4 Lent
March 22, 2009
This was one of those weeks where I wasn’t sure I was going to have a sermon. That’s only happened a few times and it just so happens that they’ve all been during the season Lent. I’m beginning to understand that I’m not very good at Lent. I’m not comfortable dwelling in this pre-Easter season. I’m not all that wild about being penitential, frankly, or talking about sin, or seeing myself as “a worm and no man,” “wicked from my birth” and all that.
And maybe that’s why I’ve spent the last week trying to get around today’s readings. I feel so sorry for the Israelites in our Old Testament story this morning. They are people that are continually screwing up, continually grumbling and moaning against God, repeatedly relying on themselves and forgetting about God. “We’re hungry!” they complain on their travels from slavery to the Promised Land. And so God sends them manna. And now we see them complaining about how boring and miserable this manna is. So even though I find these folks disturbingly easy to relate to, I also see how it must be very frustrating for God to deal with these stubborn and unthankful people. But why all the smiting? Is complaining about the manna really worthy of this plague of poisonous, lethal snakes?
But smiting aside, the desired result is achieved. The people realize the error of their ways and confess and ask Moses to intercede for them. So Moses prays for the people. And then God comes up with this very strange remedy: “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”
I remember reading this passage in college and being really surprised that the same God who last week gave the commandment “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” would suggest this bronze snake for a snake-bite cure. Especially given that these are the same Israelites who made themselves a gold calf to worship not so long before.
But that’s how the story goes. It’s an odd little story, but whatever, there are plenty of odd little stories in the Old Testament.
And I would just write it off as a total red-herring except that Jesus refers to this odd little story in our Gospel for today and compares himself to that bronze snake: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” What is that about?
I can think of a few possibilities that don’t offend my sensibilities. Here’s one: Just like those Israelites had to look up and face the image of that serpent, so also we have to face our fears. Whether they are pain or death or powerlessness or isolation or abandonment, we have to face them and learn how to live. That’s decent psychology, right? Or how about this? The agent of healing for the Israelites is a polished, bronzed image of what made them sick, just as Jesus is the perfect and polished form of our sinful imperfect humanity. Not bad.
I think those fairly faithful to the metaphor. But I’m afraid that the real reason the Gospel of John uses this metaphor of the serpent on the pole is to give a veiled reference to Jesus’ crucifixion. Just as the serpent was lifted on a pole, so will Jesus be lifted up on his own pole – the cross.
And that is where I start getting uncomfortable.
The poisonous serpent is a cursed thing – an instrument of death, but God turns it into an instrument of healing and mercy for the people. And Jesus says his crucifixion serves the same purpose.
I’m a big fan of God’s incarnation in Jesus and all that that says about God’s love for us and desire to be in relationship with us. And I’m a big fan of Jesus’ resurrection which shows the power of life over death, the triumph of God over everything that is not God, the more happily-ever-after, kingdom-of-God-on-earth promise.
But I have to admit that I am not a big fan of thinking in too much detail about Jesus’ crucifixion. I have no problem with the symbol of the empty cross, because that’s really about the resurrection -- the assurance that Jesus is risen, God has triumphed over the ugliness of that death. I prefer the naked cross tamely situated between two shimmering candles over a beautiful altar in a safe church, or dangling prettily as a pendant around a faithful neck. Not so sure about the reality of the cross, situated between two thieves in Golgotha, the place of the skull, where the outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city.
When Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ movie came out a few years back, I barely made it through the movie. Partly because I’m not a fan of his theology, but also, I have to admit, partly because I have trouble looking at Good Friday, the day of Jesus’ death. I don’t want to be faced with the details of the hideous torture and pain the Jesus had to endure. I don’t want to think about the human evil that made that happen, or the human evil that exists still and resides right here. I don’t want to be confronted with God’s seeming abandonment of Jesus: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I don’t want to pause to contemplate that bleak and ugly moment when death seemed to triumph over life; evil over goodness. Christ on the cross seems the entirely wrong place to go for help.
And yet, for John’s Gospel, it is precisely in this loathsome place that the glory of God appears in full force in our world. When Jesus says he will be “lifted up” in our reading this morning, the Greek word used means that Jesus would be both lifted up physically and exalted. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ exaltation doesn’t start with the resurrection; the moment of crucifixion is the moment of exaltation. When Jesus is lifted up on the cross, the fullness of God’s liberating love is suddenly and starkly visible.
David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, who wrote The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami?, described it this way: “The sacrifice of Christ on the cross is not as an act of divine impotence but of divine power. On the cross, God subverts death, and makes a way through it to a new life. The cross is thus a triumph of divine, limitless and immutable love sweeping us up into itself, taking all suffering and death upon itself without being defined by it, and so destroying its power and making us, by participation in Christ, ‘more than conquerors.’”
In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ crucifixion, ugly as it is, is God’s way of healing, redeeming, and saving God’s people. Just like its prototype – that bronze serpent lifted up by Moses.
And that would be quite enough for me to swallow, thank you very much, but I’m afraid there’s more to the story. We read in 2 Kings that good King Hezekiah ended up having to smash this very same bronze serpent into smithereens because the Israelites started worshipping it. What began as an instrument of healing turned into an idol.
Neither Jesus nor the writer of John’s Gospel made any mention of this eventual outcome for the bronze serpent, but there’s absolutely no way that they wouldn’t have known about this addendum to the story. And so I don’t see how we can hear Jesus’ claim that he would be lifted up just like the serpent in the wilderness without also acknowledging the rest of the story – that the people of Israel eventually misused that serpent. And it feels like there’s some kind of implicit warning there for us.
Given my personal discomfort with the crucifixion, my impulse would be to argue that we’ve made an idol of the crucifixion by focusing too much on the bloody, hateful details of Good Friday. By spending too much time in god-forsaken Golgotha rather than remembering that we are an Easter people, forgiven and free. But while I think there are some for whom that would be a fair warning, Mel Gibson among them, that tends not to be the problem for the bulk of Episcopalians, and as you already know, it is certainly not the problem for me.
And so the warning I see, the one that confronts me, anyway, is two-fold.
First, there’s a real danger in toning down the ugliness of the crucifixion, in making the cross too palatable. As theologian Jurgen Moltmann accuses, “We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses.” He contends that it is “the suffering of God in Christ, rejected and killed in the absence of God, which qualifies Christian faith as faith, and as something different from the projection of man’s desire.” And he charges that “Christians who do not have the feeling that they must flee the crucified Christ have probably not yet understood him in a sufficiently radical way.”
The second danger is in toning down the radical call of the cross to us as Christians. We often think of Jesus as a passive sufferer, “turning the other cheek” and all that. But Jesus didn’t suffer passively from nature and fate – “He incited it against himself by his message and his life. By proclaiming the righteousness of God as the right of those who were rejected to receive grace, he provoked the hostility of the guardians of the law. By becoming a friend of sinners and tax-collectors, he made their enemies his enemies. By claiming that God was on the side of the godless, he incited the devout against him. He set out for Jerusalem and actively took the expected suffering upon himself.” And our call is to engage in our own struggle of life against death – our own incitement of the status quo – in our own place and time.
Maybe that is why Lent makes me so uncomfortable. It threatens my comfortable conceptions about God by thrusting the hideous crucifixion into my face. And it brings me face-to-face with my complicity with the injustices in the world, whether by doing or not-doing.
And that’s when it happens. When my bronze idol religion gets all smashed to smithereens – when all of my shiny, polished notions are knocked out from under me – there is God.
Amen.
Elizabeth Rees