March 10, 2024
Lent 4 Year B
Epiphany, Winnipeg
Numbers 21:4-9;
John 3:14-21
I couldn’t resist. It just fits so perfectly with today’s reading from John. If you hang around in circles like mine in real life and on Facebook you might have seen it floating around and showing up here and there over this past week. It’s fun and goofy and kind of prophetic and it pokes away at all those voices that have turned this good news, that Christ is risen, and that Christ gives life, into some kind of reason to judge and condemn. That’s not the gospel, and it’s not what we’re called to do.
So I shared it on my news feed, and I happily saw that some of my friends shared it too, and I got enough likes and laughs that it kind of made me feel good, and witty, and liked. And I’ll stand by it: If God didn’t send Jesus to condemn the world I doubt that God sent you.
But then I looked at it again a few days ago, and I realized how good it made me feel to poke fun at nameless people – some kind of “you” out there somewhere - and to be honest I also thought of some people whose names I know but would never say this to, but it all started to sound kind of judgy. And I looked at it again and thought that it just didn’t sound right, or it was missing something, and I wondered why I wanted to poke fun at someone or just, well, be judgy, and then this thought occurred to me:
Sometimes the best snark backfires, doesn’t it? Or maybe it just cuts right to the heart of the matter. If God didn’t send Jesus to condemn the world, I doubt God sent me.
I suppose Lent calls us to the discipline of reflecting on our own shortcoming, our own sin, and if it calls us to repent, then it also calls us to the discipline of not pointing fingers. If we practice that for forty days it might just become a habit.
Take a minute to recall that story that we heard from Numbers a few minutes ago. Here’s what’s going on: The people of Israel were complaining again. They had been slaves for generations, hundreds of years, and then they were miraculously and terrifyingly set free from slavery by an angel of death and by the drying up of a path through the sea. Great news! But once they were free they complained about being hungry, so God gave them food. Then they complained about being thirsty, so God made water flow for them from a rock. Then they ran into enemies who kidnapped some of their people, so they went to war against them and wiped out their enemy. With God’s help, of course.
Then they complained about the food again, and they said right out loud that it might be better to be back in Egypt and be slaves again…because it’s always better back wherever you were before, right? Once you’ve forgotten that it wasn’t better? So God finally had enough of the complaining and sent poisonous snakes to the people, and they bit a lot of people and a lot of people died. Finally the people of Israel came to their senses and realized what a mess they had made for themselves, so they confessed to Moses and said, “We have sinned. Please make the snakes go away.” It’s an obvious kind of story for Lent because we’re called again now to be honest about what we’ve gotten ourselves into and the harms that we’ve caused. So we began this season with an Ash Wednesday liturgy filled with confession, and we began this service today with confession again. Holy God, we confess to you our faults and failings. Too often we neglect and do not trust your holy word; we take for ourselves instead of giving to others; we spoil rather than steward your creation; we cause hurt though you call us to heal; we choose fear over compassion. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, as we seek to follow in your way of life. Amen.
Or to make it brief: “We have sinned, and it’s been our own fault. Forgive us.” And we are forgiven.
But here’s what’s strange in that story we heard; it’s what’s strange in our own story too: The people confess their sin and they ask Moses to make the
snakes go away, but God doesn’t take away the snakes. God just says, “Make your own snake. Make it out of brass. Put it on a pole. Look at it and you will live.”
It’s kind of a strange story with a weird ending, isn’t it? The strange and difficult thing for us is simply this: God doesn’t take away the snakes. I confessed, and I meant it. I know deep inside that I’ve hurt my neighbour with my words or by something I’ve done, and God will forgive me, but God doesn’t suddenly let me off the hook and wipe away the hurt that I’ve caused so that I don’t need to make it right. God doesn’t just take away the snakes. We may confess and be honest and really really mean it if we say we’ve polluted the land and the sea and the air, or that we’ve chosen to be afraid of our neighbour rather than have compassion on our neighbour, or that we moved in and took over land that was never ours to take. So God forgives again…but the world doesn’t become pristine again just like that. Whatever we confess, we still need to clean up our mess, and we still need to make right what we’ve made wrong. We still need to try to change so we don’t make the mess again.
Now we need to remember that it's not simply that we do something bad and God sends snakes or something worse to punish us. It usually seems to be the other way around: The innocent are the ones who are hurt, and the ones who hurt them suffer no harm at all. And the point of any of this is never to say that someone who has been abused is responsible for the abuse they experience, or that my neighbour is poor because they did something wrong, or that someone can’t shake their addiction because they just have a weak will. The snakes we live with are just the ways that this world has been broken. Sometimes we do the breaking, and sometimes we are the ones who are broken. It’s just that there are these snakes, this wilderness.
That’s the thing. God doesn’t take away the snakes.
God doesn’t take away the snakes, but maybe the point is something like this: In the wilderness God makes the promise that the snakes won’t kill you. You’ll live. The snakes won’t kill you; the wilderness won’t be the end of the story, you will live…we will live. The life that God gives is stronger than any messes we will make.
In the wilderness God makes the promise that the snakes won’t kill you.
Jesus picks up the story of the snakes in the wilderness years later when he’s having a conversation with his friend Nicodemus. They’re talking under the cover of night because Nicodemus doesn’t want anyone to see that he’s talking to Jesus. They talk about things like this weird idea Jesus has about being born again, not in any kind of literal way but in this way that God makes things new and makes life and makes fresh starts and might even raise up life from death. And as they talk Jesus brings up this same story that we heard from Numbers, and he talks about the Son of Man, or as some say, this human one, who comes from God and who will be lifted up on a tree, just like that snake was lifted up in the wilderness with the promise that the snakes and the wilderness will not be the end of the story. And you somehow can’t help but think that Jesus is talking about himself there; being raised up on a tree so that the world will live.
And then he says, “God loved the world this way: by sending the Son into the world, even to die, so that everyone who looks at the one on the tree will live.”
That’s how God saves the world, and that’s how God loves the world: Just by walking in among us…by dying and by rising…with a promise that we will live. Jesus just says again, “God loved the world like this: by sending the Son into the world not to condemn the world, or to condemn you, or to condemn me, but to save it.” By being born right into the world, among the snakes in the wilderness and the hurts that we cause and the hurts that we suffer. God loved the world by being born right into it, like we are all born right into it, and living in it like we live in it, and dying from it like we will all die from it. But the snakes aren’t the end of the story. God saves the world by taking on our flesh; by dying and by rising, with a promise that we will live.