LENT 2A 2026

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ Today’s Gospel lesson is perhaps the most quoted, most memorized, and most misunderstood and misused in scripture. Its most familiar verse (3:16) has become a shorthand seen at athletic events and on billboards across our country. Another verse is often used as a cudgel to coerce into submission those made fearful by false teaching. 

That one comes at verse three—“you must be born from above,” or as the King James’ Version puts it, “ye must be born again.” Those last two words have become familiar in some religious circles while playing an important part in our dysfunctional identity politics. 
I’ve told you before that I was raised in those circles. I heard words of condemnation, threatening eternal damnation, along with finger-pointing judgment until I did what we were expected to do. I gave in, knelt at a prayer rail, called an altar, and in everyone’s eyes, got saved. Suddenly, they acted like they loved me. 

No one bothered to explain to me the depth of God’s love that John tries to help us understand. Not before, and not after that night. Love wasn’t an important part of the conversation. And, according to other verses in scripture that tell us God is love, and as I’ve come to believe since then, God wasn’t really an important part of the conversation, either. 

John is known as the Gospel of Light. It’s significant that Nicodemus, a Pharisee and community leader, comes to Jesus at night. He comes out of the darkness to do what Pharisees through the ages continue to do. He questions anything new, because it is his job, his purpose, to maintain stability or control through knowledge of how things are supposed to be done. I’ve been a lot of places where that tradition continues. 

The verses following today’s lesson speak of the difference between darkness and light. Nicodemus steps into the light, but hears a truth he’s not ready to understand or accept. So he steps back into the darkness. 

But he’s faced with contradictions. His own statement of where Jesus comes from runs headlong into his teachings that it’s not supposed to happen this way. In the previous chapter, Jesus turned water into wine, then went to Jerusalem for Passover where he drove merchants from the Temple. All the teachings say water is supposed to remain water. And the authorities gave their stamp of approval on the exchange of money for religious goods and purposes. 

“The Spirit blows where it will.” The light shines in the darkness, often revealing the misunderstandings and practices that betray our self-identifying ways of worship. So we skip over the parts that don’t speak to our own purposes while standing close enough to light’s edge that our own shadow remains shrouded in darkness. 

​Lurking in that darkness is fear and judgment, tools we use on ourselves and on others to maintain acceptability. Move closer into the light, and we must claim our shadow, lest it continue to claim us.

You see, another verse they neglected to make me memorize as a kid is the last one we heard today. God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. Be saved, not get saved.

When we move into the light of Christ, and stay there, we find that light envelops us, and in forgiveness and love erases the shadow of sin. Not because of anything we do to earn it, but because that’s how God makes it happen. To use Paul’s favorite word, it’s because of grace, God’s grace, God’s faithfulness toward us. It’s because God so loved the world—including us—that God gives us salvation as a free gift.

Paul will go on to tell us that happened long before we knew anything about it. So, it’s not about getting born again, getting ourselves saved. It’s about realizing that all that is necessary has already been done for us, and choosing to live in gratitude for such amazing, wondrous love. That is the truth scripture teaches us, and living in the light of that truth is where we find freedom to live in God’s presence now, and not have to wait in fear hoping we don’t do or think something that causes us to miss it when we die.

There continue to be many who live in fear of eternal judgment. And, I’ll admit, there are times I hope their fears come true. (I’ve said many times that most days I’m a universalist, then I meet someone who makes want to hope there really is a hell.) That’s my own prayer of confession. And truth be told, we will all face judgment. My hope, my belief, is that the only one truly capable of judging will determine a fate for all of us. That is that we are judged guilty—guilty of being loved by the greatest love ever known, by the One who is Love itself.
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That judgment, and the resulting sentence, is ours to tell the world. It is the light that begs to shine through all of us as followers of Christ, a light of love that erases the sin of the world and invites it to walk a new path, a clear path, to its reconciliation with its Creator.