Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
June 5, 2011

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So Christianity is all about eternal life, right? Christianity is how you get eternal life, right? By believing in Jesus, right? I mean, it says so right in the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” And we all know what eternal life is, right? Eternal life is our soul’s everlasting life with Jesus and God in heaven after we die, right? So that’s what Christianity is, believing in Jesus so that you can spend forever blissfully in heaven. It says so right here, in John 3:16.

That certainly is how most of Christianity understands these famous lines. It is how most of Christianity understands the Christian faith, what the Christian faith is all about, what we get out of being Christian, why anybody should be Christian. So their soul can go to heaven forever after they die. I don’t want to minimize the hope that this way of seeing Christianity can give people. I’m not saying here that this way of understanding Christianity is completely wrong. I do however believe that it is at least partially wrong. It’s wrong in the first instance if we understand it to mean that only Christians are saved. That’s simply not true. It is inconsistent with a God of grace. So let’s put that one aside so I can actually talk about something else this morning.

This understanding of Christianity as being about how we get to heaven when we die is based to a considerable extent on the meaning of the phrase “eternal life” in the Gospel of John. Language is how we humans communicate, mostly. Most of the time we think we know what words mean, and we stick to what we think a word means even when the person using it tells us that he is using it in a different way. I’ll use you guys, or some of you, as an example. Some of you have read my book. That book talks a lot about “myth.” I told you that I was using the word myth in its technical, theological meaning, as a story about the gods or about God that functions to connect people with the gods, or with God and to convey some truth about God through the story. I told some of you over and over again that that’s what I mean by the word myth. But to you, and to most people, myth means something that people think is true that is not true; and some of you just couldn’t get over that understanding of the meaning of the word myth and work with the definition I gave you. That’s not a criticism. I think I get it. The meaning of myth as something people think is true that is not true is pretty deeply ingrained in our culture. So it’s hard to shift gears and understand it as meaning something else.

I think it’s the same with the phrase “eternal life” in John, but consider what it might mean if in the Gospel of John the phrase “eternal life” doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means? If eternal life doesn’t mean what everyone thinks it means but rather means something else, we’d have to rethink what Christianity is all about, wouldn’t we? Well, guess what. In the Gospel of John the phrase “eternal life” doesn’t mean what everybody thinks it means. It doesn’t mean our souls living in heaven forever after we die.

In fact, John tells us quite clearly what the phrase means in his Gospel. We just heard him doing it. It’s John 17:2-3. It’s the only place in John where “eternal life” is defined. There John’s Jesus says in a prayer that God has given him “authority over all people, to give eternal life....” Then he says: “And this eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Whoa! That doesn’t sound anything like our souls living in heaven forever after we die, does it? It doesn’t mention souls. It doesn’t mention heaven. It says nothing about after we die. For John, eternal life is something that happens now. Note: He doesn’t say “And this is how you get eternal life.” He says “this is eternal life.” Eternal life is something that happens here and now, not something that happens after we die. Eternal life is knowing God in and through Jesus Christ. Knowing God and Jesus Christ in this life, not in some future life. Eternal life is the wholeness that we find when we know God in Jesus Christ. Eternal life is the peace that we find when we know God in Jesus Christ. Eternal is living in the grace of God that we know in Jesus Christ. It turns out that eternal life isn’t about our souls living forever in heaven at all.

Look at how that understanding of eternal life changes how we hear that famous line from John 3:16. It now reads: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but know the one true God and Jesus Christ whom God sent.” Jesus becomes not our ticket to heaven but our source of knowledge about God. The “perishing” that the verse uses comes to be the opposite of having eternal life, namely, to mean living apart from the knowledge of the one true God in Jesus Christ.

Friends, this understanding of eternal life is, I believe, very good news. It makes our faith be about living the abundant life that God wants for all people here, now, in this life. It leaves any future life that we may have, up to God, which, frankly, we pretty much have to do anyway. The entire Gospel of John is about eternal life. The phrase has misled a lot of people over the centuries. It isn’t about heaven, it is about life here and now, life with God, life with Jesus Christ, life the way God wants human life to be. That is the life that God gave Jesus to bring to us. So let us grasp eternal life. Maybe we have it after we die. I certainly hope that we do. I know that we can have it now. Right now. Right here. And that is very, very good news indeed. Amen.