Lenten Reflection – Day 24 of the Great Lent
Mid-Lent – For God So Loved the World: St. John 7:14-15; 3:13-21
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (3:16)
Twenty-four days. We have reached the middle of the Great Lent. Half the fast is behind us. Half lies ahead. The midpoint of any long journey is a strange place. The beginning is too far behind to return to. The end is too far ahead to see. We are right in the middle. And in the middle, the question that matters most is not “how far have I come?” or “how far do I have to go?” It is: “why am I here?”
Today the Church answers that question. Not with words alone. With wood.
The Cross in the Middle of the Church
In the Indian Orthodox tradition, Mid-Lent is one of the rare weekdays during the Great Lent when the Holy Qurbana is celebrated. And the day carries a ceremony that no one who witnesses it can forget.
A procession moves around the church carrying the Cross. Then the priest lifts the Cross in the Sleeba Aaghosham, the exaltation of the Cross, facing each of the four directions. East. West. North. South. The Cross is shown to the whole world. Every direction. Every corner. No part of creation is left unaddressed. The lifted Cross claims everything.
Then the Cross is placed on a large decorated stand covered with a red cloth. This stand is called the Golgotha. And it is placed in the middle of the church. Not at the front. Not at the side. Not behind the altar screen where only the priests can see it. In the middle. Where every person who enters the building must see it, walk past it, face it.
And it stays there. Not just for Mid-Lent day. Not just for that week. The Cross remains in the middle of the church from Mid-Lent until the Feast of the Ascension, forty days after Qymtho (Resurrection). Through the remaining weeks of Lent. Through Palm Sunday. Through the Passion. Through Great Friday. Through the Resurrection. Through the forty days of the Paschal season. The Cross stands in the center of everything.
The timing is not accidental. The Church places the Cross at the midpoint of the fast for the same reason that John 3:14–15 is the Gospel reading for this day. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” The priest lifts the Cross to the four directions because the Son of Man was lifted up for the whole world. And the Cross is placed in the middle of the church because the Cross belongs in the middle of everything.
Think about what this means physically. For the remaining weeks of the fast, we cannot enter the church without seeing the Cross. We cannot approach the altar without passing it. We cannot receive the Eucharist without the Golgotha stand between us and the sanctuary. The Cross is not decoration. It is not a symbol placed politely in a corner. It is an obstruction. A holy obstruction. It stands in our path and says: ‘you do not get past me. Everything you do from this moment forward must reckon with me.’
The red cloth on the Golgotha is the colour of blood. The colour of sacrifice. The colour of the love that John 3:16 describes. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” The red cloth says: this love cost blood. This gift was not free for the giver. The Cross stands on red because the Cross stands on sacrifice.
And the four directions of the exaltation say something the fast has been building toward since Day 1. The Cross is not for one people. Not for one nation. Not for one tradition. East. West. North. South. “For God so loved the world.” The whole world. The Canaanite woman we met on Knanayto Sunday. The tax collectors and sinners at Levi’s table. The crowd of four thousand in the wilderness. The paralytic who was carried. The leper who was touched. Every outsider. Every insider. Every direction. The Cross is lifted toward all of them.
As travellers on a long journey find relief under the shade of a tree, so the Church “plants” the Cross at Mid-Lent to refresh us. We are tired. The fast is long. The disciplines are heavy. And the Church does not say “try harder.” It places the Cross in front of us and says: look. This is why. This is the love that holds everything together. Rest under this tree for a moment. Then keep walking. But keep walking toward this. Not away from it.
Today the Church gives us not only the Cross in the middle of the nave but the verse that explains why it is there. Not in a command. Not in a discipline. Not in a parable. In the simplest, most famous, most astonishing sentence in all of Scripture.
For God so loved the world.
That is why you are here. That is why the fast exists. That is why the Cross is ahead. That is why everything.
Mid-Lent is the moment when the fast stops looking backward at repentance and starts looking forward at the Cross. We have spent three weeks examining ourselves. Stripping. Confessing. Giving. Resting. Now the lens turns. From us to Him. From our effort to His sacrifice. From our small offerings to the offering that changed everything.
