How God Loves Us: The Meaning of "So," John 3:16

I was this many years old when I understood “For God so loved the world” anew. It was a TIL moment, as the kids on Reddit and Twitter say. Today I learned to read the word “so” in a new way.

I don’t know when I first became aware of John 3:16 but it must have been in junior high when I was in confirmation classes in my home congregation. For the sake of good order, let’s call it a solid fifty years that I’ve read the “so” in everyone’s favorite verse to hold up on poster board in Super Bowl end zones as meaning “so much.” I’m certain that at some point in my vainglorious career as a Bible camp counselor I stood at a campfire worship service and said, “Want to know how great God’s love is? Here’s how much: sooooooo much,” stretching my arms out like Jesus hanging on the cross.

It’s true that God’s love extends so far as to pour himself out as a libation for my sin. But that reading doesn’t make sense in the context of John’s theme of double knowledge. He consistently shows his readers that there are two ways of knowing or understanding both our world and what God is up to in it. In response to Nicodemus’ undercover dark-of-night query of him, Jesus sheds light on the truth of his own purpose. Leave the thinking about the extent of God’s love to Mark and Jesus’ three passion predictions. Here, Jesus clears up our problem of seeing through a glass dimly to say clearly that God’s love is all about incarnation.

In the immediately preceding verses (John 3:14-15), Jesus points to God's care for the Israelites in the wilderness by providing a bronze serpent to be lifted up. God gives not an idea but an actual thing to rescue them from a deadly asp invasion. “So loved,” then isn’t about how much but instead simply how. The Greek word John uses that we translate as “so” is “outos” (pronounced hoo-toes), which means “in this way” or “thus.”

If God comes to you so embodied that he can be lifted up on Golgotha like the desert serpents, you no longer need to wonder what God might be up to in your own darkest nights of the soul.

God loves you in this way: not by remaining a far-off pie-in-the-sky in the sweet-by-and-by fever dream of a god who might or might not love you, or by being an idea of a supreme sovereign who rules from on high, or even by being a wielder of justice. No, God loves you by invading your dimwit life of lifting yourself up as your preferred solution to the world’s problems. God comes bursting as the real thing, as a living, breathing cruci-fiable body. 

If God comes to you so embodied that he can be lifted up on Golgotha like the desert serpents, you no longer need to wonder what God might be up to in your own darkest nights of the soul. Here he is. In this particular person Jesus of Nazareth, you have the embodiment of God’s love. That means you have a God you can believe in. Jesus lays himself out in a way you can trust him.

Like he does so many times in John’s gospel, Jesus follows this verse with a circular discourse, this time about living in either darkness or light. The question at the fore is whether you can count on a God who makes all the big eternal omni stuff available to you in the down-to-earth package John told about in his prologue. Will you be stuck in the dark or enlightened about Jesus’ identity? Darkness is done, for the Word has pitched a tent among us. He dwells with you and for you.

Try putting that on a candy heart in February. You'll need a mighty big heart, because it’s a story as big as heaven itself. But once you have the “how” down, Jesus will also go on to demonstrate the “how much.” That’s something waiting off stage to be performed on Good Friday and Easter. For now, rest assured that one itinerant first century preacher has been the very mind of God from the foundation of the world, and in his love, he’s come for you.