If you’ve watched any sports events over the last decades, you’ve seen banners held high, calling attention to a famous passage in John’s Gospel. Their message: “John 3:16: Read it!” For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.”

That demand, “Read It,” speaks not just to the TV audience, but to each of us as we encounter those words. We’re to take them home, mull them over and let them sink in. That’s not only because it’s such a memorable verse, but as one commentator points out, it may be the best and briefest summary of our faith in the whole New Testament.

The sentence that comes right after it, 3:17, only drives its grace-filled message further home. “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

When we call the gospel “Good News,” these few lines condense the very goodness of it. They carry the most fundamental Christian conviction– that we have been loved into existence by a God who’s very being is: Love Overflowing!

It would be worth any believer’s time to allow these words to get beyond just their sound and imprint the wondrous point they are making. “Hard to believe” is a phrase that fits here. Do I believe not just in my mind but down in my heart that I am loved — that we are loved?

Besides contemplating them, it can also help to connect them with our own experiences of loving and being loved. When was a time when love flowed within me and around me? What was that like?

I cite a short passage taken from the March 2024 edition of Give Us This Day, written by a new grandfather who was trying to get in touch with what he calls the outrageousness of this claim that God loves us. He writes this:

“I experienced anew God’s outrageous love when I became a grandparent last year. When visiting my new grandchild, Elliot, I saw again the power of love at its most elemental.

As I watched my sleep-deprived daughter-in-law selflessly nursing little Elliot, the Gospel refrain echoed anew …for God so loved the world.

As I witnessed my son swaying with Elliot in his arms, gently crooning a lullaby …for God so loved the world.

As I gazed with wonder into his cherubic visage and held him close … for God so loved the world.”

And that grandparent finishes with, “This is our God, drawing us into the Father’s divine bosom, bearing us up in Love Everlasting.”

Here was somebody, who through the fabric of his personal experience, was living that ballpark advice: “Read it! For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.”

And doesn’t St. Vincent often chime in here, particularly with this famous passage: “Now, if we’re really called to take the Love of God far and near, if we must set nations on fire with it, if our vocation is to go throughout the world to spread this divine fire, if that’s the case, I say, if that’s the case, how I myself must burn with this divine fire!” (Vol 12, p 213. May, 1659)

Perhaps to that ballpark injunction to “Read it!”, we might add “Absorb it!”