The fast is not about us. It has never been about us. It is about a God who loved the world so much that He gave.
Jesus Teaching in the Temple (John 7:14–15)
“Now about the middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple and taught. And the Jews marvelled, saying, ‘How does this Man know letters, having never studied?'” (7:14–15)
John places Jesus in the Temple in the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles. The middle of the feast. The Church reads this text at Mid-Lent for the same reason. We are in the middle. And in the middle, Christ teaches.
The people are astonished. Not by what He teaches. By how He knows it. This man has never attended the rabbinic schools. He has no diploma. No credentials. No teacher to cite as His authority. He is a carpenter’s son from Nazareth. And He teaches in the Temple as though He wrote the texts Himself.
Because He did.
The Word who was with God in the beginning. Through whom all things were made. The Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. He does not need to study the Scriptures the way the scribes study them. He is the subject of the Scriptures. The Torah speaks of Him. The Prophets point to Him. The Psalms cry out for Him. When He opens His mouth in the Temple, the Source is speaking.
On Day 13, we heard Christ teach in the Capernaum synagogue with an authority the people had never encountered. Today we see it again in the Jerusalem Temple. The response is the same. Astonishment. Not polite admiration. Shock. Where does this come from? How does He know this?
St. Cyril of Alexandria, in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, teaches that the people’s astonishment reveals their blindness. They marvelled at His knowledge as though it were borrowed. As though He had somehow acquired what they could not account for. They did not understand that they were listening to the Author. The book was reading itself to them and they thought someone had studied very hard. Cyril says this is always the danger of religious education without faith. You can learn the words of Scripture and miss the Word who speaks through them.1
Mid-Lent. We have been studying Scripture for twenty-four days. The question John 7:14–15 asks is whether we have met the Person behind the pages. Not just the teachings. The Teacher. Not just the theology. The God.
No One Has Ascended to Heaven (John 3:13)
“No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.” (3:13)
Now John takes us to the conversation with Nicodemus. The night-time visit. The Pharisee who came to Jesus after dark because he did not want to be seen. The conversation about being born again, about water and the Spirit, about earthly things and heavenly things.
And then this verse. Dense. Mysterious. Packed with theology.
“No one has ascended to heaven.” No human being has climbed up to God on his own power. Not by fasting. Not by prayer. Not by moral achievement. Not by mystical technique. The distance between earth and heaven is not a distance that human effort can cross. We cannot reach God by climbing.
“But He who came down from heaven.” The only one who has bridged the gap is the one who came from the other side. God did not wait for us to find Him. He came to find us. The movement is downward. From heaven to earth. From glory to a stable. From throne to manger to cross.
“The Son of Man who is in heaven.” Even while standing on earth, speaking to Nicodemus, Jesus is in heaven. He does not leave heaven when He enters the world. He does not stop being God when He becomes human. He holds both natures in one Person. Present on earth and present in heaven simultaneously. This is the mystery of the Incarnation that the Oriental Orthodox Church confesses. One nature of God the Word Incarnate. Not divided. Not confused. Not separated. United.
St. Athanasius the Great, in On the Incarnation, teaches that the descent of the Word was the only solution to the human problem. Humanity was dying. Sinking into non-being. Returning to the nothing from which it was created. No prophet could fix this. No law could reverse it. No angel could reach deep enough. Only the Creator Himself could re-create what He had made. So He descended. Not because heaven was boring. Because the world He loved was dying. And He could not bear to watch.2
This is Mid-Lent theology. We have spent three weeks trying to ascend. Trying to reach God through discipline. Through fasting. Through prayer. Through self-examination. All of it good. All of it necessary. But none of it sufficient. Because no one ascends to heaven on his own power. The only bridge between earth and heaven is the One who came down.
The fast does not lift us to God. It clears away the obstacles so we can see that God has already come to us.
