Jesus = God's lifting of love and light (Fourth Sunday of Lent)
John 3:14-21 & Numbers 21: 4-9
Satan, sinister, sin, snide, slither, sarcastic, sardonic, scandalous, salacious, slander, slur, and sneaky. Sardon, the evil Lord in the Lord of the Rings, or Slitherin the evil house in Harry Potter. There are a disproportionate number of bad words that start with S – and not just in English. And from today’s Bible lessons: snake or serpent. Those of us named Scott, or Steve, or Sally, or Samantha should have a bit of a complex.
I don’t know if there is some connection between the curvy “S” and a slithering snake, but both have this tenuous relationship with evil. Snakes, serpents, or reptiles in general suggest something sinister. Edward Wilson, former southern Baptist and socio-biologist from Harvard suggests we have some residual evolutionary memory which makes us fear and be repulsed by reptiles. He mentions that people from all cultures report having evil snake dreams. I don’t know what to think about the idea of a residual memory, but I do know that most cultures have viewed snakes or serpents, or reptiles in general, as symbols of evil. Snakes slither and sneak up on you. They writhe on the ground as they were cursed to do in Genesis.
Our Gospel text today begins with Jesus continuing his conversation with Nicodemus. You will likely remember the verses earlier, where Jesus says to Nick: “you got to be born again.” And in verse 15 he continues the conversation to further explain the kind of salvation that he is providing. “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man (phrase meaning the representation of humanity) must be lifted up.”
He is referring to the story recorded in Numbers read earlier in the service. When the people of Israel were lost wandering in the wilderness the people grumbled and complained. They felt God sent snakes to punish them. People died from snake bites. And so they cried out for help. They sought forgiveness. A miraculous cure was given: brass serpent on a pole. When the people looked up at that, they were cured of the effects of the snake bite.
If you’re puzzled by this story, you’re not alone. For centuries Rabbis have pondered the question: why a bronze serpent? Isn’t that awfully close to an idol? And in fact the brazen serpent did become an idol. It was years later, but it had to be destroyed because what began as a symbol of God’s healing became a subject of idolatry. The people moved from worshiping the creator of the snake to the snake itself (see 2 Kings 18:4).
The Rabbis had a fairly consistent answer to their quandary as to why God might encourage a metal snake on a pole. The people were healed, not by the power of the shiny metal, but by the upward look and the stark reminder. First, the people in the wilderness knew their salvation came not in looking down at their problems, but upward for God’s direction and help. Second, the brazen serpent was a reminder of the cause of their disease – it wasn’t just the snake, but the cause of the snakes: the faithless grumbling, the self-centered narcissism. It was the lack of faith that cast the eyes downward rather than upward. The snake was both a reminder of their sin and a cure from it.
It seems to me that a lot of scriptural commands boil down to “looking instructions.” Don’t look – meaning focus, think, obsess, worry – down there, but look – meaning focus, think, hope, dream – up there. This is the heart of faith: where you look for help. Do you look up, seeking God’s perspective? Or do you spend your days looking down, at all the snakes in the grass, hoping your keen eyes, your fancy footwork, will keep your ankle safe?
The point Jesus is making to Nicodemus: his kind of salvation is a healing salvation. It’s wasn’t political or social, it was emotional and physical. It brought love and light, compassion and truth, hope and faith. Jesus said he would be: 1) lifted up, like the serpent on the pole, not like a king on a throne. (Nicodemus was likely looking for a king on a throne.) 2) his salvation would come also by faith in the healing of God.
The point about being lifted up is clear enough. You lift up what you want all to see. The serpent was on the pole, so if anyone was bit, they could just look up. Moses didn’t hide the healing serpent. He put it in the center, on a pole. However, that to which they looked up, was the very thing that plagued them. This was not looking up at a “pie in the sky” answer, it was looking at the representation of your problem and at the hope for a cure!
It is fascinating that God had Moses put up an image of the very thing that plagued them. I think this speaks to two things: 1) It’s a reminder that Jesus became sin that we might become the righteousness of God. 2) It’s a reminder that the way to salvation, is not to act like we don’t have problems, to deny there are snakes, it is to face the reality of them, and then receive God’s help to overcome them.
Whether it’s step one of a 12 step process, or the first of the beatitudes, or the beginning of the Roman Road of salvation – it’s all the same: acknowledge you problem, see your sin. A cross is both a reminder of our sin and a symbol or our hope. It reminds us that humans are so depraved that they would regularly nail another human being to a tree – even an innocent man. And it demonstrates that we have hope, in sacrificial love.
Many scholars think that through vs. 15, Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus and that at vs. 16 (for God…) John starts his own commentary. And in his commentary John uses two key words: one is love, the other is light.
