Mel Prestamo, Ruling Elder, PCUSA
Offered to the First Presbyterian Church of Franklin, NJ on May 17, 2026
Before we get into today’s lectionary, I want to tell you about a small book that I read recently. The book entitled “Season’s Greetings: Christmas Letters From those Who Were There,” written by Ruth Boling. In it she has assembles “letters” that she suggests might have been written by the people who there at the first Christmas…from people who actually experienced it. It is a beautiful read, and I recommend it to you.
In it, there are letters from such characters as King Herod, Elizabeth, Isaiah, the Innkeeper, a Midwife [Boling suggests Mary couldn’t have given birth on her own], from a Shepherd, from Joseph, from Mary and finally from Jesus himself.
Her perspectives of what each of these people might have said in letters to us are thought provoking while at the same time very touching.
In it, portions of two of the letters jumped out and have stuck with me. And I am going to try to show you how they help us to understand what Jesus is saying in today’s passage from John’s Gospel.
The first is from the letter from Mary. Here Boling suggests to us, that as the mother who gave birth to God’s son, Mary should have some intimate understanding of God’s will and God’s purpose in the Christmas birth. After all, It was Mary who had that extraordinary visit from the Angel who told her of God’s special plan for her. And it was her prayer that we call the Magnificat that displayed her utmost devotion and submission to God’s plan for her.
In her letter, Mary describes God, when deciding how to bring God’s healing Shalom to Creation, God looked out on all that God had previously done. God had selected some specific persons to lead God’s people – Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and David – then God sent prophets such as Jeremiah, Isaiah and Micah to speak to the people. Then, at the time God was considering what more God could do, God measured the results of all God’s previous efforts, and God found that God’s creation was still fractured and God’s people were failing in bringing the Shalom to Creation that God desired.
So, in her letter, Mary suggests that God once again asks, “Whom shall I send – this time?” Now this phrase should resonate with us. We remember that when God previously called out, “Whom shall I send?” It was Isaiah who notably responded, “Here I am, send me!”
After Isaiah and the last of God’s prophets had spoken to the people, you may also recall that God remained silent for over four hundred years. Before Jesus, the people had not heard the voice of God for four hundred years.
Perhaps that was because over all that time when God asked, Whom shall I send, there was no response. Perhaps, Israel couldn’t hear the voice of God because it was diverting its time and energy to making alliances with foreign nations and even praising their pagan gods. Perhaps they were not even trying to hear that wee small voice of God.
So, Mary suggests when God asked this time, “Who shall I send?” God arrived at the only possible answer left to God. God decided “I will go. I will send me.”
Boling concludes, “The God who does the sending, sent himself.”
That little bit of insight shines a beautiful light on one of the most quoted verses in our Christian testimony. It is of course, John 3:16, “For God so loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”
Sometimes, because we view our God as a Trinity, we think that God split God’s self-up and sent the person of the Son. But we have to also remember that our God is one God [triune, but one] – which would mean when God sent the Son, God sent God’s self.
I don’t know why but when I read that line in Boling’s book, it gave the verse John 3:16 a new and awesome perspective for me. When God sent the Son, God sent God’s self. This is the fundamental tenet upon which our faith is built. It is that God is interactive with Creation. God created but has never stopped creating. When God asked, “whom shall I send?” And there was no one left to send, God sent God’s self. God entered into our time and space and did what was necessary to bring Shalom to God’s Creation.
It also brings clearer meaning to the conversation Jesus had with Philip earlier in these center chapters of John’s Gospel. When Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, Jesus responded by saying, “…if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” Wow! Jesus is saying, “Hey, Philip, you want to see the Father?
Here I am. I am the Father.” What Jesus is saying here is Philip, I know that you are having difficulty understanding but look at me. Look at me and you will see the Father.
And that was one of the defining purposes of Jesus life, wasn’t it? To help us to see the Father. And in doing that…helping us to see the Father… Jesus made the presence of God in our lives a real thing. Further, by making God visible in our lives, Jesus brought glory to God.
Ultimately, that is what the life of Jesus was all about isn’t it? To make visible for us the presence of God and to bring glory to God.
In the prayer that John recounts for us in this reading, Jesus is speaking and having a conversation directly with God, the Father. He is saying that it is time for the Son to be glorified so that the Son can glorify the Father.
