If you’ve ever wondered about why the Christmas tree at the church has a snake ornament, it comes from the Old Testament reading for today, where Moses lifted up a snake on a pole in the wilderness to heal the people of Israel when they were bitten by poisonous snakes. This is not my favorite Old Testament story, and not just because I’m not a big fan of snakes. It’s just a weird and unpleasant story. Since when does God send snakes, or anything like that, to bite people! This is the God who is “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Poisonous snakes do not seem like abounding in steadfast love to me. And the Israelites complained about being stranded in the wilderness and not liking the food all the time, what was it about this time that made God say, alright, I’ve had enough, send in the snakes.
Then the people prayed for forgiveness and God is all, OK Moses, build a poisonous serpent out of bronze and place it on a pole. And then, when people get bitten by a snake, they can look at the snake on a pole and live. Which is a little bit better, but it still means people are being bitten by snakes. Wouldn’t it have been easier for God, who sent the snakes in the first place, to just take the snakes back again? Why do the snakes have to stay?
I’m not really sure what to make of this story, which seems to portray God as temperamental and vengeful enough to unleash a bunch of poisonous snakes on people simply for being tired of being lost in the desert. And I don’t know how to make sense of why God didn’t, or couldn’t, take the snakes back once they’d been unleashed. But I do think the story is maybe more helpful for the persistence of the snakes. Because the bronze serpent on the pole in the midst of the snakes reminds us that healing does not always mean the removal of suffering. Sometimes healing is the reminder of God’s continued presence with us even in the midst of suffering.
The snake story, like stories often are, is overly simple. People complained, God sent snakes. In the real world, events that produce suffering often develop from such a complexity of events and mistakes that there is no single cause. Spending so much of my time with the members of the Woman’s Co-op, I have become all too familiar with the complicated web of traps and pitfalls that led to the problem. I remember the story of a woman who had been offered a promotion at work, but had to turn it down because the small increase in salary would raise her family out of the income limit for subsidized childcare, yet was not enough extra money to allow her to pay the full childcare costs on her own. Or the woman who left her six year old to babysit her two year old through her third shift job, because it was the only way she could earn enough to care for them. Or women who drive on suspended licenses to get to work, because they can’t afford the fines on top of fines on top of fines, the chain that started with something as simple as a burnt out taillight that there was no money to fix. There are GED testing requirements for jobs, when testing is only offered in Albion. Or felony convictions from juvenile offenses that limit employment options for the rest of one’s life. Or lack of credit that prevents access to safe and affordable housing, leading to the only housing available being slumlords like Triangle or absentee landlords. In the story it seems easy, just take away the snakes. But in the real world, the snakes we face are complex and complicated, a tangled web of events and experiences, mistakes, and barriers that cannot be simply cleared through or easily undone.
And the good news that this story from the Old Testament promises us is that God provides healing even in the midst of the snakes. When we look around at our snake infested world, this story promises us that just because the snakes are still here, doesn’t mean that God is not. Just as the Israelites could look to the serpent on the pole and live, so too can we look to God and find healing. Because yes, the snakes are still here, and the snakes are real and poisonous, but God is more powerful than any snake.
This is the point Jesus was making in our Gospel reading for this morning. There’s a great pun happening here that the English translation misses. In verse fourteen where Jesus said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” That word translated “lifted up” means to physically lift something up, like when Moses raised up a snake on a pole, or like when Jesus will be lifted up to be hung on a cross. But the same word can also be translated as “exalt” or “honor.” When Jesus was physically lifted to death on a cross, he was also spiritually lifted in honor and glory. In the cross we are shown the depth of God’s glory, on the cross Jesus shone with the radiance of God’s love. And just as so long ago the Israelites could look to the serpent, once a source of suffering and death, and find healing, when we look to the cross, a place of death and suffering, we too are healed, we too are made whole.
Verse fifteen goes on, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” The word translated eternal life is a rich one as well. Eternal life means a life not defined by the limits of humanity, but by the infiniteness of God. Eternal life is not the hope of some never-ending physical existence, which really doesn’t sound all that pleasant if you think about it. It is not a future we have to wait for or work towards, eternal life is life lived right now in the unending presence of God.
Reading on, we get to perhaps the most well-known verse of the Bible, John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” John 3:16 is certainly a great passage of scripture, my only beef with it is that it so often gets quoted without the corollary verse seventeen, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” While the role of Jesus is judge, like we talked about last week, the point of that judgment is not condemnation, but salvation. Jesus didn’t come into our metaphorically snake-infested world to point out how bad everything already was, he came to save us from said snakes, to be light in the midst of the darkness, to draw us from death into life. And here’s a couple of fun facts from verses sixteen and seventeen that make these lines even more powerful. First off, verse sixteen is the only place in John’s Gospel that talks about Jesus being given to the world. Every other time, Jesus is described has having been “sent,” what is “given” is God as the source of what Jesus offers. But here, we see God giving us Jesus, a powerful reminder that the incarnation is God’s token of love to the world.
And that word “world” is also a powerful one. The Greek is kosmos, where we get the English “cosmos,” meaning the universe. But in John’s Gospel, kosmos most often means not the whole universe, but the human part of the universe, the part that is in conflict with the kingdom of God. Verses sixteen and seventeen state very clearly that through Jesus, God is not just reconciling the whole of creation, but very specifically the parts of creation that are in conflict. Jesus came not just to be lifted up to the whole wilderness, but specifically in the midst of the snake-infested parts, the parts that most needed a place to look to and be saved.
If you will now permit me my normal obscure theological term of the sermon, this is all a part of what theologians call the “realized eschatology” of the Gospel of John. Eschatology is the theological term for the end times. We often think of it as the great messianic moment, the long awaited future when Jesus comes to judge the living and the dead. But realized eschatology is the idea that the end times are now. Rather than some long-awaited future hope, realized eschatology holds that when God gave Jesus to the world in order that the world might be saved, what Jesus was doing was no less than saving the world. Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so that in the midst of a world still filled with snakes, the people of Israel could look up and be saved, so too was Jesus lifted up on the cross, so that in the midst of our broken world, we would not have to wait for some long-hoped for promise that never seems to be fulfilled, but we can look to the cross and know that salvation is already at hand. Yes there is still pain, yes there are still plenty of snakes, but the Word made Flesh raised to glory on the cross reminds us that the God whom “In the beginning,” billions upon billions of years ago, spoke the cosmos into being, this beautiful and ordered creation, so perfectly formed that we can study it, marvel in it, that same God is still at work, bringing healing to our broken kosmos. Dear friends in Christ, just as God led the people of Israel from slavery into freedom, so too is God leading not just us, but the whole of creation. It is a long, slow journey, for the world is much bigger than even the whole of the Judean wilderness. But just as the people of Israel once looked to the serpent on the pole, so too can we look to the cross and remember that even as we are in the midst of our journey, we do not wait for glory, for our salvation is already here. Amen.
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