Love is an emotional state. Light is a physical state. Love is an interior motivation, experienced in the heart. Light is an external reality, seen by the eyes. We believe in love which we don’t see. We experience light which is the way we do see.
John wants us, his readers, to understand who Jesus is. He is writing with images, pictures, metaphors, in order to communicate this. And in this communication he makes two fundamental points: Jesus is the expression of God’s love (interior), secondly: Jesus is the physical expression of God’s light (exterior). There is the mystical and the historical, the Christ of faith and the Jesus of Nazareth.
One of the things this says: God wants to heal you of the snakes, inside and out. The inner disease of hatred, and the outer disease of bad relationships. The inner problem of envy and the outer problem of having a crowded life. The inner problem of depression and the outer problem of living in a difficult world.
God so loved the world, that whosoever… That is as inclusive a word as you can get. There is no limit, no restriction, no fence, barrier, etc. Jesus didn’t come to condemn. Condemnation, John makes clear, we bring on ourselves when we remain in the darkness, refusing to see the snakes, the sin, the state of our soul. We condemn ourselves by staying in the darkness, looking downward, not looking up at God’s expression of love.
We have a member who will remain nameless (Todd White) and he works for a small liquid manufacturing company in town. He is an engineer. He works at keeping the plants going. And the other day he told me he was flying to CA to go to an AB plant to count light bulbs. Now don’t misunderstand me, most days I love my calling, but there was this twinge of envy: “Lord why didn’t you call me to count light bulbs. Todd makes a nice living, he’s paying for two girls in college, so he must be pulling in big bucks and all he does is count light bulbs. Light bulbs don’t talk back. They don’t complain about hymns, or temperature in the sanctuary, or sermon length…” Well OK, that’s a bit of an oversimplification of what he does, but in the process of explaining some of what he really does he mentioned that in the old days, before the plants were mostly automated, the plants had to be very well lit – lots of light bulbs. This is because the only way to see if something is clean is to have lots of light. And when you are making beverages that millions of people are going to drink – purity is essential. (Before utility costs went up, they didn’t worry about turning the lights off – Todd is figuring out how much they’d save if they turned them off).
We all struggle with the evil inherent in the world. No matter what we label it, or how we symbolize it (serpent or otherwise) we all get bitten. Jesus was lifted up on the cross. Look up at the ultimate expression of God’s love. Let the light of that love purify your life and give you hope for your journey.
On the cross we see our sin at work and our sin absolved. We see human beings at their worst and God’s love at its absolute best. We see evil, and its eternal cure.
Satan, sinister, sin, snide, slither, sarcastic, sardonic, scandalous, salacious, slander, slur, and sneaky. Sardon, the evil Lord in the Lord of the Rings, or Slitherin the evil house in Harry Potter. There are a disproportionate number of bad words that start with S – and not just in English. And from today’s Bible lessons: snake or serpent. Those of us named Scott, or Steve, or Sally, or Samantha should have a bit of a complex.
I don’t know if there is some connection between the curvy “S” and a slithering snake, but both have this tenuous relationship with evil. Snakes, serpents, or reptiles in general suggest something sinister. Edward Wilson, former southern Baptist and socio-biologist from Harvard suggests we have some residual evolutionary memory which makes us fear and be repulsed by reptiles. He mentions that people from all cultures report having evil snake dreams. I don’t know what to think about the idea of a residual memory, but I do know that most cultures have viewed snakes or serpents, or reptiles in general, as symbols of evil. Snakes slither and sneak up on you. They writhe on the ground as they were cursed to do in Genesis.
Our Gospel text today begins with Jesus continuing his conversation with Nicodemus. You will likely remember the verses earlier, where Jesus says to Nick: “you got to be born again.” And in verse 15 he continues the conversation to further explain the kind of salvation that he is providing. “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man (phrase meaning the representation of humanity) must be lifted up.”
He is referring to the story recorded in Numbers read earlier in the service. When the people of Israel were lost wandering in the wilderness the people grumbled and complained. They felt God sent snakes to punish them. People died from snake bites. And so they cried out for help. They sought forgiveness. A miraculous cure was given: brass serpent on a pole. When the people looked up at that, they were cured of the effects of the snake bite.
If you’re puzzled by this story, you’re not alone. For centuries Rabbis have pondered the question: why a bronze serpent? Isn’t that awfully close to an idol? And in fact the brazen serpent did become an idol. It was years later, but it had to be destroyed because what began as a symbol of God’s healing became a subject of idolatry. The people moved from worshiping the creator of the snake to the snake itself (see 2 Kings 18:4).
