The Hewn Stone Cracks (Great Vigil of Easter)

“The Hewn Stone Cracks”
The Great Vigil of Easter

31 March 2018 8:00 p.m. Sung Eucharist

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Genesis 1:1-2:4a [The Story of Creation] ; Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13 [The Flood] ; Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea] ; Isaiah 55:1-11 [Salvation offered freely to all] ;
Ezekiel 37:1-14 [The valley of dry bones] ; Romans 6:3-11 ;   Psalm 114 ;  Mark 16:1-8

May the light of Christ, rising in glory,
banish all darkness from our hearts and minds.   Amen.

When I was a boy, I had a particularly harrowing experience that has haunted my nightmares on and off for all of my life:  near my home, there was a large natural valley that we called “the gulley.”  We would play in it in all four seasons, sledding in the winter and hiking up and down its steep slopes in the spring and fall.  In summer, we would bike along its rim, catching the breeze in the otherwise stifling heat. Once, my brother and I found a small cave.  Knowing it couldn’t be very deep, I disregarded warnings of my parents never to venture into such places alone.  It was only 3 or 4 feet deep, but I could fit in completely.  I wanted to jump up out of it to startle my brother Mel, as he walked behind me over the steep rim’s incline.  I hid, but as he came down the hill behind me, the roof collapsed.  Had I been slightly further back, I would have been entirely buried.  As it was, I was only caught by the falling earth as far as my waist and one arm.  Mel helped me struggle out.  I was shaken up, but not hurt.  Mel was sure to tell my parents all about it later, who scolded me, put the gulley off limits for a month, and regaled me with horrible and detailed descriptions of what might have happened to me had I not been so lucky.  As a result, I suffered for years of vivid nightmares of being buried alive, trapped in the dark and unable to breath or move.  To this day, I suffer from mild claustrophobia.  Medical teams usually give me sedatives if I need an MRI—I just cannot bear being locked in that small coffin-like tube with all the loud sounds of the machinery whirring about me. 

I think most of us have fears and nightmares, and sooner or later all of us suffer terrible and horrible loss. 

This holy week I have been deeply moved by the songs of suffering and abandonment that are the heart of Morning and Evening Prayer in Holy Week.   Christians from early on saw the expressions of deep grief and loss in the Lamentations and Psalms as somehow speaking the truth of Jesus’ suffering and our part in it.  The morning of Good Friday, we chanted: 

“I am one who has seen affliction
under the rod of God's wrath.”  (Lamentations 3:1)

That is certainly how it feels when we suffer—it must be punishment, and God must be angry with me.  This, despite Jesus’ assurance to us that the heart of God is love, and has always loved us as a kind parent.   But suffering still feels like rejection and abandonment, despite assurances of love and support. 

We continued chanting: 

 

“He has driven … me
into darkness without any light;
… He has made my flesh and my skin waste away,
and broken my bones.”

This, despite the Gospels’ insistence that Jesus, like the paschal lamb, never had his bones broken.  Then we continued, coming to an image that triggered my memories of the nightmare in the gulley:   

 “He has made me sit in darkness
like the dead of long ago.

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape …

though I call and cry for help,
he shuts out my prayer;
he has blocked my ways with hewn stones…” 

This image of being buried alive hit me.  It is one of my greatest fears, and its stifling sense of not being able to see, breathe, or move is at the heart of any of my feelings when faced with insecurity, loss, and grief.   The image of hewn stones blocking the way is probably what caught the medieval monks attention when they sought passages about the feelings we have when we face the Passion of Christ:  the tomb was sealed by a large hewn stone.  But Jesus was dead, and not alive. 

This morning, on Holy Saturday, a world away from tonight, we chanted Psalm 88: 

"…I am full of trouble;
my life is at the brink of the grave.
I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;
I have become like one who has no strength;
Lost among the dead,
like the slain who lie in the grave,
Whom you remember no more,

for they are cut off from your hand.
You have laid me in the depths of the Pit,

in dark places, and in the abyss…  
You have put my friends far from me;
you have them abhor me;
I am in prison and cannot get free.

