Passage: This Week's Second Reading

"Deep Reading John 3:16"

The venerable New York Times has long been nicknamed "the gray lady" because of the density of its copy and the depth of its coverage. More than most, the Times is a newspaper for people who like to read. But last March, the editors decided to devote the second and third pages of every issue not to important and timely articles, but to summaries of articles that appear elsewhere in the paper. Those two pages are kind of a hulked-out table of contents.

Management explained that they made this change to address two complaints they were hearing. One was from readers who said they didn’t have enough time to read the fuller articles. The other was from readers who said that because there was so much in each issue, they often overlooked the articles they really cared about.

One observer, however, says the change is also evidence of a larger trend in our world, one which may not be for the good. Writing in The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr, who watches technology, business and culture, said that the new feature was driven by how the Internet is rewiring not only our reading habits, but also the circuits in our brain that have to do with cognition.

As a professional writer, Carr spends a lot of time online, and has been doing so for more than a decade. There’s good reason for writers to use the Internet, of course, because research that used to require days of searching and lengthy visits to the library now can be done online from home in a matter of minutes.

But more than that, Carr points out that the ’Net has become "the conduit for most of the information that flows through [his] eyes and ears and into [his] mind." The problem, as Carr sees it, is that all of this comes at a price: The Internet not only supplies more than enough stuff to think about but also shapes the very process of thought.

Carr notes that a recent study by scholars from University College London shows that as people view material online, they usually skim rather than read deeply. They hop from one source to another and rarely return to any one they’ve already visited. Generally, they read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they leap to another site. The authors of the study concluded that users are not reading online in the traditional sense and that "there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse.’" They add, "It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."

As further evidence, Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University, who worries that the kind of reading the Internet promotes, which aims at "efficiency" and "immediacy," may be withering away our capacity for the kind of deep reading books call for. When we read online, Wolf says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information" who don’t engage our ability to make "the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply."

Carr has noticed that loss leaking over into the reading he does when not on the Net, too. Whereas he used to read pages of material comfortably, he now finds that his concentration drifts after a couple of pages. He gets fidgety and easily loses the thread. He writes, "I feel as if I am always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." And in his article, he quotes others who give similar reports.

All of this comes from Carr as more than an observation; he seems to be issuing it as a kind of warning. Here’s his key conclusion:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

Not every verse in this passage is on the tip of your tongue, but most regular church attendees can usually rattle off the gist of John 3:16, which is often called "the gospel in a nutshell." There’s truth to that, although it’s been said that "The only thing that really fits into a nutshell is a nut," but it also leaves us with the assumption that if we can recite John 3:16, we’ve pretty much got the whole Christian message, as if the rest of the Bible were just commentary.

But the reading is not just verse 16. For full context, we’d need to start reading at verse 1 of chapter 3, but the assigned passage starts with verses 14-15, where Jesus makes reference to an incident from the Old Testament, involving a "serpent in the wilderness."

The fact is, many people who know just John 3:16 aren’t going to have the foggiest idea what Jesus was talking about in 14 and 15 or why the story of a wilderness serpent serves as an introduction to verse 16. That verse, of course, tells of God’s love for the world and of his sending of his Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life, but what does a snake in the wilderness have to do with that? In fact, the uninformed may well assume that this wilderness serpent is another appearance of the one who tempted Adam and Eve, but they’d be wrong. This serpent is not a tempter but a savior.

Reading John 3:16 and thinking you’ve got the whole story is like reading in hop-skip fashion on the Internet. You may, in fact, get the basic nugget of the story, but you will miss the in-depth kind of understanding that comes only from deeper reading, from living with the Scriptures.

One way to start viewing the John passage in its larger context is to imagine there’s a hyperlink in verse 14 that jumps you back to our Old Testament lesson for today. We’re going to jump back to that story for a moment, but unlike the usual Internet reading practice, we are going to return to the text we started with, and thanks to Numbers, we’ll have a better understanding of what Jesus was getting at in John 3:16.

The Numbers story finds the people of Israel in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan, after the exodus. Their route requires them to skirt the land of Edom. This detour makes the Israelites cranky and it brings up complaints they’ve raised to Moses before: "Our slavery in Egypt was better than this. We’re going to die out here in the wilderness." And then, in a rant that doesn’t even make sense, they add, "We’ve got no food and water, and we loathe this worthless food!" They complained not only against Moses, but also against God.

Now if we are really into deep reading, we should go back further into Numbers to see that this is not the Israelites first occasion for murmuring. It’s not their second or even their third. It is at least the fourth occasion, and in each preceding time, God addressed their complaints in some way. But here they are at it again. And this time, according to the Numbers 21 account, God sent poisonous serpents among them, who bit them, and many of the people died.

This brought the rest quickly back to Moses with the admission that they had sinned against him and against God, and they pleaded with

Moses to intervene with God on their behalf. When Moses did so, God told him to fashion a serpent out of bronze and place it on a pole. God instructed that anyone who was bitten by a live serpent should look at the bronze one on the pole. And when they did so, they would recover and live.

Now if we return to John and look at the larger context there, we see that Jesus’ mention of the serpent in the wilderness was in a conversation with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. This man had come to Jesus seeking to understand his message and mission, and as they were both Jewish and steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was able to refer to this serpent story with the certainty that Nicodemus would know it and be able to use it as a comparison to Jesus’ mission. Thus, when Jesus says to Nicodemus, "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."

Probably at that point Nicodemus doesn’t envision Jesus dying on a cross and being "lifted up" in that sense. But he’s probably beginning to realize what Jesus means. Jesus is saying that just as looking at the bronze serpent on a pole enabled those ancients who were dying due to their sin to live, looking at Jesus with belief and faith will enable those dying in sin today to live eternally.

All this deeper reading of the Bible also helps us to grasp what Jesus says after the John 3:16 statement; He says, "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."

Recall that in the Numbers story, the live serpents were agents of judgment. Yet here is where Jesus tells Nicodemus how his role differs from the serpent’s in the wilderness. He didn’t come to be like the biting serpents of judgment and death. He was not sent to condemn the world, but to save it. Only the bronze serpent was a representation of the role Jesus came to fill. Granted, those who refuse to believe are condemned already, but condemnation is not why Jesus came. He came to give his life on the cross for those who are dying spiritually in sin, but believe in what Jesus did for them.

So it’s not enough to read John 3:16 in isolation and be mere "decoders of information." We get far more out of it if we do what Jesus invited Nicodemus to do, to make "rich mental connections" between the Old Testament and the Gospel Jesus was bringing.

Of course, John 3:16 can stand on its own. It tells us God’s motive, "he so loved the world," God’s action, "gave His only begotten Son," God’s receptacle, faith, "whoever believes in Him," and God’s purpose, so we "would not perish, but have everlasting life."

But a deep reading the Bible will help us not only see John 3:16 as Nicodemus now saw it, it also helps us to realize that the theme of God saving those dying in sin is not limited to the story from Numbers and this verse in John. Here, for example, is what Psalm 107 verses 17-20 says:

"Some were sick through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities endured affliction; they loathed any kind of food, and they drew near to the gates of death. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress; he sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from destruction."

In Numbers, some of the bitten people could have refused to look at the bronze serpent and died. It’s hard to imagine why anyone would, but it was possible. Likewise, we sin-bitten people can refuse to look at the Savior God provided and miss out on eternal life. But why do that? Look in faith to our Lord and Savior lifted up on the cross and live! Amen.