John 3:16

The word usually read as an intensifier is actually a manner word. So loved does not mean loved so much; it means loved in this way — and what follows is the description of the way.

That changes the sentence from an exclamation into an explanation. The love is not being measured. It is being demonstrated, and the demonstration is the giving.

World is the second thing worth slowing down for. In John's vocabulary it is not a neutral term for the planet; he uses it repeatedly for the human order that is set against God. That is what is being loved here. Not the world as scenery, and not the part of it that was already sympathetic.

And the structure of the second half is deliberately wide, then deliberately narrow. Whoever believes — anyone at all, no category named, which for a Jewish teacher speaking to a member of the ruling council was the provocative part. Then: should not perish. Perishing is assumed as the default condition, which is the sentence's least popular clause and the reason the rest of it is good news.

Nicodemus, who is listening to this, appears twice more in the Gospel. The last time is at the burial, carrying about seventy-five pounds of spices to a grave — an absurd quantity, and the only comment John makes about how the conversation eventually landed.