As Moses Lifted Up the Serpent (vv. 14–15)
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” (3:14–15)
The bronze serpent. One of the strangest stories in the Old Testament. Numbers 21:4–9. The Israelites in the wilderness were complaining. God sent poisonous snakes. The people were bitten. They were dying. They cried out to Moses. God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and put it on a pole. Anyone who was bitten could look at the bronze serpent and live.
The remedy looked like the disease. A serpent to heal a serpent bite. The thing that was killing them, lifted up, became the thing that saved them. They did not have to do anything. They did not have to earn the healing. They just had to look.
Jesus says: that is what is going to happen to Me. The Son of Man must be lifted up. On a cross. On a pole. Like the bronze serpent in the wilderness. And whoever looks at Him will not perish but have eternal life.
The Cross is the bronze serpent. The thing that was killing us (sin, death, the curse) was placed on Christ. He became the disease in order to be the cure. Paul will say it later: “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The Cross looks like death. It is life. It looks like defeat. It is victory. It looks like the end. It is the beginning of everything.
St. Ephrem the Syrian, in his Hymns on the Crucifixion and Hymns on the Church, develops the bronze serpent typology with characteristic depth. He writes that Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness so that the eyes of the dying could find a focal point. The serpent did not contain the healing. God healed through the serpent. The looking was the act of faith. In the same way, the Cross does not save by its wood. God saves through the Cross. And the looking is faith. Ephrem marvels that God chose to heal through the very image of the wound. The serpent had bitten them. A serpent saved them. Sin had killed humanity. The sinless One, made sin, saved them. The medicine looks like the poison. But the poison has been emptied and the medicine is full of life..3
This is exactly what the Sleeba Aaghosham enacts in the church at Mid-Lent. The priest lifts the Cross to the four directions just as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness. The gesture says: look. Look at what has been lifted up. Do not look at our feet. Do not look at our failures. Do not look at the snakebite of sin on our ankle. Look up. At the Cross. At the One who was made sin so that we could be made righteous. The entire second half of the fast is lived in the physical presence of this lifted Cross, standing on its Golgotha in the centre of the nave. Every time we walk into the church for the remaining weeks, the Cross is there. Reminding us. Not of our sins. Of His love.
Mid-Lent. The Cross is now visible on the horizon. We are walking toward it. The fast is pointing toward Great Friday. The disciplines are preparing us for the week of the Passion. And today’s passage tells us what we will see when we get there. Not death. Life. Not defeat. Victory. Not a curse. A cure. The Son of Man lifted up. And whoever looks at Him will live.
For God So Loved the World (vv. 16–17)
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.” (3:16–17)
The most famous sentence in the Bible. And possibly the most misunderstood.
Not misunderstood because people get the words wrong. Misunderstood because people hear it so often that they stop hearing it.
Listen to it again. Slowly.
“For God so loved the world.”
God loved. The starting point of everything is not human sin. Not divine anger. Not judgment. Not law. Love. God loved. Before we sinned. Before we repented. Before we fasted a single day. Before we prayed a single prayer. God loved the world. Not God tolerated the world. Not God reluctantly agreed to rescue the world. God loved. The word John uses is ēgapēsen. The decisive, active love of a God who chooses to give Himself away for the sake of the beloved.
“The world.” Not the righteous. Not the deserving. Not the elect. The world. The whole broken, rebellious, idolatrous, suffering, beautiful, terrible world. God did not love a selected portion of it. He loved it. All of it. Including the parts that do not love Him back. Including the parts that have spent twenty-four days fasting and still feel far away. Including the parts that will never fast a single day.
“That He gave His only begotten Son.”
This is what love does. It gives. Not surplus. Not a portion. The only begotten Son. The one and only. The beloved. The Word who was with God from the beginning. The Son in whom the Father delights. God gave Him. Handed Him over. Released Him into a world that would reject Him, mock Him, strip Him, nail Him to wood, and watch Him die.