My sight has failed me…  
Do you work wonders for the dead?
will those who have died stand up and give you thanks?
Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave?
your faithfulness in the land of destruction?
Will your wonders be known in the dark?
or your righteousness in the country where all is forgotten?
… Ever since my youth, I have been wretched and at the point of death;
I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind.
Your blazing anger has swept over me;
your terrors have destroyed me;
They surround me all day long like a flood;
they encompass me on every side.
My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me,
and darkness is my only companion.”

Jesus’ suffering, death, and burial was nightmarish, but was not a dream.  It was common, everyday human suffering, suffering that makes us feel that God has abandoned us, is angry with us and is punishing us.  Suffering makes us doubt the love and support of God. It makes us wonder whether life has any meaning and sense.   This is the great truth of these poems we chant during Holy Week. 

Children die in accidents every day.  If I had died in the cave, it would have not been unusual.  As painful as it would have been to my family, it would have been par on this particular course we call human life.  As horrible as it would have been for me—worse than my nightmares—it would have simply been death suffered by us all a bit earlier and perhaps more gruesome than some.  But it would have been part of what it means to be human.

 

But life is not made up only of nightmarish bits.  Most of it is good and filled with wonderful things, happy and warm.  There is prayer and hope and gentle goodness. Jesus taught us about a loving Papa who sends the blessing and grace of rain and sunshine to all, righteous and wicked, and calls us to likewise be undiscriminating in our blessing of others.    

Jesus' death on the cross was a nightmare, and draws into question all he taught.  But Jesus, raised from the dead, changes all that.  The hewn stones cracked and rolled back change all that.  The mystery of what happened a day and a half after the crucifixion tells us that what Jesus taught about God, and love, and life is indeed true.  It is happy, but it is not a dream.  It is salvation for us all, like those stories of creation, the exodus, and the prophets’ dreams we read tonight.  Jesus coming forth from the dead is the breaking of the hewn stones that bury us, that keep us from breathing, from seeing.  It breaks the bonds that tie us down, the fears and doubts that sour our lives.  It spells the end of the power of nightmares, and drives away all our fears and suspicions. 

Christ is risen.  The Lord is risen indeed.  Amen. 

Incarnation and the Cross

Incarnation and the Cross

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

March 28, 2018

One of the great misrepresentations of the age is the claim made by some Christians, styling themselves as “Evangelical,” that the reason “Jesus had to die on the Cross” was to pay the penalty for our sins, suffering in our stead, to satisfy the wrath of God.  They portray this as a biblical idea, but nowhere in the Bible is it to be found as such.  The idea is actually very recent, and not part of traditional, ancient Christianity.   Often tied to St. Augustine’s version of the doctrine of Original Sin, pathological in its hatred of the body and pessimism, this doctrine is highly problematic since it portrays God the Father as a vengeful child-abusing monster interested more in blood than in justice. 

Though the early Church defined an orthodox and catholic doctrine of who Christ is (“Christology”), it never defined clearly what exactly it is that Jesus did for us in his death and resurrection (“soteriology.”) 

St. Paul gives us more than a dozen vivid images to describe what Christ did:  he liberated us from oppression, he saved us from danger on the battlefield, he created us anew, he purchased us back out of slavery, he reconciled us to God as one would reconcile friends who had quarreled, he propitiated an angry deity, he declared us innocent as in a court of Law, he transformed us like in the Greek myth of metamorphosis.   Paul is searching for the right image, drawing them from a wide range of human life, but clearly is not completely satisfied with any single one of them.

