"God so loved this world..."

[AI translation] Today I want to preach the Christmas Gospel based on this, the best-known Word in the whole Bible. If this Word, which we all know well by heart, were now to be heard by heart, oh, what a merry Christmas we would have!"God so loved the world" - it is clearer from the original Greek text than from the Hungarian translation that we are not talking about a finished past. It is not that there was once a time in this world when God loved! He once loved, but He no longer loves! That is not what the Word is saying. It is about a past that has begun. A process that began a long time ago, a divine action, an action of love that has been going on ever since! God loves the world now as much as He did when that statement was spoken by Jesus!
Sadly, we are very used to this phrase, and there is no more incomprehensible miracle than that God loves this world! It would have been so much more understandable if Jesus had said, "People, take note: God hates this world, is angry with it, is hateful to it! That would be perfectly understandable. This world is really pushing God out of his life completely. It cares very little that there is a God, that there is a divine law. The whole life of this world is a great rebellion against God. It is filled with passions, desires, ambitions, thoughts, sins, all of which are in direct opposition to all that God can love. Would it not be more natural for God to abandon this world to its fate, and let it fall into its own misery? And yet He loves! Do you not feel what a miracle this is? Truly a miracle that only God can do! He loves this world! The world that you often hate around you. The one you are tired of, the one that weighs you down like a cross with its agonizing weight, the one that may consume your strength. The world in which you do your work, in which shifts are changed, the norm is counted, this is the world God loves! The human world that gnaws at each other with its petty, slanderous, malicious bread envy, that bustles, elbows around you - that human world God loves! In this big world, the small world that you are, that is perhaps a thorn in the side of many, an obstacle, that many may not understand, mock, scorn - this small world, you: God loves you! Inexplicable, but He loves you! Yes! Jesus says: "God so loved the world...". Like no one else!
The reason why I would like to re-emphasize this old truth today is because it alone can give a comforting solution to the greatest problem of man today. Do you know what the greatest problem of man today is? It is fear! Recently, psychologists and neurologists have been talking and writing a lot about the fact that the basic feeling of most modern people is fear. A feeling of abandonment. Rich or poor, educated or uneducated, white or coloured, Christian or non-Christian, every modern man is afraid! Afraid of what? Of war? An atomic bomb? Of history? Or of ourselves, of our technical power, of our moral depravity? Maybe. But perhaps there is no object to fear. That is the bigger problem, if one is not afraid of something, but simply afraid! There is an irrational fear, an anxiety in man.
There is only one thing that can overcome this tormenting feeling of fear: a feeling of being hidden, of being protected. For example, a child in the arms of its mother is not afraid. He is hidden in her arms. Even in the air-raid shelter, he is not afraid in his mother's arms, even in the most frightening situation. Concealment is not external protection, but the love that surrounds you! External protection can ward off certain dangers, but the invisible, the indefinable, the unnameable fear can only be conquered by love! Love casts out fear! This is what modern man longs for most deeply: concealment.
That is what he has lost. Although he knows every conceivable external protection device, from life and accident insurance policies to nuclear weapons, he is still not hidden. He has no protector to hide it from. Unable to give himself the gift of concealment, he is cut off from protective love, so the world is afraid! That is why the Christmas Gospel, "God so loved the world", is timely good news! There is divine love all around the world! Only in this divine love is there hiddenness. There is love!
God so loves "that he gave his only begotten Son"! Not the way we would like to see God's love! We want him to treat us as a weak father treats his spoiled child: to grant us all our wishes and keep us from all harm and danger. Grant us health, grant us a peaceful and abundant life. Is this not how God loves! He gave us His only begotten Son. He gave Him into this fearful world! His only begotten Son: the expression means that Jesus is the window through which man can see something of the God who is at work in this world, who fills the world with His presence. The transparency through which the fact that God so loves this world shines into the world! God who is here! Not enthroned in some distant, unimaginable heavenly height above the world, but here! He gave His only begotten Son. It is like a warning to seek God not on high, but down in the depths! The reality of God is much better expressed in depth than in height. Just as deep is the truth, deep is suffering, or deep is the foundation, the deepest foundation. At the depth of truth, at the depth of all the problems of human life, at the depth of the foundation of the world: there is God! The depth expresses solidarity, the height expresses indifferent transcendence. The Epicurean gods, who themselves hover in their high heavens above the cares and troubles of the earthly world - these are the types of sublime indifference. The trouble is that this is still the way many people imagine God today. The saying is: There is a God in heaven, there is nothing wrong with the world! Because if He is above everything, then He is not really interested, He is above all things.
