Homily 28 — John 3, verses 17 to 21

“For God did not send his Son to condemn the world, but to save the world.” [a]

Many of the more careless sort of people use God’s love for humankind to increase the size of their sins and the extent of their indifference. They talk like this: “There is no hell, there is no punishment to come; God forgives us all our sins.” To stop their mouths a wise man says, “Do not say, ‘His mercy is great; he will be appeased for the great number of my sins.’ For mercy and wrath both come from him, and his anger rests on sinners” (Sirach 5, verse 6). And again: “As his mercy is great, so also is his correction” (Sirach 16, verse 12).

“Where, then, is his love for humankind, if we are to receive for our sins what we deserve?” That we will indeed receive “what we deserve,” hear both the prophet and Paul declare. The one says, “You will repay every man according to his work” (Psalm 62, verse 12, in the Greek Old Testament); the other, “who will repay every man according to his work” (Romans 2, verse 6). And yet even so we can see that God’s love for humankind is great. He divided our existence into two periods, the present life and the life to come, and made the first a time of trial and the second a place of crowning. Even in this he has shown great love for humankind.

“How, and in what way?” Because when we had committed many grievous sins, and from youth to extreme old age had not stopped defiling our souls with countless evil deeds, he demanded no account from us for any of those sins. Instead he granted us forgiveness of them by the washing of new birth, and freely gave us righteousness and holiness. “What, then, if someone who has been counted worthy of the mysteries from his earliest years commits countless sins after this?” Such a man deserves a heavier punishment. For we do not pay the same penalties for the same sins if we do wrong after we have been initiated. Paul declares this when he says, “Anyone who despised the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will he be thought to deserve who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has counted the blood of the covenant an unholy thing, and has insulted the Spirit of grace?” (Hebrews 10, verses 28 and 29). Such a man, then, deserves heavier punishment. Yet even for him God has opened the doors of repentance, and has given him many means of washing away his offenses, if he is willing.

Think, then, what proofs of love for humankind these are: to forgive sins by grace; and when a man has sinned after receiving grace and deserves punishment, not to punish him, but to give him time, a set period, to clear himself. For all these reasons Christ said to Nicodemus, “God did not send his Son to condemn the world, but to save the world.”

For there are two comings of Christ, the one that has been and the one that is to be, and the two are not for the same purpose. The first took place not so that he might examine our actions, but so that he might forgive. The purpose of the second will be not to forgive, but to examine. That is why he says of the first, “I did not come to condemn the world, but to save the world” (John 3, verse 17); but of the second, “When the Son comes in the glory of his Father, he will set the sheep on his right hand, and the goats on his left” (Matthew 25, verses 31 and 46). And they will go away, the one group into life, the other into eternal punishment.

And yet, by the rule of justice, his first coming too was a coming for judgment. Why? Because before he came there was the law of nature, and the prophets, and a written Law besides, and teaching, and countless promises, and signs displayed, and chastisements, and punishments, and many other things that might have set people right; and it followed that he would demand an account for all these things. But because he is merciful, for a while he pardons instead of examining. For had he examined, all would at once have been swept away to destruction. For “all,” it says, “have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3, verse 23). Do you see how far beyond words his love for humankind goes?

Verse 18: “He who believes in the Son is not judged; but he who does not believe is judged already.”

But if he “did not come to judge the world,” how is “he who does not believe judged already,” when the time of “judgment” has not yet arrived? He means either this, that disbelief without repentance is itself a punishment (for to be without the light carries in itself a very severe punishment), or else he is announcing beforehand what will be. A murderer, even before the judge has condemned him by his verdict, is still condemned by the very nature of the deed; and so it is with the unbeliever. So too Adam died on the day he ate from the tree, for this is how the decree ran: “On the day you eat from the tree, you will die” (Genesis 2, verse 17, in the Greek Old Testament). Yet he lived. How, then, did he “die”? By the decree, by the very nature of the thing. For the man who has made himself liable to punishment is under its penalty; and if for a while he is not actually under it, still he is by the sentence.

Someone hearing “I did not come to judge the world” might imagine that he could sin without being punished, and so become more careless. To prevent this, Christ puts a stop to such indifference by saying, “is judged already.” And because the “judgment” was in the future and not yet at hand, he brings the dread of punishment near and describes the punishment as already come. This itself is a mark of great love for humankind: that he not only gives his Son, but even puts off the time of judgment, so that those who have sinned and those who do not believe may have the power to wash away their offenses.

