Deep

Do any of you have a subscription to the New York Times? The Times is a newspaper for people who like to read. It was founded in 1851, and in the upper left hand corner of the paper their motto reads, “All the news that’s fit to print.” All the news is right! The Times has been dubbed the “gray lady,” not only for its staid appearance, but also because of the density of and depth of its coverage. The papers is so large that about a year ago, the editors decided to devote the second and third pages of every issue not to important and timely articles, but to summaries of articles that appear elsewhere in the paper. These two pages are kind of an extended table of contents. These changes were meant to address two complaints, one being that people didn’t have time to read such a long paper, and two because there was so much content, people actually overlooked articles that they cared about.

Everyone from writers to psychologists have pointed out that changes, such as those that took place at the New York Times, are indicative of a larger cultural shift. “Writing in The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr, who watches technology, business and culture, said that the new feature was driven by how the Internet is rewiring not only our reading habits, but also the circuits in our brain that have to do with cognition.”[2] As a professional writer, you can imagine that Mr. Carr spends a lot of time online, and has been doing so for more than a decade. There’s good reason for writers, professionals, and students of all types to use the Internet, because research that used to require days of searching and lengthy visits to the library now can be done online from home in a matter of minutes. The Internet is convenient. But more than that, Carr points out that the ’Net has become “the conduit for most of the information that flows through [his] eyes and ears and into [his] mind.” The problem, as he sees it, is that all of this comes at a price: The Internet not only supplies stuff to think about but also shapes the very process of our thought.

A recent study by scholars from University College London shows that as people view material online, they usually skim rather than read deeply. They hop from one site to another and rarely return to any one they’ve already visited. The study also showed, that once a person is on a site, [s]he reads no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they leap to another site. This kind of “power browsing,” suggest that Internet readers are not engaging in a traditional form of reading. It is almost as if we go online to avoid in depth reading.

The immediacy and efficiency of Internet reading can actually make it more difficult to read a book in depth. As we read on the Internet we tend to more decode information than make rich mental connections, like those we form in deep reading. In his article, Mr. Carr reports a profound difference with how he reads after a decade on the Net. Whereas he used to read pages of material comfortably, he now finds that his concentration drifts after a couple of pages. He gets fidgety and easily loses the thread. He writes, “I feel as if I am always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” And in his article, he quotes others who give similar reports. “Here’s his key conclusion: The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.”[3] Deep reading fosters deep thinking. Now there’s more to the article but that’s enough to help transition us into this morning’s text from John. But before we move on, let me summarize. The New York Times has taken to summarizing articles possibly because they’re afraid people just don’t want to read so much anymore, and 2) it’s possible that the Internet is responsible for the decline in deep reading.

Now for some deep reading of John chapter 3. This is not my favorite passage in the Bible. Here’s the thing about chapter 3. Most of the chapter is not on the tip of our tongues, except for verse 16, which most regular church attendees can rattle off. How many of you know it? Say it with me, “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 often been dubbed the gospel in a nutshell. My friends the only thing that really fits into a nutshell is a nut. While this verse highlights a principal of Christianity, we cannot assume that if we can recite John 3:16, we’ve pretty much got the whole Christian message down, as if the rest of the Bible were just a commentary. We need to read deeper. We need to make some rich connections. We need to grasp a fuller picture of the gospel message. We can’t just jump from verse to verse to create a faith system that works for us. We must look at context, history, the bigger picture.

For full context, of today’s passage, we’d need to start reading at verse 1 of chapter 3, but the assigned lectionary text starts with verses 14-15, where Jesus makes reference to an incident from the Old Testament, involving a “serpent in the wilderness.” The fact is, many people who know just John 3:16 don’t have the foggiest idea what Jesus was talking about in 14 and 15 or why the story of a wilderness serpent serves as an introduction to verse 16. In this chapter, Jesus is talking to Nicodemus, a Pharisee, and it is the reference to a serpent in the wilderness that begins to make sense to Nicodemus. Jesus is referring to a story that Nicodemus would have known well about the Israelites in the wilderness. The uniformed skim reader may well assume that this wilderness serpent is another appearance of the one who tempted Adam and Eve, but they’d be wrong. This serpent, Jesus is referring to is not a tempter but a savior.