Well then, never imagine God as enthroned at the top of the universe, outside the natural world, like the sun above the earth, outside the earth - that's the trouble, that we have pushed God so far away from ourselves and our world in our imagination - but as at the very bottom of all existing reality. Not somewhere on the edge of life, but at the centre of life. God is not an addition to the events and realities of the world, but the other side of it. That is why life has meaning! That is why history makes sense! God is in everything that happens! Just like Jesus was in history! In the world. Jesus is the window through which we can see something of the God who fills this world with His presence. He gave His only begotten Son: that is, God is here. Here, below, where you are, where you live, rejoice, grieve, struggle, work. Here is God! He is in the fullest solidarity with you! This is true love. It is also in the love-relationship between people that, for example, when I see someone I love suffering, struggling, tired, I stand by him, I suffer with him, I endure with him. I empathize, I think myself into their situation, into their fate. That's what God does: he puts himself in the fate, in the situation of man. Not only in thought and feeling, but in fact and reality.
It is said of Kagawa (a well-known Japanese Christian) that he went so far among them, among the poorest beggars in Tokyo, that he himself became a piece of dirt. He lay on the floor with the sick, so much so that he himself became sick. He was infected with the eye disease of the blind, and he became blind. God is a thousand times more intimate among us here! He has come into our destiny, into our bed, our manger, our cross, our death, our judgment. Our sighs, our cries of woe were uttered on his lips, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" In the abyss! In all our earthly life! Maybe someone here feels like their little life doesn't really matter anymore in this big world. Maybe it means something to himself, maybe to one or two people, and then it will be erased from their memories like the wrong assignment on the school blackboard. But God says to him: I love you! This means that you are as valuable to God as you are to yourself, and even more so! As if you were the one for whom the star was lit in the night of Bethlehem! This is eternal life, to know God like this! The one you know today, you will know forever!
For this reason God gave His only begotten Son, "that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life", says our Word. Eternal life: it also means that when all the light goes out around you and in you, a new day will dawn. One that will never again turn to evening! But eternal life is not only in the afterlife! The person of Jesus means the possibility that in Him earth and heaven, the temporal and the eternal, are joined together. "For in him is one, that he perish not". Let him not be lost in the drabness, the rush, the aimlessness, the sadness, the dirt, the sin of life. Don't get lost in the crowd, so that you slowly become a number. Let it not stagnate, let it not sink, but have eternal life! God in Jesus gave something of himself to this world. Something that makes our ordinary, everyday lives blossom, refreshed, beautified, full, blessed.
"He who believes in Him" - To believe in God, who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, is a very practical thing. How can God be reached by faith? Again, not up, but down. Not by trying to soar to some invisible height on the wings of piety, trying to cross the boundary of finitude in ecstasy, but by trying to take a serious step towards the person closest to me. To cross the chasm that may separate me from him. In God, who lived among us as man. I believe as much as I love man! For we believe in a God who not only loves us, but who has taken the whole world into His heart with us. We only truly believe in Him when we accept Him as He is. As a God who loves the whole world. Whoever chooses God, but is reluctant to choose those for whom He has already chosen - has not chosen this God, but a deity of his own imagination. Believing in God implies being ready to love all those whom He loves! When you look at a person, perhaps the one who is most annoying, disturbing, getting in your way, always remember that that person has one more dimension than meets the eye. Jesus said. He did not think that the attitude towards Lazarus would count as an attitude towards God. This is the great surprise, the great fright, in Jesus' parable of the Last Judgment, that Jesus himself was present in the poor, the sick, the prisoners, the hungry, whose need, material, daily need, was a call to the practice of love. Your fellow human being is God's representative to you. In him you can live your faith in God! Here, in loving man, we can prove what God is worth to us! It is in him that God speaks to you and through him that God awaits your response. If you are not honest with man, you have deceived God. If you approach him with impure feelings, you have repelled God. As hotly or lukewarmly as you love him, so truly or lukewarmly do you believe in God!
God has become flesh, dwells among us, and meets us every day in the person of his youngest child. If we want to meet Him, we do not seek Him in heaven, where we cannot reach, but on earth, where He has come down to us! A few weeks ago I said at the evangelization: Take out Jn 3,16, this well-known Word at home! Read it and substitute your name for "someone"! So: if X Y "believing in him, let him not perish but have eternal life". Is that right? Of course it's true! Say it again! Say it again, until the joy of Christmas overflows your heart, and the love of God overflows from your heart to the other!
Amen
Date: Christmas, December 25, 1964