God so loves the WHOLE

If you’ve watched professional sports, it’s likely that you’ve seen a sign flash across the screen as the camera pans the cheering crowds. John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.


This verse has been helpful and harmful – possibly since it was penned. The verses before and after (John 3:15 and 17), in fact, the whole context of when and why Jesus spoke this, is often ignored. And I am about to do the same thing! Yup. I want to drill down on just one word in the verse.


Kosmon: the Greek word means several things in Greek. It means universe (cosmos), wholeness, the ordered creation, the ordered society (cosmopolitan). And God loves it all. God loves ordered, harmonious humans, and God loves the wholeness of the whole. So much does God love these things, that God goes to every and any length to restore them. Even becoming broken, destroyed, poor, marginalized, and falling through the black hole of evil in order to tie the frayed knot, to fill the vast vacancy, to restore the lost sheep, coin, and human. God does it not by violating the order, but through the order, through becoming Emmanuel – God with us.
In flesh, in bread, in wine, incarnate, present.

God loving the cosmos does not mean humans are at the center of God’s concern, it means that love, wholeness, interconnection is the center.  Our brokenness is God’s concern only because wholeness requires our healing, not because we are distinctive or special within the order.
Out there across the vast expanse of interstellar space, it’s likely that there are other creatures who have also fallen into separation. Creatures who willfully chose to move away from wholeness. Perhaps it was pride, greed, lust, or competitiveness. God knows. And the longing at the heart of God has sent God’s love into that world just as much as ours.

Flipping John 3:16 open to imagine God’s immense, eternal, expansive love for the whole kosmon invites us to break open our narrow worlds and widen our love so that we too can be a part of the whole. Because, if God so loves the WHOLE, it suggests, if one of us isn’t healed, none of us are.

-- Pastor Rebecca