For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
So loved the world ... is the burden of the entire corpus of divine revelation.  Fittingly, this announcement of God's universal love was made to a representative of the narrowest and strictest sect in ancient Judaism, who taught that God's love was the special province of Israel, who were at that very time hoping for their long-awaited Messiah, who would, according to their views, restore the kingdom of Israel and judge the whole Gentile world with an overwhelming destruction.  Jesus' refusal to conform to such an idea of the Messiah was a very conspicuous element in their rejection of him.  Here, Christ hurled into the very teeth of the Sanhedrin the mind-blowing concept that God loved everyone on earth, the whole creation! It is no wonder that John never forgot such a confrontation as this; and no wonder that some of the words in this interview became a part of his permanent vocabulary, appearing even in the writings of his old age, as in "And he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world" (1 John 2:2).