Over the ages, the Church has explained the atonement in different ways. For the first four or five centuries, both Eastern and Western preachers simply declared that Christ was a victor:  on the cross he took on sin, death, and hell in a battle, and on Easter beat them all.  Once feudalism had become the main social arrangement where Christians lived, they used its sense of honor based in social rank and began to say that Christ offered the “satisfaction” to a Deity insulted and dishonored by the failings of mere human beings, who could never repay their debt of honor to such a superior.  In the High Middle Ages, secular-leaning scholars like Peter Abelard argued that the example Christ set encourages us to behave better and thus be freed of sin, while the more churchy ones like St. Thomas Aquinas argued for a sacramental view, directly linking Christ’s death on the cross with Holy Communion, which they called the sacrifice of the Mass, and which they saw as directly transformative on those who not only partook it, but merely gazed upon it in reverence.  It was only during the Renaissance, with its greater emphasis on the individual; political economy, and legal reasoning, that Christians began primarily explaining atonement as substitutionary punishment.

All of these ideas are simply different ways of describing how Jesus closed the gap between us and God and what God intends in us.  The different images and doctrines just emphasize different parts of the chasm.  And none is ideal. 

I was raised in a denomination that did not display or wear crosses: they said the point was Easter, not Good Friday.  But without a clear understanding of the cross, and reverence for it, Easter is impaired and diminished. 

The heart of the matter, I believe, is incarnation: God taking on human flesh in Jesus, and becoming one of us.  God made flesh in Jesus had to die as all of us have to die.  He had to suffer all the horrors that the rest of us face, because he lived and died as one of us.  The Romans dished out unjust torture and death to many, as have all nations at various times.  And Jesus would not let the threat of this deter him from proclaiming the Reign of God.  And so he suffered and died.  And God on the Cross calls us too to take up the Cross and follow him. 

The victory of Jesus over horror, suffering, and death opens the way for us to communion with God and each other.  It turns aside meaninglessness and despair.  As we live in Jesus, we suffer with him, and we are also raised with him. 

As we prepare for Holy Week, with all its talk of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and how this was for our sakes, let us remember to place these stories, texts, and doctrines in a broader context than one that assumes (I believe wrongly) that God demands violence and suffering to make things right, even if we may have been raised with such a view.

Peace and Grace,

Fr. Tony+

Palm and Passion Sunday, Holy Week (Midweek Message)

Palm and Passion Sunday, and Holy Week  

Fr. Tony's Midweek Message

March 21, 2018

Holy Week starts this Sunday. We begin the service with the joyful Liturgy of the Palms, and then continue with the sorrowful reading of the Passion. Some liturgists have called the Palm/Passion Sunday rite the most schizophrenic of all Christian liturgies. This juxtaposition of joyful procession and sorrowful commemoration is intentional. 

G.K Chesterton captured some of the happiness and whimsy of the Palms liturgy in his poem "The Donkey": 

When fishes flew and forests walked

   And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

   Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

   And ears like errant wings,

The devil's walking parody

   On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

   Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

   I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

   One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

   And palms before my feet.

From The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (Dodd Mead & Company, 1927)

The little Jerusalem donkey Jenny, Darcy Jo, will accompany us in the Procession at the 10 a.m. service. In the liturgy, the congregation rejoices and welcomes Jesus as the crowds once did on the steep pathway down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem, singing praises. Then, in the Passion reading, traditionally the congregation calls out the words for his execution "Crucify him, crucify him!" This coming Sunday, we will ask the congregation to call out these words. The point is not to shame or point fingers. The point is to accept responsibility for our own part of the human race's corporate misdoings.

 

 Hymn 458 describes the contemplative truth behind this practice in this way: 

       "He came from his blest throne,

        salvation to bestow,

        But men made strange

        And none the Christ would know... 

        Sometimes they strew His way,
        And His sweet praises sing;
        Resounding all the day
        Hosannas to their King:
        Then "Crucify!"
        Is all their breath,
        And for His death
        They thirst and cry."