The Rabbis had a fairly consistent answer to their quandary as to why God might encourage a metal snake on a pole. The people were healed, not by the power of the shiny metal, but by the upward look and the stark reminder. First, the people in the wilderness knew their salvation came not in looking down at their problems, but upward for God’s direction and help. Second, the brazen serpent was a reminder of the cause of their disease – it wasn’t just the snake, but the cause of the snakes: the faithless grumbling, the self-centered narcissism. It was the lack of faith that cast the eyes downward rather than upward. The snake was both a reminder of their sin and a cure from it.
It seems to me that a lot of scriptural commands boil down to “looking instructions.” Don’t look – meaning focus, think, obsess, worry – down there, but look – meaning focus, think, hope, dream – up there. This is the heart of faith: where you look for help. Do you look up, seeking God’s perspective? Or do you spend your days looking down, at all the snakes in the grass, hoping your keen eyes, your fancy footwork, will keep your ankle safe?
The point Jesus is making to Nicodemus: his kind of salvation is a healing salvation. It’s wasn’t political or social, it was emotional and physical. It brought love and light, compassion and truth, hope and faith. Jesus said he would be: 1) lifted up, like the serpent on the pole, not like a king on a throne. (Nicodemus was likely looking for a king on a throne.) 2) his salvation would come also by faith in the healing of God.
The point about being lifted up is clear enough. You lift up what you want all to see. The serpent was on the pole, so if anyone was bit, they could just look up. Moses didn’t hide the healing serpent. He put it in the center, on a pole. However, that to which they looked up, was the very thing that plagued them. This was not looking up at a “pie in the sky” answer, it was looking at the representation of your problem and at the hope for a cure!
It is fascinating that God had Moses put up an image of the very thing that plagued them. I think this speaks to two things: 1) It’s a reminder that Jesus became sin that we might become the righteousness of God. 2) It’s a reminder that the way to salvation, is not to act like we don’t have problems, to deny there are snakes, it is to face the reality of them, and then receive God’s help to overcome them.
Whether it’s step one of a 12 step process, or the first of the beatitudes, or the beginning of the Roman Road of salvation – it’s all the same: acknowledge you problem, see your sin. A cross is both a reminder of our sin and a symbol or our hope. It reminds us that humans are so depraved that they would regularly nail another human being to a tree – even an innocent man. And it demonstrates that we have hope, in sacrificial love.
Many scholars think that through vs. 15, Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus and that at vs. 16 (for God…) John starts his own commentary. And in his commentary John uses two key words: one is love, the other is light.
Love is an emotional state. Light is a physical state. Love is an interior motivation, experienced in the heart. Light is an external reality, seen by the eyes. We believe in love which we don’t see. We experience light which is the way we do see.
John wants us, his readers, to understand who Jesus is. He is writing with images, pictures, metaphors, in order to communicate this. And in this communication he makes two fundamental points: Jesus is the expression of God’s love (interior), secondly: Jesus is the physical expression of God’s light (exterior). There is the mystical and the historical, the Christ of faith and the Jesus of Nazareth.
One of the things this says: God wants to heal you of the snakes, inside and out. The inner disease of hatred, and the outer disease of bad relationships. The inner problem of envy and the outer problem of having a crowded life. The inner problem of depression and the outer problem of living in a difficult world.
God so loved the world, that whosoever… That is as inclusive a word as you can get. There is no limit, no restriction, no fence, barrier, etc. Jesus didn’t come to condemn. Condemnation, John makes clear, we bring on ourselves when we remain in the darkness, refusing to see the snakes, the sin, the state of our soul. We condemn ourselves by staying in the darkness, looking downward, not looking up at God’s expression of love.
We have a member who will remain nameless (Todd White) and he works for a small liquid manufacturing company in town. He is an engineer. He works at keeping the plants going. And the other day he told me he was flying to CA to go to an AB plant to count light bulbs. Now don’t misunderstand me, most days I love my calling, but there was this twinge of envy: “Lord why didn’t you call me to count light bulbs. Todd makes a nice living, he’s paying for two girls in college, so he must be pulling in big bucks and all he does is count light bulbs. Light bulbs don’t talk back. They don’t complain about hymns, or temperature in the sanctuary, or sermon length…” Well OK, that’s a bit of an oversimplification of what he does, but in the process of explaining some of what he really does he mentioned that in the old days, before the plants were mostly automated, the plants had to be very well lit – lots of light bulbs. This is because the only way to see if something is clean is to have lots of light. And when you are making beverages that millions of people are going to drink – purity is essential. (Before utility costs went up, they didn’t worry about turning the lights off – Todd is figuring out how much they’d save if they turned them off).
We all struggle with the evil inherent in the world. No matter what we label it, or how we symbolize it (serpent or otherwise) we all get bitten. Jesus was lifted up on the cross. Look up at the ultimate expression of God’s love. Let the light of that love purify your life and give you hope for your journey.
On the cross we see our sin at work and our sin absolved. We see human beings at their worst and God’s love at its absolute best. We see evil, and its eternal cure.
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