"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. 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." [John 3:16-17]
It's the cardinal sin of journalism. They call it "burying the lede," and it refers to a badly written opening paragraph or sentence in a news story that hides or obscures the really important information with lesser detail or distraction. In other words, it's what happens when the writer of the story misses the point or misdirects readers by pointing away from the real takeaway.
For example, if you've got a headline that reads "Man Wearing Blue Socks with Black Shoes Robs Bank," the lede has been buried--this is a story about a bank robbery, but the headline makes it sound like a crime of fashion is the big deal. When a bank is robbed, that's the story, not whether the robbers' shoes matched their socks. Or, if a politician is supposed to give a big speech and the reporters don't talk about the actual content of the speech or the policies advocated by the politician, but instead obsess over the choice of necktie or the color of the podium, it's another case of burying the lede. Sometimes it's inadvertent--a new reporter may still be learning how to think through what the "real story" is about, or a sloppy writer may just be throwing words together to make a deadline. Sometimes it's intentional, if you've got an agenda that gets in the way of covering a story you don't like, or when you want to put a certain spin on how people hear it. And in this day and age of niche news markets and nakedly partisan cable news, we can get pretty good at seeing how "the other side" sometimes buries the lede... but we have hard time seeing when we do it ourselves.
I mention this because Respectable Religious Folks have a habit of doing the same to the words of Jesus, too--especially when our religious traditions, theological assumptions, or hang-ups about the limits we want to put on grace get in the way of hearing him on his own terms. And of course, when we do put our own "take" on Jesus and make him fit our expectations, we'll hear any pushback on that "take" as an attack on Jesus... rather than maybe someone helpfully [and correctly, even] pointing out where we've buried the lede with Jesus.
A classic example from church history was when the medieval church took the proclamation of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, "The kingdom of God is at hand--repent, and believe the good news!" and retold it [or mistranslated it] as "Do penance, and believe..." The shift was subtle at one level, because "repent" and "do penance" sound pretty similar. But in the ears of the medieval church, "do penance" had the very precise technical meaning of "perform the sacrament of confession to a priest and then do whatever ritual action he prescribes you," rather than the more radical sense of re-ordering your way of thinking and acting, to turn away from evil and to turn toward God. What Jesus had intended as a radical reorientation of our allegiances away from self, empire, wealth, or sin, and toward God had been tamed and declawed into a reminder to do a bit of liturgical performance and go home otherwise unchanged. Nobody intended to undercut the power of Jesus' words, but when you bury the lede and focus on "what you're supposed to do" rather than on "what God is up to" you are likely to get into trouble.
There's the rub--when we take the Scriptures and focus on what "we" are supposed to do, rather than on the announcement of what "God" is doing in the world, we are invariably burying the lede. There's a bank robbery in progress and we're all fixating on what color socks the robbers are wearing, or the color of the necktie the senator is wearing for the big speech. This is a pretty big deal, because it is terribly easy to make that mistake and turn the Scriptures into a behavior manual [which will sometimes seem to contradict itself since different behaviors are prescribed in different contexts and cultures in the Bible], rather than taking the Scriptures as, in the words of Daniel Erlander, "the unfolding story of God's promise to mend the entire universe."
As you can imagine, when we bury the lede with one of the most well-known verses of the entire New Testament--say, good ol' John 3:16--folks can get uncomfortable or even feel threatened, because so many of us have not only memorized the words but learned a certain spin on them. And, again as so often happens, the "spin" that a lot of Respectable Religious Folks have been taught about these words is to focus on what WE have to do in order to "achieve" or "earn" a thing called "salvation," rather than where Jesus is really placing the focus--namely on the God who saves and loves the world. Both are there--the God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son" and the piece about "whosoever believes"--but if we make this verse primarily about the things you and I have to do in order to earn eternal life, we're missing the point and burying the lede. The gospel isn't a sales pitch for how to accept a deal from God to get yourself a ticket to heaven--its about a God who loves the world enough to die for it, even at our own hands. One of those is the Real Story... and one of those is burying the lede.
The thing is, Jesus isn't here in this passage rattling off a list of theological propositions or credal statements you have to recite in order to claim a sunny spot in the afterlife. The scandalous thing isn't the obligation that we have to correctly believe in Jesus in order for him to accept us--it's that in Jesus, God's love for has come in person to save and rescue, and with the whole world in mind. Christianity, when we actually listen to Jesus, isn't a set of facts to be believed or actions to be done in order to make ourselves acceptable to God; it's the announcement of what God has already done to restore and rescue the world because God already loves the world. When we take a passage like this and try to extract a formula of "what you have to do or say in order to secure eternal life" we're burying the lede--Jesus didn't intend to give us a to-do list but to tell us who has loved us enough to give everything away for our sake, namely God.
Jesus has come, in other words, to be the One who saves the world and then unburies the lede when it comes to telling the story of how it is saved. Jesus comes as the One who lays down his life for our sake and then makes sure we know that it's a gift freely given, not a commodity to be bought or earned. And when we take Jesus seriously that way, it has a way of sucking the arrogance out of our overinflated egos like a vacuum. If the point of this passage isn't to list off "The Things You Must Correctly Believe About Jesus To Secure Your Eternal Status," then there's no room for us to boast, brag, or puff ourselves up. If this point of these words really is--as Jesus sure seems to think--on the God who does not condemn the world in Jesus but saves it, then I don't get to point to my faith, my correct belief, or my shows of piety as the reason I'm "worthy" of being saved. It's not about "worthiness" anyway--it's about the way love refuses to let our refusal of God be the last word.
For a very long time in American religious history, we've let the heart of the good news be hidden behind a list of Dos and Don'ts, rather than the announcement of what God has already done, for you, to save and redeem. We've let the lede be buried, and it has meant that an awful lot of folks have only heard Christianity presented as a set of statements to be memorized or righteous actions to be taken in order to properly "count" as "believing in Jesus" and thus to get some sort of celestial prize. And that has in turn led to a lot of folks being puffed up with pride about their piety, sure that they have "earned" their spot in glory because they did such a good job of believing... which misses the point of what Jesus is saying here. Jesus' emphasis is on the graciousness of the Giver and the extravagance of the Gift himself [Jesus], not on being gatekeepers to determine who gets access to the afterlife.
There are people all around us--maybe the face in the mirror, too--who are tired of hearing talk of Jesus come with a condescending and arrogant attitude that THEY have done something to make themselves worthy, and that only if you copy THEM can you, too, make yourself acceptable in God's eyes. Maybe if we let Jesus speak on his own terms, we won't keep mishearing or misspeaking the news that Jesus has to share with us--news of a God who has already sent the One who saves the world out of love for that very world.
Maybe it's time to un-bury the lede--or, more fittingly, to let Jesus roll away the stone and call it out of the tomb.
Lord Jesus, keep us from getting in the way of your good news, and let us speak your audacious word of grace to all.
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