Holy Week is one great spiritual journey, and each service is part of that great truth. The Palms and Passion on the Sunday that begins it all, then the Great Three Day Liturgy (Triduum). It is one service spread over three days: Maundy Thursday celebrating the new Commandment to love one another, the Lord's Supper and the Washing of the Feet, the stripping of the altar, and the overnight prayer vigil; Good Friday and the stark grief at our loss of Jesus; the silence and calm of Holy Saturday, and then the Great Vigil of Easter with the New Fire, the reading of salvation history, renewal of baptismal vows, and the first Eucharist of Easter; and then the glories of Easter Sunday. I would invite all to participate in the whole commemoration and celebration, not just parts. We still need people to sign up for middle of the night stages of the Maundy Thursday prayer vigil. 

Grace and Peace,

       Fr. Tony+

Draw all People Unto Myself (Lent 5B)

“Draw All People Unto Myself”

Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
18 March 2018; 8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon  

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-13; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s Gospel reading describes a scene that is a turning point in the Gospel of John. Several times previous to this, John has said that things we expect to occur in the story didn’t happen right then because, Jesus’ “hour had not yet come” (John 2:4; 7:30; 8:20).  With the final arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem, and with the coming of Greeks asking to see him, suddenly Jesus declares that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all portray Jesus’ suffering and death as the painful but necessary prelude to his being raised in glory from death.   But for the Gospel of John, Jesus being raised up on the cross itself is the moment of true glory. John’s Jesus in today’s Gospel uses a parable to describe this: “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

The passage from Hebrews we read today says that “Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears,” for God to “save him from death”  (Hebrews 5:5-6).  The three other Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—describe Jesus the night before his death begging in prayer in Gethsemane to be spared from the cross, and ultimately accepting “not my will, but thine.”   But John’s Gospel omits any prayer in Gethsemane. Rather he has Jesus say in today’s reading, “What shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name!’”

Last week, we saw that John’s Gospel portrays looking to Jesus lifted up on the cross as the means of salvation for the broken, wicked world just as looking on the bronze serpent lifted on Moses’ staff was a means of healing.   Again, in today’s reading, John’s Jesus says, “But when I am lifted up from the earth,” that is, lifted up on the cross, “I will draw all people to myself." Just as Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, John says Jesus on the Cross draws all people to him.  This is not a few people, not some small percentage somehow graced by God choosing them and not the massa damnata, or who have followed some esoteric practice and doctrine, or have respected the right religious brand.    John’s words here give us hope that eventually all people, the world, everyone, will be drawn to Jesus and healed.

Some would object, saying God’s holiness is incompatible with universal salvation.  They point to passages of scripture and the liturgy that talk of God’s wrath, of punishment, of justice and judgment, and the only one strait and narrow path.      

But the Gospel of John, for all its sectarian and at times anti-Jewish animus borne of being put “out of the synagogue” (John 9:22), teaches that Jesus came to save, not to judge (John 3:17).   And, as I have preached many times from this pulpit, the idea “the wrath of God” describes more how we feel when we are estranged from God, not something about the heart of God, who is love itself.  1 John 4 teaches in love there is no judgment.  To be sure, declining to follow Jesus is for John a type of judgment in and of itself, since it is for now at least in fact rejecting the very source of our healing.  But John goes on:  Jesus on the cross is an ensign, a rallying point, who eventually will draw all to himself for healing. 

Others might object that Jesus drawing all to himself is an insult to other traditions, whether Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Baha’i, animist, shamanistic, or even atheistic.  This is true, if we understand this image in terms of a proselyting urge that says, join us or be damned.  But if we understand it as a loving desire to share with others the good we have enjoyed, without the demand that others change and become like us, it is not so.