On Day 22, the widow gave her two coins. Her whole livelihood. We said she gave more than all the rich donors combined. Today we see where she learned it. She learned it from a God who gave His only Son. Her two coins were an echo of His giving. All genuine giving is an echo of this giving. The source of all sacrifice is a Father who sacrificed His Son.
“That whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
“Whoever.” The widest word in the sentence. Not whoever is circumcised. Not whoever is baptised. Not whoever belongs to the right church. Not whoever has fasted for twenty-four days. Whoever. Whoever believes. The door is as wide as belief. And belief is not a theological system. It is trust. Looking at the bronze serpent. Looking at the Cross. And trusting that the God who lifted His Son on the wood did it because He loves you.
“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world.”
This verse is as important as the one before it. God did not send the Son to condemn. The purpose of the Incarnation is not judgment. It is salvation. Christ did not come to sort the righteous from the unrighteous. He came so that the world might be saved. All of it. Every part. Even the parts that resist. Even the parts that hide. Even the parts that choose the dark.
St. John Chrysostom, in his Homily 27 on John, says this verse is the answer to every terrified conscience. Every person who has sinned and fears God’s response. Every person who has failed during the fast and dreads the judgment. Chrysostom says: God did not send the Son to condemn. Say it again. Let it sink in. The Son came not to condemn but to save. If the purpose of the Incarnation is salvation, then salvation is what God is working toward in our life right now. Not punishment. Not revenge. Not a detailed accounting of every failure since Day 1 of the fast. Salvation. That is the project. Everything else serves that purpose.4
Light Has Come Into the World (vv. 18–21)
“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.” (3:18–21)
After the widest invitation in Scripture, the hardest truth. Light has come. And some people prefer the dark.
The condemnation is not something God does to people. It is something people do to themselves. The light has come. It is available. It is shining. And some people turn their backs on it. Not because they cannot see it. Because they do not want to see it. Because the light exposes what they are doing. And what they are doing is evil. And they love it more than they love the truth.
On Day 12, we reflected on Romans 1 and the great exchange. Humanity trading the glory of God for images. Suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. Today John makes the same point from a different angle. The problem is not that the light is hidden. The problem is that people love the dark. The truth is available. God is not hiding. Christ has come. The Son has been given. The invitation stands. And some people walk in the other direction.
But notice how the passage ends. Not with condemnation. With hope.
“He who does the truth comes to the light, that his deeds may be clearly seen, that they have been done in God.”
The person who does the truth comes to the light willingly. Not fearfully. Because his deeds have been done in God. Not perfectly. Not impressively. In God. The light does not threaten this person. It confirms him. It shows that the small, imperfect, stumbling things he has been doing during this fast were done in God. The prayers that felt dry. The fasting that felt pointless. The giving that felt insignificant. Done in God. Visible in the light. And seen as beautiful.
St. Macarius the Great, in his Spiritual Homilies, teaches that the person who fears the light fears it because he does not trust the mercy he will find there. He imagines that the light will expose him to condemnation. But Christ has just said: I did not come to condemn. The light exposes not for punishment but for healing. The doctor does not examine the wound in order to mock it. He examines it in order to treat it. The light of Christ is diagnostic, not punitive. It shows what is wrong so that what is wrong can be made right.5
What Mid-Lent Means
We are at the midpoint. The hinge of the fast. And the hinge verse is John 3:16. Everything before this day was preparation. Everything after this day points toward the Cross.
The first half of the fast was about us. Our sin. Our repentance. Our fasting. Our prayer. Our giving. Our struggle.
The second half of the fast is about Him. His descent. His love. His gift. His Cross. His resurrection.
Mid-Lent turns the fast from a mirror into a window. For three weeks we have been looking at ourselves. Today we look through ourselves at the God who loved the world so much that He gave.
The fast does not save us. The Cross saves us. The fast prepares us to see the Cross. To understand what we are looking at when we get to Great Friday. To know that the Man on the wood is there because God loved the world. Not because we earned it. Not because we fasted well enough. Because He loved. Period.
