4th Sunday in Lent, March 22, 2009 “Series B”
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, as we move through this season of Lent, and closer to our celebration of your Son’s passion, help us to gain a deeper appreciation of his sacrifice for our redemption. Through the power of your Holy Spirit, open our hearts to your Word, that we might come to true repentance, and embrace with deepened faith the gift of life that you make available to us through the cross which Christ bore for us. This we ask in his holy name. Amen.
Our Gospel lesson for the morning is the conclusion of a conversation Jesus had one night with a leader of the Jews named Nicodemus. Jesus tells Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Clearly, this is a reference to the story recorded in our first lesson from the book of Numbers.
Thus, let us begin by exploring this strange story, to which Jesus refers. Here, we find the people whom God had delivered from bondage in Egypt, in the midst of their journey to the new home that God had promised to give them. But as happened several times along this arduous journey, the people become impatient with the hardships of their travels, and begin to grumble and complain to God and Moses about their situation.
In this case, the people are complaining about their daily diet of Manna. According to some of the commentaries that I read, Manna is produced when insects bore into a certain flowering lichen plant, or fungus, which then secretes this sweet substance that falls to the ground and then solidifies. When it is dry, the wind can pick it up and carry it from one area to another. This substance would then be mixed with meal to make sweet cakes, a practice still prevalent in areas of Egypt and Syria.
For some reason, the thought of eating the sap from fungus does not whet my appetite. Of course, those of you who know me, and my very broad diet, might understand why I wouldn’t find Manna to be something that I would enjoy. But even if I could bring myself to try it, and for some odd reason, even liked it, I doubt that I would want to eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, day in and day out. Most of us, even if you have a limited diet like me, enjoy variety in our meals.
So the people complained to Moses and to God about that miserable food they had to eat to stay alive. And herein lies the first problem that I have with this strange story. God was not at all sympathetic to the people’s complaint. Instead, in what seems to be an overreaction to the situation, God sends poisonous snakes among the people, which bit them so that many of the people died.
Snakes! Now there is a creature that can totally unnerve some of the calmest people I know. Several years ago, three friends and I put a
couple of canoes in the Allegheny River at Franklin, to spend the day fishing, until we got to my friend Harry’s camp at Fisherman’s Cove. About noon, I suggested to Harry that we pull ashore at this rather level spot, and have a little lunch.
“Not here!”, Harry screamed at me, at the top of his lungs. I looked at him, as beads of sweat began to form on his brow. A little further down stream we pulled ashore, and Harry shared with us that he had pulled up at the place I wanted to stop, and when he went ashore, he found himself standing in the midst of more snakes than he had ever seen in his entire life. “I could have walked on water to get out of there,” he said, in a tone that led you to believe he could have done just that.
Well, the snakes certainly did the trick. According to the story, the people acknowledged their sins against God and Moses, repented, and asked Moses to pray to God, that he might take the snakes away from their midst. So Moses prayed for the people. But God didn’t take the snakes away! He didn’t remove the threat of death, which was the consequence of their sins.
Now we come to the most troubling aspect of this strange story for me. God instructed Moses to make a replica of the snake, and place it on a tall pole, which would be visible to the people. And whenever a person was bitten, they could look at that snake of bronze, and live.
Just last Sunday, our first lesson from Exodus placed before us the Ten Commandments, in which we were told that we should have no other gods before the One, true God, who led Israel out of bondage, and that we should not make or have any graven images. To make sense of God’s instruction to Moses, in the wake of the first two commandments, alludes me.
After all, it led the people to believe that there was some mystical power in this graven image that Moses had created, rather than in the power of God to save them from the consequences of their sins. As is recorded in the 18th chapter of 2nd Kings, when Hezekiah became king of Israel, we are told that he did what was right in the sight of the Lord. And he smashed into pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, because the people were beginning to worship it and make offerings to it as an idol. This is indeed a strange and troubling story!
So what is it that Jesus would have Nicodemus, along with us, understand when he said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life?”
First of all, I believe that we, as Christians, living with the knowledge of Jesus death and resurrection, have come to understand this statement to refer to Jesus being crucified – lifted on a cross to which he died for our sins. But we also need to make a clear distinction between the bronze serpent that Moses molded and placed on a pole, and the flesh and blood that Jesus shed for our redemption.
When Jesus was lifted up on the cross, he was not an inanimate object. He was a live human being, who felt the pain of the nails that attached him to that pole on which he was lifted. And on that pole, on that cross, his life’s blood flowed from his wounds, and the breath of life ceased to fill his lungs. When Jesus was lifted up, he died!
Jesus gave his life for you and for me, and for all who might look upon him, lifted on that rough-hewn pole, in order that we might be delivered from the consequence of death for our sin. As a result, the cross of Christ deserves more than a casual glance, a few moments of our time on Sunday mornings, which we set aside for worship of him, among the other activities that fill our week.
For just as God did not remove the snakes from among the people in that strange old story from Numbers, which required the people to keep a constant vigil of repentance, of turning from their sin toward God’s saving grace uplifted before them, we, too, must maintain that vigil. As persons who have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, we are, as Luther stated, “to daily die to sin and rise to newness of life.”
Secondly, let me state that it is not the cross itself that should be the center of our focus, but the death of Christ for our redemption. To be sure, the cross has become the central symbol of the Christian faith, as it was the means by which Jesus gave his life to atone for our sins. But let us not lose sight of the fact that it was the death of Jesus the Christ that atoned for our sins, of which the cross only symbolizes.
The cross, which has been sculpted out of many unique materials and in many unique shapes, can become an idol for us, just as the bronze serpent that Moses made became an idol for the people of Israel, during the reign of Hezekiah. Wearing a cross around our neck, or hanging a cross from the mirror of our cars, or having a cross that, when held up to the light reveals the “Lord’s Prayer,” is not going to save us from sin and death. The cross is but a symbol of the grace of God, whose Son gave his life to redeem us from sin and death.
Here is where Nicodemus kept missing the target in his conversation with Jesus, that first night he came to him. Nicodemus kept missing the point, thinking only in earthly terms – what he could see from a human perspective. But Jesus was trying to get him, according to John’s Gospel, to think in terms of the realm of God, of Spiritual things. And we, like old Nicodemus, can not comprehend these things, except for the power of God’s Spirit at work in our lives and through the work of Christ’s Church.
It is my prayer this 4th Sunday in Lent, that God’s Spirit might move all of us to come to understand the tremendous gift of God’s grace, poured out for us in Christ’s death, to redeem us from our sin. And that when we look at the cross over our altar, or finger the cross around our neck, that God’s Spirit focuses our attention, not on the object, but to what that cross represents – God’s gift of redeeming grace in Christ’s death for our redemption.
Amen.
