For Sunday, March 15, 2015 – John 3:14-21
“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness…,” today’s passage says, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” This is one of those small bites of scripture we are apt to glide right past in our hurry to get to the meat of the message. How odd to find in John’s gospel this reference to a peculiar story in the book of Numbers in which God punishes the people with an onslaught of poisonous snakes. The remedy God gives Moses is rather odd, too. He is told to make a bronze replica of a serpent and put it on a pole. When it is lifted up, anyone who has been bitten by a poisonous snake simply looks at the replica to be saved.
The people do not have to figure out how it works. They do not need to come to consensus about its meaning, or strive to love it with their whole hearts. They simply look at it if they want to be healed. This, John says, is how it is with Jesus.
We tend to make Jesus quite a bit more complicated. Is it possible that faith might be as childlike and simple as just looking at Jesus? Not arguing over who he was and is, what one should believe about him, how to express that belief, who is right and who is wrong. “For God so loved the world…”—we barely get this far in one of the best known and most hopeful verses in scripture before we leap out into the perils and pitfalls of varying belief systems, who is in and who is out and who gets to decide. We stand condemned, or ready to condemn, despite the very next words: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world….”
Moses lifted up the serpent, not to condemn, but to heal. And the people only needed to take a new look at its healing potential. That’s all. Maybe taking another look at Jesus will bring us more gifts than we know. If we start to see him in a new light, without knowing for sure what is right or wrong and who is on his team, we might be surprised by what we end up believing, what old wounds get healed.
