From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. 5 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.” 6 Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. 7 The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. 8 And the LORD said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” 9 So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live. – Numbers 21:4-10
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And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” – John 3:14-21
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Welcome to the fourth week of Lent and our theme for today: “The Venom and the Antidote”. It’s an odd title for a sermon, and it immediately raises questions. So I’ll start off by saying, yes, we actually are talking about real snake venom… and yes we are actually talking about a real cure. But these are obviously also meant to be metaphors, a way of describing the life of faith in Jesus.
So I’d like to start with Jesus today, and our reading from the Gospel of John.
This passage includes one of the most famous verses in the Bible: John 3:16. Something many of us memorized in Sunday School. This verse has gained worldwide fame thanks to a man named Rollen Stewart, who spent amazing amounts of time and money attending sports events around the world – and buying seats where he knew the TV cameras would be (like behind home plate or behind the end zone) – and holding up a sign reading “John 3:16”. (Full disclosure: this guy is a bit nuts and is currently in prison) but during the latter part of the previous century he brought this verse to everyone’s attention…
… including some people I used to work with back in the early 1990s. One evening when a group of us were out having dinner at a local bar, a football game came on the TV, and this John 3:16 sign made an appearance. And one of my co-workers looked at me – as the one churchgoer at the table – and said, “what does that mean?”
I said, “it’s a Bible verse.”
“But you know what it is, right preacher-lady?” (mind you I had not even started seminary yet – but I had a reputation)
I said “Yes, I know what it is.”
And he said “Well??”
“You want me to actually say it right here in this bar?”
“Yeah!”
“OK then!”
So I did:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
And he thought that over for a second and he said “Cool!” And all his buddies at the table said “cool!” too. And they carried on with their conversations.
So John 3:16 is cool. I have it on good authority.
But this is not all there is to the passage. In fact John 3:16 is not even really the main point of Jesus’ conversation.
In this passage, we are listening in on a conversation between Jesus and a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is one of my favorite people in the Bible because he’s an honest Pharisee. He is a member of the Sanhedrin, the body of religious rulers in Jerusalem; but he’s not a hypocrite. Nicodemus thinks for himself; and where it comes to Jesus, he is honestly curious. He wants to know what Jesus is teaching, and he wants to ask questions.
Nicodemus is also, at this point in time, aware that many of his co-Pharisees are conspiring to kill Jesus – and he wants to give Jesus a heads-up about this. So he does something very risky: he comes to where the disciples are staying, in person, at night, and asks to have a word alone with Jesus.
Nicodemus starts the conversation by saying,
“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do the signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”
This is a stunning confession! By saying “we” – as in, “we know” – Nicodemus makes clear the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. The Pharisees know – they know! – that Jesus is from God; but this doesn’t stop them plotting and planning. They can’t face the truth of what Jesus teaches; but Nicodemus has decided to be different.
Jesus is very up-front with Nicodemus from the very start; but he takes the conversation in a direction that Nicodemus doesn’t expect. Jesus says: “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” And the conversation continues for a while along the lines of what it means to be ‘born again’ or ‘born from above’ or ‘born of the Spirit’. Bottom line, Jesus says, salvation from God is not about keeping rules; salvation is a miracle by which God’s Spirit – the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity – comes into a person and lives in the heart of a person who is willing to worship and follow God.
This sounds like a new teaching to the people in Jesus’ time, but it’s actually a new presentation of ancient truths; and Nicodemus is a bit confused. Jesus scolds him gently saying, “you’re a teacher of Israel and you don’t know these things?” Jesus goes on to explain that, while God loves the world and God loves the people in it, people love darkness because what they do is evil. But while this was all still going on, God sent the Son as a savior. Jesus says:
“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” John 3:14-15
Why? Because God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not die but have eternal life. In fact, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved through him. BUT this is the judgement: the light of God came into the world but people loved darkness more, because their deeds were evil. (John 3:16-19, edited)
Nicodemus, being the well-educated Pharisee that he was, immediately recognized and remembered the story of the serpent in the wilderness that Jesus was talking about. His mind would have gone back to the book of Numbers and that last segment of Israel’s journey in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land.
The people of Israel at that time had been traveling through the wilderness for almost forty years. Many of the people who had been freed from slavery in Egypt had grown old and passed away; others were elderly; and most likely the majority of the people in the tribe of Israel no longer remembered Egypt. All they had ever known was life on a journey – and the leadership of Moses.
At this point, the people of Israel were setting out from Mount Hor to go around the land of Edom. And it looked like they were going in the wrong direction: the Promised Land was to the north, but their path turned south to go around Edom. The people were impatient and they complained against both Moses and God; and their complaints were full of lies: they accused Moses of bringing them into the wilderness to die. They accused God of starving them to death; but then they say “…and we detest this miserable food” (so there actually is food – they are not starving – and in fact the food they have is manna, which has sometimes been called the ‘bread of angels’… wonderful stuff that tasted like wafers with honey.)
