to highlight the connection in this passage between this concept, "life eternal", the life of God, with the concept of 'salvation'. To me, they are the same thing: to be saved is to partake of the life of God, life eternal, starting now (though in such a small way). As it says in 1 John 4:9 (a re-wording of John 3:16): God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. (NRSV)
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"[Jesus] starts by appealing to Moses, explaining what he's talking about with relation to Moses: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” Okay, this is very odd. It's an odd little incident in the book of Numbers 21 where, after Aaron has died, just as he's about to die, he's stripped of his priestly garments and then left to die, his son is vested and then the priesthood starts up again. Israel carries on its trek but they fall into a fit of complaining, the Lord gets annoyed with them and he sends poisonous snakes amongst them. ... So the people in the desert were dying of the bites of these poisonous serpents ... and Moses, showing how things were going to be, made a bronze serpent, lifted it up, exalted it. In other words, from the same thing that caused the poison, he made the remedy.
"This is an absolute standard trope, something which we know ourselves. What is a vaccine, but a little bit of what causes this trouble [applied] in such a way that we protect ourselves against it, the poison turned into a remedy. The same word, 'pharmakos', can both mean poison and remedy in Greek. So this is standard, but Jesus is bringing out something rather remarkable here because he says: okay, what Moses did was he took the poisonous reality ... and he offered up something better than that, [a] serpent made of bronze, and ... when they looked at it and exalted it they lived.
"So that's what's going to happen with [Jesus], in other words, he's saying: what I do may look like a priestly sacrifice, and of course, in one way it is, but it's exactly the reverse of that: it's the remedy to the whole of the sacrificial world which tends to bite and destroy people. I'm going to be doing the exact reverse, enabling people to live by that, which seemed to be that which killed them. That's going to be the sign. So the Son of man must be lifted up in the same way, so this priestly anointed figure is going to be lifted up, and people are going to be able to live through that, they're going to be able to say: oh yes he's done this for us, therefore, no one is against us, therefore, we don't need to sacrifice anymore, therefore, we don't need to drive our goodness over against other people anymore, therefore, we don't need laws to live by. We can work out what is true because we can trust that the Creator will make these things available for us. So that's all being hinted at in Jesus' answers to Nicodemus.
...
"Now notice what Jesus is doing: he's talking outside the Temple and to the representative of Moses. He's talking about the relationship between behaviour, which means commandments, and God. He's indicating that actually there is going to be a criterion that's present. The criterion is the self-giving Son, the self-giving Lamb who looks like the poison of sacrifice [but] in fact is undoing the whole world of sacrifice from within. And that this is something which Moses after all understood, Jesus is suggesting, hence his lifting up of the serpent not as a form of judgment but as a form of bringing to life.
"So we see Jesus having explained himself in the Temple, now explaining himself with relation to the Law and showing how he's undoing something from within, so as to make something, a new way of life, possible for us. In fact, this is how he was undoing the old Temple, which is going to be destroyed, and offering something completely different instead: the way of being that brings people to life so they can share the life of God [zoe aionios, "life eternal"] starting even now."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent Year B" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZorkCoDJxAc)
[Source of quotes from N. T. Wright and James Alison's Broken Hearts and News Creations, and for discussion and reflections on all of this week's lectionary texts, see: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-b/lent4b/]
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