Gospel Reflection on John 3:13-17
- Sep 12, 2025
- 3 min read
September 14, 2025
No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man. And 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, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.
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Today we celebrate an unusual feast. It's the triumph of the cross. What a strange thing to salute, to give thanks for, to recognize as critical.
That's the reality. The cross of Christ is like a well-cut diamond, turn it in the sun, and you see so many different images of light and color.
The cross brings out the price of love, the power of vulnerability. It shows us the presence of God within human suffering, how death can wash things clean, how death can even triumph.
How we're tempted to cry out and despair just before triumph. But most especially the cross shows us how God loves us unconditionally. The unconditional love of God is what good Friday in the end is all about.
The crucifixion of Jesus is unlike anything else that someone would accept to be crushed in this manner and utterly humiliated and not hold it against those who did it is hard for us to conceive.
The fact that someone would accept this humiliation and not use it as a tool to pressure us into accepting something because of what Christ did for us is beyond our imagining.
If creation is the first free gift of God, then the crucifixion is an even more astounding free gift.
The cross is the utterly impossible to explain factor about the mystery of God.
Sadly, in some ways, we become far too used to it. It's become a decoration, a symbol of art, a piece of jewelry.
We've made a theory of the salvation of the cross, but that is not the cross. On the cross, we see God as not God.
Here is the triumph of death, the triumph of the enemy, the lawless state. Here Satan triumphs over God, and our faith begins at this point.
This is the point where non-believers point out and say, this is the end. But strangely enough, our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is revealed in the night of the cross, the abandonment and temptation and doubt about everything that is good.
Our faith is born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality. Our faith, the goodness and human hearts, is born out of nothing.
We have to taste this nothing and be given it to taste, not as a philosophy, but as an experience.
Our faith begins where we think it should end. The blackness of good Friday, perhaps more than anything else, can help us to understand the enormous love that creates heaven.
This is the love we celebrate when we celebrate Christ's death. The love that comes from the cross of Jesus is not something to be admired or adored, but it is something to be grasped and cherished, something to animate us and to give us hope.
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