“He who believes in the Son is not judged.” He who “believes,” not the one who pries with curiosity; he who “believes,” not the meddler. But what if his life is unclean and his deeds are evil? It is of people like these above all that Paul declares they are not true believers at all: “They profess that they know God, but in their works they deny him” (Titus 1, verse 16). But here Christ says that such a man is not “judged” on this one count. For his works he will indeed suffer a heavier punishment; but since he believed once, he is not punished for unbelief.

Do you see how, having begun his discourse with fearful things, he has ended it with the very same? At the start he said, “Unless someone is born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God”; and here again, “He who does not believe in the Son is judged already.” He says: “Do not think that the delay does the guilty any good unless they repent. For the one who has not believed will be no better off than those who are already condemned and under punishment.” [i]

Verse 19: “And this is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.”

What he is saying is something like this: “They are punished because they would not leave the darkness and hurry to the light.” And from here he goes on to strip them of every excuse for the future: “If I had come to punish them and to demand an account of their deeds, they might have been able to say, ‘This is why we ran away from you.’ But as it is, I have come to free them from darkness and to bring them to the light. Who, then, could pity someone who will not come out of darkness into light? They have no charge to bring against us; they have received countless benefits; and still they run away from us.” He has brought this charge in another place too, where he says, “They hated me without a cause” (John 15, verse 25); and again, “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin” (John 15, verse 22). For the man who sits in darkness when there is no light may perhaps be pardoned; but the one who stays in the darkness after the light has come produces against himself clear proof of a perverse and quarrelsome disposition.

Next, because his statement would seem unbelievable to most people (for no one would prefer “darkness to light”), he adds the cause of such a feeling in them. What is it?

Verses 19 and 20: “Because,” he says, “their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, for fear his deeds should be exposed.”

Yet he did not come to judge or to examine, but to pardon and forgive offenses, and to give salvation through faith. How, then, did they run away? If he had come and taken his seat on the judgment bench, what he said might have seemed reasonable, for a man who knows he has done evil usually runs from his judge. But on the contrary, those who have done wrong even run to someone who is pardoning. So if he came to pardon, those who knew themselves guilty of many offenses would naturally have been the quickest to hurry to him. And in fact this was the case with many, for even tax collectors and sinners ate with Jesus.

What, then, does he mean by this? He says it of those who choose to stay in wickedness always. He did come to forgive people their former sins and to make them safe against sins to come. But since there are some so slack, so powerless for the labors of virtue, that they want to stay in wickedness until their last breath and never stop, he is speaking here with them in view: “For since,” he says, “the profession of Christianity requires, besides right teaching, a sound way of life as well, they are afraid to come over to us, because they do not like to show a righteous life. No one would blame the man who lives in paganism. With gods such as he has, and with rites as foul and ridiculous as his gods, he shows actions that suit his beliefs. But those who belong to the true God, if they live a careless life, have everyone calling them to account and accusing them. So greatly do even the enemies of the truth admire it.”

Notice, then, how precisely he lays down what he says. He does not say, “He who has done evil does not come to the light,” but: “He who does it always, he who wants always to roll in the mud of sin, will not submit himself to my laws, but chooses to stay outside, and to be sexually immoral without fear, and to do all the other forbidden things. For if he comes to me, he is shown up like a thief in the light; and that is why he avoids my rule.” For instance, even now you can hear many pagans say that they cannot come to our faith because they cannot give up drunkenness and sexual immorality and disorders like these.

“Well, but are there no Christians who do evil, and no pagans who live sensibly?” That there are Christians who do evil, I know; but whether there are pagans who live a righteous life, I do not yet know for certain. Do not speak to me of those who are good and orderly by nature — that is not virtue — but tell me of the man who can withstand the extreme violence of his passions and still be self-controlled. You cannot. For if the promise of a kingdom, and the threat of hell, and so much other provision can scarcely keep people in virtue, those who believe in none of these things will hardly pursue virtue. Or if some make a pretense of it, they do it for show; and the man who does it for show will not hold back from indulging his evil desires when he can escape notice. However, so that no one may think us contentious, let us grant that there are people among the pagans who live rightly. Even this does not go against my argument, since I was speaking of what happens generally, not of what happens rarely.