The glory that Jesus is talking about is his willingly acceptance of the Will of the Father by going to the Cross. By going to the Cross, Jesus will display for all of us to see his willing submission to the Will of the Father as a loving Son.
When we think of the crucified Christ, we usually think of sacrifice. Jesus sacrificed himself for our sins and yes that is part of it.
But what we don’t often think of in the crucifixion story is the Son doing the Will of the Father out of pure love of the Father. Jesus’ death on the Cross is the ultimate act of loving the Father more than loving life itself.
This is the glory that Jesus brings to the Father and that the Father gives back to the Son.
And by thinking that in the Son, God sent God’s self – then by submitting to the Will of the Father, Jesus shows us just how far God is willing to go to recreate Shalom for God’s creation.
That brings me to the second phrase from Boling’s book that stuck with me. This one was from the letter from Jesus. Jesus’ letter begins with a love poem. It goes:
Roses are Red, violets are blue.
The meaning of Christmas is, “I love you.”
And that is what is going on in John 3:16 and in the text that we shared from today’s lectionary. Everything that Jesus is saying about giving glory to the Father comes out of the love that Jesus has for the Father and the love the Father has for God’s Creation. So, what Boling is suggesting that Jesus is saying to us is that the meaning of Christmas, as well as the meaning of the Cross – is the display of love that God has for you.
And – and, out that love – because of that love, Jesus will glorify the Father by submitting to the Will of the Father by going to the Cross. It is through that offering of love that Jesus displays to us a life fully lived in devotion and obedience to God. Jesus shows us the kind of life that will lead us to a righteous relationship with the Father.
Bible scholar Wiliam Barclay speaks also of the necessity of Jesus completing his work for the glory of the Father. If Jesus were to have stopped short of going to the Cross, then his work would have been incomplete and left undone.
Barclay asks, “Why should that be so?”
Because Jesus came into the world to tell us about the faithful and prodigal love of God – and to show it to us. And a display of that love was demonstrated by Jesus’ sacrifice of love by going to the Cross.
To have stopped short of the Cross, to have pulled back at Gethsemane – would be to say that God’s love goes “Thus far and no further.” In other words, if Jesus had stopped short of the Cross it would have been like saying, this is far as I [your God] am willing to go on your behalf. After this you are on your own. Go and build your own Shalom on your own.
But by going to the Cross, Jesus displays to us that there was nothing that the love of God was not prepared to do for us. In other words, there was no limit to God’s love – even to the point of giving up life itself.
God’s love is prodigal. God’s love is poured out upon us with a lavishness that is over the top extravagant. It is beyond imagining. It washes us clean and offers us forgiveness even when forgiveness and mercy do not seem justified.
That is how the Father gives glory to the Son and how the Son gives glory to the Father.
At the top of a page in William Barclay’s commentary on this chapter in John’s Gospel, I had written in the words long before I sat down to prepare for today’s worship service. I wrote, “Glory is to make visible the presence of God.”
So, this image comes into focus for me. In Jesus, yes, we have the Son of our Triune God, but we also have The Father and God’s Holy Spirit. In Jesus, we have the entirety of our God because as Boling paints the picture for us, God sent God’s self.
“Glory is to make visible the presence of God.” And that is what Jesus did. In the person of Jesus Christ, we see glorified the Father as well as the presence of God’s Holy Spirit because God sent God’s self and was fully present in the Christ.
This is the level of God’s commitment to bring Shalom to God’s Creation. God was all in. There is no suggestion in the life of Jesus that there would be a point beyond which he was unwilling to submit to the Father’s will.
In Luke 22:42, Jesus prays “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet your will to be done, not mine.”
There is no suggestion that God was only willing to go thus far and no farther. No. God’s commitment in the life of Jesus was to submit fully to God’s desire that God’s Creation be healed – that the sin that so dominated humankind be overcome and that the grip of death that it held over us be broken and conquered. By going to the Cross, Jesus brings glory to the Father, and the Father brings glory to the Son. And through Jesus’ resurrection from death Jesus makes the awesome presence of God visible for us to see.
To all of us, like for Philip, Jesus tells us, “Hey. Here I am. When you see me, you see the Father.” If you let God’s Spirit reveal it to you, you will see the glory of the Father and the glory of the Son. Instead of saying, “thus far and no farther”, God goes beyond the point of what humanity deserves. In Jesus’ love of the Father, He gives glory to the Father by making the presence of God visible in our lives.