Reading John 3:16 and thinking you’ve got the whole story is like reading in hop-skip fashion on the Internet. You may, in fact, get the basic nugget of the story, but you will miss the in-depth kind of understanding that comes only from deeper reading, from living with the Scriptures. One way to start viewing the John passage in its larger context is to imagine there’s a hyperlink in verse 14 that jumps you back to Numbers 21:4-9. We’re going to jump to that story for a moment, but unlike the usual Internet reading practice, we are going to return to the text we started with, and thanks to Numbers, we’ll have a better understanding of what Jesus was getting at in John 3:16.

The Numbers story finds the people of Israel in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan , after the exodus. Their route requires them to go around the land of Edom . This detour makes the Israelites really cranky and it brings up complaints they’ve raised to Moses before: “Our slavery in Egypt was better than this. We’re going to die out here in the wilderness.” “We’ve got no food and water, and this food we have is miserable!” They do of course have manna. Which by the way in Hebrew it is pronounced, man-hoo, which meant, what’s that?" Now, "what’s that?" was really a nourishing food that God graciously provided, but month after miserable month of meandering back and forth across the desert, the manna began to taste like crusty oatmeal, and many folks started to grumble and gripe, whine, crab, and complain.

They complained not only against Moses, but also against God. A really deep reading would show, that this is at least the fourth occasion, that they have complained and God has addressed their complaints in some way. This time, according to the story in Numbers, God isn’t too happy and sends poisonous serpents among them, who bite them, and many of the people died. Now this is not the God I’ve experienced, but remember we are reading this story in the context of Israelite theology. The serpents send fear through the people and they plead with Moses to intervene with God on their behalf. When Moses did so, God told him to fashion a serpent out of bronze and place it on a pole. God instructed that anyone who was bitten by a live serpent should look at the bronze one on the pole. And when they did so, they would recover and live. The serpent was a savior.

Now if we return to John and look at the larger context, we see this mentioned in conversation with a man who was both Jewish and steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus was able to refer to this serpent story with the certainty that Nicodemus would know it and be able to use it as a comparison to Jesus’ mission. Thus, when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life,” Nicodemus suddenly understands that Jesus intends to be a savior. He is beginning to realize what Jesus means. Jesus is saying that just as looking at the bronze serpent on a pole enabled those ancients who were dying to live, so looking at Jesus with belief will enable those dying spiritually to live a new life.

Jesus did not come like the serpents as agents of judgment, but as a way to a new, deeper, meaningful life. It’s not enough to read John 3:16 in isolation and be mere “decoders of information.” We get far more out of it if we do what Jesus invited Nicodemus to do, to make “rich mental connections” between the Old Testament and the gospel. To read and study, and experience what exactly Jesus had and continues to offer. Jesus acts like a light and reveals to us not only the grace and love in this world, but through his stories and through a relationship with the divine, he also asks us to continually reflect on the ways we intentionally or unintentionally feed evil and corruption in this world. Jesus modeled for us the life of discipleship. He showed us that life is not merely about our relationship with the Divine, but also about our relationship to other. Through the stories of the Gospel we see, God in the flesh, living with integrity, challenging unjust systems, loving those who were especially difficult to love, showing people that life can be so deep and rich. We don’t get a true sense of Jesus or his message if we skim, if we don’t take time for critical reflection and prayer.

[1] Based largely on a reflection with the same name found in the March-April edition of Homiletics.

[2] Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google making us stupid?” The Atlantic , July/August 2008, theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google.

[3] Taylor, Rev. Bob, “Deep Reading ,” Homiletics, March-April 2009.