God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son
As many as six pairs of opposites appear in today's teaching of the Lord Jesus. Let us enumerate them because this will help us understand today's Gospel: perish - might have eternal life / be damned - be saved / believe in God's Only-begotten Son do and not believe in Him / love darkness - love light / commit unrighteousness and fulfill the requirements of truth / hate the light - get closer to the light.
The Lord Jesus uses these contradictions to show that being away from God is harmful to man, but it destroys him, and destroys the meaning of our life; away from God, man wastes himself. And vice versa: getting closer to God is saving yourself from nonsense, saving what is most important is opening yourself to eternal life.
However, the Lord Jesus does not say: "Therefore, beloved, come closer to God and you will save yourselves." When someone is very sick, he or she does not even have the strength to see a doctor. This was the spiritual situation of mankind. Due to our distance from God, we were plunged into nonsense and so deprived of spiritual strength that we would have perished if the Divine Physician had not come to us himself. Fortunately, however, " God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son,
so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.".
Only in the light of God's love for mankind can we understand ourselves as such. We can understand what it means to be human and how great is human dignity. Man is someone so important that God Himself loves him and wants us to be friends for eternity. We are so important to God that He gave us His own Son to save us.
At the same time, in today's Gospel, the Lord Jesus shows the greatness of our loss. Here is the inconceivable work of God's love for us, the Son of God himself comes to us to save us from eternal death - and we run away from him. " The light came into the world,
but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil." Apart from the light of God's word, we think we are good to ourselves. We do not want to notice that our good is often worm-like selfishness or subordinate to some evil. That our love often lacks what is most important, i.e., selflessness and thinking about the good of the one I love.
This is the consequence of blindness: that man would rather appear good to himself than to see and acknowledge his sinfulness than to enter the path of salvation, to become good in the eyes of God.
Until Tomorrow
fr. george