“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him” [John 3:14-15].
In spite of the best efforts of several Sunday school teachers at Olney Presbyterian Church in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I neither profited from nor enjoyed our “Bible Verse” races. For those of you who are uninitiated to such thrills, these were generally time “fillers.” The teacher would glance at her watch, realize that while she had finished the lesson for the day, five minutes remained before the buzzer would sound to tell us kids that it was time to assemble with our parents upstairs in the sanctuary for worship. She’d say something like, “Let’s have a Bible verse race. Who’s first?”
Among the dozen or so in the class, there’d be a mad dash to raise one’s hand, be identified, and cry out, “Jesus wept, John 11, verse 35.”
Some of us would lower our arms at that point—the shortest verse in the Bible having been taken. There was the time the teacher picked on our brother, Jeff—two years our junior—saying to him, “Come now, Jeff, you never raise your hand.”
Jeff—even then a marvelous contrarian—whom I think also saw little value in isolated memorizations, nevertheless quickly retorted, “When evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, John 6, verse 16.” Not believing him, the teacher had quickly looked it up. To her chagrin, of course, Jeff was correct.
Invariably during the Sunday school exercise, someone would identify what is certainly the most memorized verse in the New Testament: “John 3:16.” In all my early years of Bible Verse races, in my many subsequent years of envious listening to colleagues who, unlike me, can recite broad swaths of Holy Scripture by heart, I’ve never heard the recitation of the two verses that precede John 3:16. I’ve never seen a football end zone placard saying, “John 3:14-15.”
“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him” [John 3:14-15, a portion of the New Testament lesson for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, RCL, Year B].
Whoa! What’s this about snakes being lifted up? Is that what they do in small churches in the North Carolina mountains? Spoiler alert: snake handling and the third chapter of John have nothing to do with each other. What in the world is Jesus talking about here? Well, as is usually the case with our Lord, there’s a lot more going on in his statement than that which meets the ear. Jesus really knew his Hebrew Bible.
In the verses that lead up to John 3:16, Jesus draws upon a troubling image found in the Old Testament reading for this upcoming Sunday [Numbers 21:4-9, Fourth Sunday in Lent, RCL, Year B]. Known as one of several “murmuring stories,” the reading from Numbers describes the attitude of the Israelites as they find themselves near the end of the 40-year wandering period within the wilderness. Most of the older, original generation have died and the remaining people have little recollection, if any, of the Egyptian pain that the people had endured.
The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food” [Numbers 21:5].
No one comes off looking good in this story, even YHWH. For example, as is the case in most of the other “murmurings passages,” the children of Israel exhibit an irrational idealization of their time in Egypt. Moreover, their dissatisfaction with their food belies their true thoughts. Not only do they contend that the food is unpalatable; the bread they are rejecting is baked from the manna provided for them by YHWH. It has literally saved their lives, providing nourishment (and grace) for decades, but now it’s unappreciated. They are essentially saying, “We don’t like your bread, and YHWH, we’re not too sure we like you either.”
YHWH retaliates, sending poisonous snakes to bite and kill “many” of them [Numbers 21:6]. It is as if YHWH is saying, “You folks want Egypt, how about a plague like the ones I conjured up for the Egyptians? I could add some poisonous frogs.”
The Israelites see the error of their ways and ask Moses to call off YHWH. Moses prays, and YHWH responds favorably, but in an unusual fashion. YHWH tells Moses to craft “a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live” [Numbers 21:8].
Our OT story ends with Moses making a serpent of bronze. He puts it upon a pole and lifts it up; so that “whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live” [Numbers 21:9]. And so, the Israelites were required to participate in a form of paradoxical “double vision.” On the one hand, they were required to look upon the very thing that had brought them death—the poisonous serpent. On the other hand, their salvation rested upon, and was manifested in, that same image. YHWH was telling the people that the serpent was both a sign of his righteous anger, and yet also, a sign of his marvelous mercy.
Double vision—particularly during Lent, as we gaze upon our Master, particularly our Master who is “lifted up” on a cross, we’re similarly called upon to utilize a sort of double vision. We know from the Gospel that Jesus is Light; he is Life; he is Truth. We know also that YHWH did not send his Son into the world to condemn it [John 3:17]. And yet, the Anointed One’s presence among us nevertheless offers us more than a hint of judgment, for as John teaches us, the “people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil” [John 3:19]. The advent of Jesus Christ into the world can, therefore, lead us out of darkness and into the light, or it can confirm the place that we have among the dead.
I know that Jesus was a man who chose his words carefully. In this week’s lesson, he says that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so shall the Son of Man be “lifted up,” that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him. The Greek word for “lifted up” has an interesting, “double vision” sort of meaning. On the one hand, it points to the suffering that the Son of Man would have to endure on the cross. Nails driven into his limbs, a lance to be thrust into his side, a slow, suffocating death—these are visions of ugliness and horror. This is what happens when a human body is nailed to a cross and “lifted up.” The season of Lent requires that we look at all this pain and suffering.
And yet, the alternative meaning for that same Greek word is “exalted.” YHWH takes an ugly act on the part of humanity—the crucifixion of the blameless Jesus Christ—and utilizes that same activity to reverberate the world with love and forgiveness. The cross—it reminds us of our sin and yet it symbolizes our salvation.
During Lent, we are indeed called upon to utilize a strange brand of double vision. We must recognize that at the end of Jesus’ journey, there is a cross, and we must concentrate our gaze upon it. It is ugly and it reminds us of all the many ways in which we fall short, both individually and collectively. Jesus is “lifted up” on that cross by all the elements of darkness that surround us. He hangs there to die, to be gazed upon by a humanity that faces the horrors of sin.
And yet, instead of being merely a place of death, a hill of despair, the sight of the cross becomes for us also a sight of YHWH’s great mercy, a locus of love and concern for all of us within our fallen state. The cross is not a beautiful sight. And yet, through it, our Lord is exalted by YHWH. In the cross, which cost YHWH the life of his only Son, we see just how far YHWH is willing to reach in order to grasp our helpless, outstretched hands. Thanks be to God!
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