Does the Gospel include God’s past deeds being exposed to the light as well our own?
Gospel Reading: John 3:14-21
For Sunday, March 18, 2012—Lent 4
The state of humanity is snake bit. The poison of the serpent has entered our collective blood stream, a metallic taste in our mouth, our whole body going numb, it attacks our nervous system, and it is getting hard to breath.
Address the Elephant?
The deep evangelical groves in my brain keep pulling me to address the elephant in this verse—John 3:16—but my need to debunk the narrow interpretations of ye must be born again, are more easily resisted, perhaps as a result of years since those battles were heated for me.
Now I don’t need to engage—I think we should all be born again, what ever you mean by it, rock on—I am more interested in the snake on a stick.
Light/Dark Magic
While I literally have eaten snake on a stick at both the Minnesota State Fair and the Beijing Night Market, this is something else entirely. There is some kind of dark/light magic going on in this verse. Nicodemus comes at night looking for something, but Jesus doesn’t give him a chance to say what it is.
Jesus either senses what he wants or knows what he needs. He tells Nicodemus, no one sees the kingdom of God with out being born from above. Nic takes the bait and goes into his, how can anyone be born after growing old line. Jesus fleshes out the metaphor, throws in the Spirit, water, wind. Nic’s head is reeling. “How can these things be,” he asks? Jesus says, “You are a teacher of the law, you know your Bible, and you should be able to understand.” Then Jesus provides this learned man a deep track from the scriptures.
Just As?
Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him hay have eternal life.
Is Jesus messing with him? He didn’t get the born again metaphor, so Jesus moves on to this allusion to a crazy story in Numbers (see my post on the OT reading for the back story)? It is true that this lifting up of the serpent on a pole seems to be a clear reference to Jesus being lifted up on the cross, but aside from both Jesus and the serpent being lifted up on wooden things what else do they have to do with each other?
At the end of this book Jesus will be raised up on a cross where he will die and it is through that death and resurrection that all is reconciled, real and eternal life is possible. In Numbers 21 Moses makes a bronze serpent and places it on a stick and raises it high above his head. All of the people, who had been bitten by poisonous, fiery serpents, need only look up at it and they will have life. There is a clear correlation for sure, except for one glaring fact—God is the one who sent the poisonous, fiery serpents to bite and kill the Israelites. God provides Moses with a fix to save the people from the gruesome death God had inflicted on them.
Exposed
So why does the author of John choose this scriptural story to illustrate how one gains eternal life? It is kind of a dark story. God gets so enraged that the people are complaining about the food that he sends poisonous, fiery serpents to kill them all. Only after they repent does God decide to save their lives by looking to an idol of the very thing God was using to kill them.
Nicodemus comes at night.
Jesus concludes, And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light so their deeds may not be exposed. Does this include both Nicodemus and God?
The Hardest Question
Does the Gospel include God’s past deeds being exposed to the light as well? As Jesus is lifted up, like the fiery serpent, does it draw all the venom out of the relationship between the created and the Creator?
Russell Rathbun is a preacher at House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author of Midrash on the Juanitos (Cathedral Hill Press, 2010) and the curator of The Hardest Question.
I feel much less successful than you at ignoring the pull toward the elephant in the chapter. Part of that is my own theological preference to the synoptics, which focus more on Jesus’s theology than christology. This means that I always have a hard time preaching from John. But your question has me fascinated, not in the Old v. New Covenant trap, but in the more basic question of GOD seeking redemption through Jesus. This goes against how we often characterize John and deals in the great theological terrain of doubt, humanity, and against the static depiction of a changeless GOD. I’m going to have to stew on this.
I love both these passages, but only when they’re held together. I am circumspect about God being the sender of the serpents, I often think that human beings are so adept at hurting one another and the world, why on earth would God ever need to add anything that way?
To the contrary, I think God very much wanted the world and all its creatures to enjoy the paradise he/she/it drew from the mouth of the chaos monster. But we humans took all too seriously our being made in the image of the Divine, and we insisted on the hard road, the road where we had the option to ignore God’s wishes and constantly take matters into our own hands.
The Divine plan was paradise…human striving led to the snake bite reality. So what to do but to continue to offer salvation to human beings through the mode most familiar to them: through the consequences of sin itself.
Both passages are rich with irony, but how much more ironic can you get than God offering eternal life to humanity through the once and future death of the Divine Son?
Sometimes the worst thing about being human on a spiritual path is recognizing that my times of deepest growth and awareness arise out of the worst times of my life, especially those worst times brought about my own sin(s).
But no matter how deep and deliberate my sin(s), God’s power to save works even through them. The Israelites experienced that through the serpent on a stick. We experience it through the death of our Beloved on a cross.
Thanks be to God.
I don’t know, Russell. God isn’t the President (at least as Tricky Dick saw the Presidency). If God does it, is it a sin? Are God’s past deed to be interpreted the same as anyone else’s? If so, we might in trouble.
I like this weeks question and video, but an in depth explanation of why Jesus’ analogy might not have been the best probably won’t work with my somewhat conservative, Texas, country congregation. They already not all that pleased with me, as my taste are neither theological nor cristological but scatological. With the mindset of many of the leaders in our world, I cannot avoid the black and white nature of this week pericope. However, the elephant I see isn’t the cliche that we’re all clearly tired of. Rather, I’m going to focus what Jesus would’ve considered good or, more specifically, evil. this is what I find to be the most misinterpreted facts of Scripture- The Son of Man’s world view concerning institutional evil and oppression vs the sin of the individual vis a vis personal relationships and individual conduct.
BTW, Lia, I don’t know if I agree with you but I like the way you think. . .
I’ve been re-reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time series, and as a consequence looked up her biography. I remember that for many years (maybe even still) Christian bookstores refuse to offer her books because she was an avowed universalist. One of the things she said about that was that the purpose of punishment is to teach, so the punishment should only last for as long as it takes for the lesson to be learned; apply this to the concept of eternal damnation, and you come up with universal redemption, but one doesn’t have to go that far to appreciate the truth in the statement.
Can we agree that the behavior of the children of Israel merited punishment? That God was within God’s rights to inflict punishment in this case? If so (and there is a sustainable argument that this punishment is inappropriate to the crime, but that’s another sermon for another day) then the snake on a pole is still an act of grace even if God DID send the snakes.
A bigger problem for me is that in the Numbers story, and the analogous JN3:16, salvation is made available to anyone—ANYONE!—who is willing to look upon it (see it, accept it, live in it, what have you). It this cheap grace? Or doesn’t it at least open the door for people to take a ‘cheap grace’ attitude? Unless, of course, L’Engle was right.