  

Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner developed the doctrine of the Anonymous Christian, later adopted and promulgated as official Roman Catholic teaching by the Second Vatican Council.   The idea is that a person can live in God’s grace and attain salvation through Jesus even outside explicitly constituted or stated Christianity.  If a person, say a Buddhist nun or a Muslim imam, tries to do the right thing, be right with whatever God they conceive of, and follow his or her conscience and tradition, that person might be considered an anonymous Christian and be saved through Jesus’ victory over death and sin.  They would not have to explicitly accept Jesus or Christianity, or might even, because of circumstances and constraints, have rejected these explicitly.  But God’s universal salvific will and the greatness of God’s grace would save them too.

 

The idea is also found among Protestants. The final book of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle, has the character Emeth, a Calormene prince who had fought against Aslan and Narnia and served his own god, Tash.  He has done his best to live uprightly within the traditions he was raised in.  In the end, Aslan receives him as one of his own with these words, “I and [Tash] are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.^”  Our Prayer Book teaches us to pray, “Remember all who died in the peace of Christ, and those whose faith is known to you alone; bring them into the place of eternal joy and light” (p. 375).

Again, some criticize this effort at Christian inclusivity saying that it is condescending:  “I’m Jewish, thank you very much, and do not want to become Christian, even anonymously.”   Fair enough, especially in light of historical Imperial Christian persecution of Jews, native peoples, and the non-conforming.    A tradition is truly inclusive only when it recognizes that other traditions have separate yet valid paths.  Accepting that God is bigger than our particular brand is an essential part of Jesus’ teaching.  Our hope that God is doing and will do for us more things than we can ask or imagine means that ultimately there is no conflict between trusting that Jesus will save all people and respecting the independence and truth of non-Christian traditions.  One of the things I liked most about what heard at the Havurah last week with the Rev. Matthew Fox is this:  we must all draw deeply from our own well, and rejoice in the river we share, recognizing that they carry the same life-bringing water. 

The four Gospels tell very different stories about Jesus, and as we have seen today, John's Gospel tells a story often at odds with the other three’s version.   I have always taken this as an occasion for great hope. You see, Christians were a diverse lot from the very beginning.   And the Church has not insisted that we harmonize or censor all competing stories about Jesus into one. The Church has let the four Gospels stand in glorious disharmony, wonderful diversity. “I will all draw all people unto me,” says Jesus here. That means the Church ought to have diversity, ought to have a variety of keys in which the Gospel tune is played.

Because of the Church's history of oppressin of Jews, native peoples, and women, because of its colonial proselytism and identifying and trying to control heresy, we often lose sight of this. It is important to remember that as the early Church sought to define its faith, there were individuals who wanted to eliminate all diversity and possible disharmony in scripture. Some, like Marcion, wanted to get rid of the Old Testament. It was just too distasteful for him.  Others, like  Tatian the Syrian, wanted to reduce the New Testament to a single theological viewpoint.   He created a single harmonized Gospel (the Diatesseron) that served as the Gospel lectionary in most of the Church for several centuries.  Tatian wanted it to be recognized as Scripture instead of the Four Gospels the Church finally settled on.

The Church Fathers, seeking to truly reflect the deposit of faith given in the apostolic age, declined Tatian's offer and rejected his single Gospel along with several other Gospels that bore the marks of having come from a period after the first couple of generations of Christians. The apostolic faith thus defined included the diversity we see in the New Testament.

As we begin our final preparations for Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter, may we reflect on Jesus’ love for us, and see in it God the Father’s love for all as well.  May we be more comfortable with diversity and difference, with change and new things.  And, with Jesus, may we welcome the whole world, whom our Lord, this God on the Cross, draws unto Himself.

In the name of God, Amen. 

God in the Grass (mid-week Message)

 

 Cosmic Christ, Fr. John Guiliani

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

God in the Grass

March 14, 2018

The seminars and liturgies held last weekend at the Havurah Shir Hadash with the Rev. Matthew Fox focused on our need to seek the deep commonalties between faith traditions on our experience of God in creation and our daily lives as well as on our need to protect and preserve our common mother, the Earth.   All this got me thinking about three Christian texts from far afield that I have encountered over the years:  a hymn from China and two prayers from Africa, that express this experience of God in creation.  I thought I’d share them with you today. 