The Church understood this when it designed the Mid-Lent ceremony. The Cross is not placed at the end of the fast as a reward for those who survived. It is placed at the midpoint. While we are still fasting. While we are still struggling. While we are still tired. The Cross does not wait for us to finish. It meets us in the middle. It stands in the nave as a companion for the second half of the journey. The red-draped Golgotha says: I am here now. You do not have to walk the rest of this road without me. Every prayer you pray for the next twenty-six days, you will pray in my shadow. Every Qurbana you receive, you will receive with me standing between you and the altar. I am not the destination. I am the companion. And I will be here when you arrive at Great Friday. And I will still be here when the tomb is empty. And I will remain until the Ascension, because the Cross does not end when the fast ends. The Cross is forever.
Everything in the second half of the fast flows from this verse. Every discipline, every prayer, every sacrifice for the remaining twenty-six days is a response to love. Not an attempt to generate love. A response to love already given. Already poured out. Already nailed to wood.
For Our Journey Today
Read John 3:16 as though you have never read it before. You have heard it a thousand times. Let it be new today. Read it one word at a time. God. So. Loved. The world. That He gave. His only. Begotten. Son. Let each word land. Let the weight of it settle. This is not a bumper sticker. It is the reason the universe exists. And the reason you are fasting.
Let the fast point forward. The first half of the Lent looked backward. At our sin. At our failures. At the things we needed to confess. The second half looks forward. At the Cross. At the love that put Christ there. At the resurrection that follows. Today, shift the direction of our gaze. Stop looking at our own self. Look at Him. The bronze serpent is lifted up. Look at it. And live.
Come into the light. If there is something you have been hiding during this fast, today is the day to bring it into the light. Not because the light will condemn you. Because the light will heal you. Christ did not come to condemn. He came to save. The thing you are most afraid to expose is the thing that most needs His mercy. Name it. Bring it to the light. And discover that the light is not a courtroom. It is a hospital.
Venerate the Cross. If you are able to attend the Mid-Lent Qurbana, stand before the Golgotha when the Cross is installed. Watch the exaltation. East. West. North. South. And know that you are standing in one of those four directions. The Cross was lifted toward you. If you cannot attend, find a cross in your home. A wall cross. A prayer corner cross. A cross on a chain. Hold it. Look at it. Let it do what the Golgotha does in the nave. Let it stand in the middle of your day and remind you why you are fasting. Not because you are strong. Because He was lifted up. And because looking at Him is enough.
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, who so loved the world that You gave Your only begotten Son, we stand at the midpoint of this fast and we look forward. Toward the Cross. Toward the love that we did not earn and do not deserve. We confess that we have spent three weeks looking at ourselves. Our sin. Our effort. Our performance. Today we lift our eyes. We look at the bronze serpent lifted up. We look at Your Son, nailed to the wood, and we see not condemnation but love. Not punishment but healing. Not the end but the beginning. Thank You. For loving the world. For loving us. For sending not a judge but a Saviour. For light that heals rather than destroys. For the Cross that the Church has placed in our midst today. For the red cloth of sacrifice. For the four directions of Your love. For the holy obstruction that will not let us pass without seeing what You have done. Carry us through the second half of this fast with our eyes fixed on the Cross. Not on ourselves. On Him. For He is gentle and lowly in heart. And in Him we find rest for our souls. By the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos, the holy Evangelist John, and all the saints, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.
- St. Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444). Commentary on the Gospel of John, on John 7:14–15. ↩︎
- St. Athanasius the Great (c. 296–373). On the Incarnation (De Incarnatione), particularly chapters 4–10. ↩︎
- St. Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306–373). Hymns on the Crucifixion and Hymns on the Church (Madrāshē d-ʿal Zqeephutho and Madrāshē d-ʿal ʿEdtā).Edition: Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, translated by Kathleen E. McVey, Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1989). ↩︎
- St. John Chrysostom (c. 349–407). Homily 27 on John, on John 3:16–17. ↩︎
- St. Macarius the Great (c. 300–391). Spiritual Homilies (Homiliae Spirituales), particularly Homilies 1, 5, and 32. ↩︎
