March 10, Lent 4B (Numbers 21:4–9; John 3:14–21)

One Sunday, while preaching on this text, I told a story about seeing someone in the stands at a football game holding a sign that said “John 3:16.” I was a kid, and I thought John must be a football player with an unusual number on his jersey.

I now know the backstory of how that verse came to dominate sports arenas. A man named Rollen Stewart wanted to spread the gospel and so would position himself in the stands with signs or shirts with a Bible passage that he believed summed it up: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Why Stewart chose this particular verse instead of any number of others remains a bit of a mystery, but the message continues to be hoisted up at Super Bowls and World Series decades later.

In my early years of pastoring I would see this passage in the lectionary and preach a sermon on the dangers of taking one verse out of context and making it your focus. I had good examples for this. In seminary I had heard the story of a professor who, when a conservative student talked about the promise of John 3:16, aggressively questioned him: “What about John 3:15? How about John 3:17?” The story got a lot of laughs around school from those of us who considered ourselves above bumper-sticker Christianity.