10 March 2024 Lent 4
Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3: 14-21
Our reading this morning from Numbers is such a problematic passage that comment cannot be avoided. The people sin, God gets angry and sends poisonous snakes which cause several fatalities. The people ask Moses to intervene on their behalf, God relents but instead of removing the snakes he has Moses fashion a bronze snake so that when they are bitten they only have to look at the bronze snake and they will be healed. I am not sure this would leave me feeling protected or ‘safe’. And it presents questions about what sort of psychological aberration would motivate God to say – yes I will continue to hurt you, but I will also provide an antidote. This almost looks like divine torment or terrorism. And despite the temptation to dismiss this story as some sort of ‘fictional’ lesson aimed at keeping the community in line, it is part of our accepted Cannon of Scripture and therefore we need to work out what our response is to this arbitrary and vindictive image of God.
God asks the Israelites to look up; to gaze without flinching at the hideous thing their sin has conjured. It is the thing they fear most, the thing that will surely kill them if God in God’s mercy does not intervene and transform this instrument of pain and death into an instrument of healing and life. In order to be saved, the people have to confront the serpent – and look hard at what harms, poisons, breaks, and kills them. And sometimes, like in this story, we struggle to understand that the kind of love that will save us might also ‘hurt’ us first. The Israelites have to understand that their failure to trust in God has consequences, and it matters. What they need is not ‘intellectual’ belief, but full-bodied, heart-and-soul confidence in God’s goodness, presence, provision, and love. The bronze snake forces them to ‘stare down the poison’ until they see in the grief, anger, judgement and unending mercy, a God whose love is vast but tough, deep but demanding.
And then the bronze snake makes a reappearance in our gospel passage. Jesus has been talking with Nicodemus who had come ‘in the night’ to ask questions. But the answers he has been receiving have left him confused. Jesus has asked him to be ‘born from above’, and Nicodemus takes it literally. And then Jesus mentions this bronze serpent, followed by probably the most well-known verse of Scripture ever, ‘for God so loved the world…..’. And then Jesus goes on to assure Nicodemus that the Son (him) did not come to condemn but to save, but the phraseology he uses has sometimes been used by people to ‘bully’ others into believing or has been used as a ‘litmus test’ for faith. In that those who believe are not condemned but those who don’t believe are already condemned. And the problem is the way we understand that word ‘believe’. Because this word comes from ‘belieben’ the German word for love, so this would mean that those who ‘love’ are not condemned but those who have not ‘loved’ are already condemned. They are condemned because of their lack of love, by their actions they have condemned themselves and, as Jesus says, it is not God, or God’s Son who condemns them, but they themselves. And when the writers of our Scriptures, both our Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, used the word we now translate as believe, they were not speaking about an intellectual surrender to a factual truth, they were writing about fidelity, confidence, trust. For them, to believe in God was to put their entire confidence in God, to throw their whole minds, hearts, and bodies into God’s hands.
In my everyday life, when I ask someone to ‘believe in me’, I am not asking them to affirm an intellectual reality about me, I am asking them to ‘dare to hang in; dare to accept that I will not let you go; trust me with your heart; trust me with your love and faith and vulnerability. Allow yourself to treasure me as I have come to treasure you’. So why would my relationship with God be any different. When I speak about believing in Jesus, I am speaking about how I trust him with my life. Jesus invites Nicodemus to ‘start again’, be ‘born again’, Jesus asks him to let go of all that he thought he knew and understood about the life of faith, and risk becoming a newborn - vulnerable, hungry and ready to receive the reality in a brand new way. Jesus is inviting him to leave the darkness and walk into the light. He is calling Nicodemus to fall in love, and stay in love. So, why is belief in God important? Because love is important. And to believe is to be-love.
God’s love for us is rich, demanding, costly and free, and it can never be reduced to just a ‘formula’ or a ‘catchy statement’. In the same way that Moses lifted the bronze serpent in the desert so that those bitten by snakes could look at it and be healed, today we just have to look to the love of God. Nothing else; just look to God’s love and all will be healed. And John states, ‘in this is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us.’ The only thing that is asked of me today, and every day, is to rely upon and know the love that God has for me. The bronze snake was not magical, it was not meant to be idolized, and neither is the cross that we contemplate in Lent. It reminds us that to believe in the power of the cross is to rely on Jesus for our very lives. It is to trust that the lifting up of the Son of Man is our only hope, our only ‘anti-venom’, our only means of rescue. The cross of Christ is a great mystery, and among other things it is a stunning paradox of sorrow and hope; of judgement and mercy; of despair and healing; and of brokenness and hope. It is ok if we, like Nicodemus, don’t really understand. The invitation is to see, to look up. Look up and be saved.