And notice how in another way he strips them of every excuse, when he says that “the light has come into the world”: “Did they look for it themselves? Did they toil, did they labor to find it? The light itself came to them, and not even so would they hurry to it.” And if there are some Christians who live wickedly, I would argue that he is not saying this about those who have been Christians from the beginning and have inherited true religion from their ancestors — although even these, for the most part, have been shaken loose from right teaching by their evil life. Still, I think he is not speaking now about these, but about the pagans and the Jews who ought to have come to the right faith. For he shows that no one living in error would choose to come to the truth unless he had first resolved on a righteous life for himself, and that no one would remain in unbelief unless he had already chosen to be wicked always.

Do not tell me that a man is self-controlled and does not rob; these things by themselves are not virtue. What good is it if a man has these, and yet is a slave of empty glory, and stays in his error for fear of his circle of friends? This is not living rightly. The slave of reputation is no less a sinner than the man who commits sexual immorality; in fact he does more things, and worse, than that man. But tell me of anyone who is free of all passions and all wrongdoing and yet remains among the pagans. You cannot. For even those among them who have boasted of great things, and have, as they say, mastered greed or gluttony, have been more than anyone the slaves of reputation — and this is the cause of all evils. This is how the Jews too have remained Jews; and for this reason Christ rebuked them and said, “How can you believe, who receive honor from people?” (John 5, verse 44).

“And why, may I ask, did he not speak of these matters with Nathanael, whose truthfulness he himself bore witness to, or carry his discourse to any length with him?” Because even Nathanael did not come with the zeal Nicodemus had. Nicodemus made this his business, and turned the hours others used for rest into a time for listening; but Nathanael came because someone else urged him. Yet Jesus did not pass even him by entirely, for to him he says, “From now on you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God going up and coming down on the Son of Man” (John 1, verse 51). But to Nicodemus he did not speak like this; he talked with him about the plan of salvation and about eternal life, addressing each of them differently, as suited the state of each one’s will.

It was enough for Nathanael to hear only this much, because he knew the writings of the prophets and was not so timid either. But because Nicodemus was still in the grip of fear, Christ did not reveal the whole to him plainly. Instead he shook his mind, so as to drive out fear by fear, declaring that he who did not believe “was being judged,” and that unbelief came from an evil conscience. For Nicodemus set great store by honor from people, more than by the punishment (“Many of the rulers,” says the evangelist, “believed in him, but because of the Jews they did not confess him,” John 12, verse 42). So Christ touches him on this point, saying: “It cannot be that the one who does not believe in me disbelieves for any other reason than that he lives an unclean life.” Further on he says, “I am the Light” (John 8, verse 12), but here, “the Light has come into the world”; for at the beginning he spoke somewhat obscurely, but afterward more clearly. Yet even so the man was held back by regard for the opinion of the many, and so he could not bring himself to speak out boldly as he ought.

Let us flee empty glory, then, for this is a passion more tyrannical than any other. From it spring greed and the love of wealth; from it come hatred and wars and quarrels. For the man who wants more than he has will never be able to stop; and he wants it for no other reason than his love of empty glory. Tell me, why do so many surround themselves with crowds of eunuchs, and herds of slaves, and great show? Not because they need it, but so that they may make those who meet them witnesses of this ill-timed display. If, then, we cut this off, we will slay the other members of wickedness together with the head, and nothing will stop us from living on earth as though it were heaven.

Nor does this vice merely push its captives into wickedness; it even lives alongside their virtues. When it cannot throw us out of them entirely, it still does us great damage in the very practice of them, making us undergo the labor and robbing us of the fruit. For the man who fasts, and prays, and shows mercy with an eye to this has his reward in full. What could be more pitiable than a loss like this: that a man should mourn over himself uselessly and in vain, and become an object of ridicule, and lose the glory from above? For the man who aims at both cannot obtain both. It is indeed possible to obtain both, when we desire not both but one only, the glory from heaven; but the man who longs for both cannot obtain both. So if we want to attain glory, let us flee from human glory and desire only the glory that comes from God. In this way we will obtain both the one and the other. May we all enjoy it, through the grace and love for humankind of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom and with whom be glory to the Father and the Holy Spirit, forever and ever. Amen.