And they accused the Lord of Life of trying to starve them and kill them.
First, it is not wise for mere human beings to cop an attitude with God, the Creator of the Universe. Not a good idea.
Second, as one theologian writes, the accusations against God were serpentine in nature: poisonous, bitter, and self-contradictory.
God needs to confront this rebellion. If God does not confront the evil, it will grow and spread, and will result in the deaths of many people, perhaps the entire tribe of Israel. On this journey through the wilderness, the people still need God every step of the way. They need God’s direction and God’s insight; but the people think otherwise. So God sends poisonous snakes into the camp; and the snakes bite some of the people; and the people who are bitten die.
In reaction to this, the people say to Moses, “we have sinned; pray to God to take the snakes away.” Why it is that the people interpret the snakes as having been sent by God to confront them about their sins, I don’t fully understand; although it probably points to some guilty consciences. Apart from this, it seems like in the history of the human race people turn to God more quickly in times of trouble than when things are going well.
That’s what happens here. But God does not take the snakes away. Instead God says to Moses, “make a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and whoever looks at the bronze serpent will live.” This is not idol-worship: God does not say to bow down to the bronze serpent or to pray to the serpent. God only says “look at it” and you will be healed.
Side note: This symbol of a snake wrapped around a pole became the symbol of medicine and healing in the ancient world. The symbol has been found dating as far back as 400 BC in ancient Greece; and most likely the Greeks borrowed the story from Israel’s history, because they were aware of the history. [End of side note.]
Back to our story: God tells Moses to put the bronze serpent where everyone can see it; BUT people who are bitten must still be willing to look at it – to do what God said to do. The bronze serpent by itself does nothing. The fact that there’s a bronze serpent in the camp means nothing. If your brother or sister looks at the bronze serpent, it won’t help you if you’re the one who’s been bitten. And in fact the bronze serpent means nothing at all to people who haven’t been bitten. But for those who have been bitten, looking at the bronze serpent will heal them and they will live.
Notice the double conditional: If you aren’t sick, the bronze serpent means nothing to you. But if you are sick, only looking at the bronze serpent would heal you. Believing that a bronze serpent might heal you is not enough; you actually had to look at it. Head knowledge was not enough; the belief had to be acted on.
The snake bite represents sin. And Jesus says to Nicodemus: the same thing is happening here and now. Just like that bronze snake in the wilderness, Jesus is about to be lifted up on the Cross. Anyone who thinks they’ve never sinned doesn’t need the cross. But anyone who has been bitten by sin and rebellion of this world can look at Jesus on the Cross and be healed.
Notice there are no go-betweens. In Jesus, God is reaching out to each individual person. Each person needs to have the faith to look at the Cross. There is no priest or rabbi or pastor, not even Moses, who can look at the Cross for someone else, on someone else’s behalf. Each person must trust God for themselves in order to be healed, and each person must look to Jesus for that healing.
One other side note: I think this kind of trust is very difficult for people who have come from rough backgrounds: people who have been abused or neglected or kept down or prejudiced against; or people who suffer from PTSD. People like the Israelites who had suffered from generations of slavery and pain and hardship. It is difficult for people who have experienced these things to trust. I think that’s where a lot of the griping came from in ancient Israel; I think that’s why it was so hard for many of them to look at the snake and believe. And I think that’s why it’s so hard for many people in our world today, who have suffered through trauma and tragedy, homelessness or hunger, to look on the Cross and believe and trust God.
On the other hand, the God we are asked to trust knows our pain. The Cross makes that very clear. When we suffer we are not alone. God does not leave us alone. God has entered into our pain; and all we have to do is look at the Son of God on the Cross… and trust.
The Bible doesn’t tell us whether Nicodemus walked home that night as a believing Christian. But Jesus gave him the truth, and gave him a lot to think about. Nicodemus ended up being one of two men who stood by Jesus on the day Jesus died. Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea were the two men who had the courage to ask Pilate for the body of Jesus in order to give him a proper burial. Somewhere in between that nighttime conversation and Jesus’ crucifixion, Nicodemus became a believer. And he did for Jesus what no-one else could have done.
For us today, just like back then, our health and our well-being depends on the man on the Cross: the Son of God, lifted up for us. We have all been bitten by sin, and we all need to look to Jesus for our healing. Just like God said “look at the snake” to be cured, God says “look at the Cross” to be healed. And all of this is possible because God loves us, and because God is leading us to the Promised Land. AMEN.
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