And yet these venomous snakes are the healing; it did have to be snakes. Think superstition, magic – or Israelite religion, with such a homeopathic antidote. An object is controlled by its own image or effigy. To gaze on an uplifted snake, they believed, could cure ill effects of the snakes on the ground. Lest you think this is a one-off, a bronze snake stood in the temple until Hezekiah finally smashed it (2 Kings 18:4). Israel shared this with their neighbors: Egyptian religious featured serpentine amulets, cobras denoted royalty. A bronze bowl engraved with a winged snake was discovered in Nineveh – booty the Assyrians swiped from Israel’s King Ahaz!
And then archaeologists found copper mines near where Israel was meandering in Numbers 21 – and a 5 inch long copper snake affixed to a staff, dating to the time of Moses! (Think modern times also: Asclepius was symbolized by a snake and still is on that little medical symbol we pay no attention to.) You
don’t have to tie this to John 3 (although John himself did!) – but it’s
preachable. What is lethal is the way to life; the curse is the way to cure.
Certainly the cross works this way: it’s a sign of horror, the killing of
the Son, and yet it is itself the cure. Similarly, it is only in our dying that
we come to life; it is the killing of our sin on the cross that frees us.
So,
before visiting Ephesians 2, which can also be woven into all this, let’s stick
with John 3:14-21. Nicodemus has made
his famous nocturnal visit to Jesus. His puzzlement over being “born again” is
itself fascinating, and can’t be lopped off from our precise reading for today.
Jesus speaks of a whole new life – and it’s not an emotional experience, this
being born again (evangelical fantasies, and churchgoer confusion and guilt
notwithstanding). It’s God’s work – and our verses explain how God pulled off
regenerating us.
I admire Jean Vanier’s phrasing (despite John Vanier turning out to be so problematical…), unwittingly linking John to Numbers: “This journey, our pilgrimage of love, begins and deepens as we hear God murmur within our hearts: ‘I love you just as you are. I so love you that I come to heal you and to give you life. Do not be afraid. Open your hearts. It is all right to be yourself. You do not have to be perfect or clever. You are loved just as you are. As you become more conscious that you are loved, you will want to respond to that love with love, and grow in love.’”
We
see John 3:16 on billboards, t-shirts, etc.; some terrific music, my favorite
being “God So Loved the World” by John Stainer (or this
one by Bob Chilcott!)
drives the verse home.
The omnipresence is striking, and would have shocked most Christians through the centuries. John 3:16 was never the verse until the modern American revival movement – so chalk it up to Billy Graham I suppose. The verse isn’t a problem, although it diminishes the breadth of the Bible’s vision for us and creation. Or does it? If we read it slowly, we see it’s better than we dreamed. It doesn’t say “For God so loved you, you religious person, that he gave his son – that is, had him crucified in your place – so that whoever believes in him, that is, whoever confesses his sin and agrees Jesus saves him, will not perish but go to heaven.” Instead it says God so loved – the world, the kosmos, the whole thing! He gave his son – but he gave him when the Word became flesh, at Christmas, and in his healing and teaching, and in his crucifixion and resurrection, which for John is way more about the glorification of God than me getting off for my sins. Belief, for John, is way more than mental assent or repentance and feeling forgiven. It’s following, it’s union with the living Christ, it’s being part of the Body.
I’d say whether you preach on John or Ephesians, these two texts illuminate one another in lovely ways. Ephesians 2:1-10: the pivotal verse is 5, not 8 (which is cited so often). Paul (let’s give it to Paul and not confuse church people about authorship) begins by pronouncing us dead – as sensible, as we’re reading his words and hence very much alive, as Jesus’ counsel to Nicodemus to be born again. The word translated “dead” is nekros; I’ve gotten to walk around a few necropolises from Bible times. Eerie – including the catacombs where Christians worshipped.
Sermons have to explain how we’re dead while we have a pulse; Walker Percy might help. His parents died while he was very young, and he barely survived tuberculosis. Deeply influenced by Kierkegaard (who had written wisely of our “sickness unto death”), Percy creates characters like Dr. Tom More (in The Moviegoer), who lives in Paradise Estates, but really it’s a living Hell. People “have it all” but they are hollow and miserable. Even the meek priest confesses, “I am surrounded by the corpses of souls. We live in a city of the dead.”
His
later novels, especially Thanatos
Syndrome and Love in the
Ruins, play on these same themes. I’m struck again by the moment when More
refused to take Samantha to Lourdes – because he was afraid she would be
healed! Our worst fear is not that God is dead but that God is alive, and it
won’t do just to drink and soak up pleasure. Again, in Numbers and John, it
only in the confrontation with death, it is only by dying, that life unfolds,
especially this miraculous life in Christ.
Some
preachers might resort to the Walking Dead as an image, but that’s just too
creepy even for me... although R.C. Sproul, in his tiny book What Does it Mean to Be Born Again?,
does say that before being reborn, "We were spiritual zombies - the walking
dead. We were biologically alive but spiritually dead."
Clearly,
Ephesians 2 exposes how our plight is our whole person, not this or that
misdeed. It’s my mind, my flesh, my thoughts, actions and cravings. And yet God
is merciful. No, God is rich in mercy (the Greek is polyeleos, very merciful,
manifoldly merciful!). Paul’s hyperbolic language should be noted by the
preacher – as if words fail Paul (and hence the preacher). It’s not just grace,
of the wealth or grace, but the surpassing wealth of grace!
And
then a close reading of v. 8 is instructive. Notice the Greek word order. Grace
comes early – to emphasize its centrality. “Gift of God” is really “God’s
gift,” God coming first, unusually in the Greek, to fix our attention on whose
grace this is. Notice there is an article (the, that) before grace. So it’s not
“For by grace you are saved” but “For by that grace you are saved” – that is,
the grace celebrated in verses 5 and 7. Faith is not a work, it is not a
clever, even spiritual decision. Faith is God’s work; faith is all gift. “End
of faith as its beginning,” Charles Wesley shrewdly wrote. Faith, St. Augustine
helped us to see, isn’t the human contribution to salvation. Otherwise you get
spiritual cockiness, no matter how grinningly spiritual. Markus Barth wrote,
“The bragger is man in revolt against God, and a tyrant over his fellow man.
But he who boasts of God and accepts his own weakness gives God the glory he is
due.”
Of
course, it’s salutary that the lectionary didn’t clip things off after v. 8.
Verses 9-10 debunk any overly simplistic notion of “We’re saved by grace not
works” – as Paul then, as if to keep us off balance (or twisting in the wind!)
explains that we are “created for good works.” Maybe it’s all in how we
construe who we are, whose we are, what defines us, and what our doing emanates
from.
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