God in the Grass and in the Bed

I implore You, God;
I pray to You during the night.
How are all people kept by You all days?
You walk in the midst of the grass;
I walk with You.
When I sleep in the house,
It is You with whom I sleep.
To You, I pray for food and water to drink,
and You give it.
Set me free, I implore You with all my heart:
If I do not pray to You with my heart,
How can You hear me?
But if I pray to You with my heart,
You know it and are gracious unto me!

We Drink in Creation and Cannot Get Enough (Ashanti Christian prayer, from Ghana)
O Lord, O God, creator

Of Our land, our earth, the trees, the animals and humans, all is for your honor.

The drums beat it out, and people sing about it.

They dance with noisy joy that you are the Lord.

It is You who pulled the continents out of the sea.

What a wonderful world you have made out of the wet mud,

And what beautiful men and women!

We thank you for the beauty of this earth.

The grace of your creation is like a cool day between rainy seasons.

We drink in your creation with our eyes.

We listen to the birds' jubilee with our ears.

How strong and good and sure your earth smells, and everything that grows there.

The sky above us is like a warm, soft Kente cloth, because you are behind it,

Else it would be cold and rough and uncomfortable.

We drink in your creation and cannot get enough of it.

But in doing this we forget the evil we have done.

Lord, we call you, we beg you: Tear us away from our sins and our death.

This wonderful world fades away.

And one day our eyes snap shut.

All is over and dead without you.

We are still slaves of the demons and earth-fetishes

When we are not saved by you.

Bless us. Bless our land and people.

Bless our forests with mahogany, wawa, and cacao.

Bless our fields with cassava and peanuts.

Bless the waters that flow through our land.

Fill them with fish and drive great schools of fish to our seacoast, so that the fishermen in their unsteady boats do not need to go out too far.

Be with us youth in our countries, and in all of Mother Africa, and in the whole world.

Prepare us for the service that we should render.

Tianshang de Fuqin (Father in Heaven)

(sung to the tune Song of the Hoe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nznxZT0uRGs )

Great are thy mercies, Heavenly Father,

Food and raiment thou dost still bestow. 

Let me praise thee always,

Serve thee all my days. 

Thou, the spring wind,

I the grass:  On me blow!

Grace and Peace. 

--Fr. Tony+

The Gospel in Miniature (Lent 4B)

The Gospel in Miniature

Fourth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
11th March 2018

Laetare Sunday
8 am Spoken Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon

   The Very Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D., homilist  

Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

God, Take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen.

I’m sure you have seen it.  At a professional baseball or football game, in real stadiums or televised, in the bleachers:  a pair of fans holding up a banner reading simply “John 3:16.”  No text is quoted.  You are expected to nod your head in knowing agreement or be intrigued enough to look it up: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has faith in him may not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

The banners at sports events and parades are intended, I suppose, as a kind of evangelism.  But I wonder—with the cryptic reference unavailable to all but those who supposedly are already “saved,” maybe the real reason is to speak in a code language and show a secret self-congratulatory handshake to like-minded people already in the know. 

It is unfortunate that the verse has come to be used in this way.  Martin Luther called this verse, “the heart of the Bible, the Gospel in miniature.”    It has deep meaning, but not the meaning that the banner-carriers see in it. 

Jesus here is speaking to Nicodemus, a devotee to Mosaic Law but a secret follower of Jesus.   Jesus has told him about being born from on high. Nicodemus has misunderstood this as some kind of second physical birth: it’s all about identity or group affiliation, based on who your mother was.   Jesus corrects him and says this is about starting a spiritual life in God, which is uncontrollable like the wind or breath.   He then adds: just as Moses lifted up the bronze snake in the desert to heal the Israelites suffering from snake bites, Jesus would be lifted up on the cross for all the world to see and be healed. 

Note that God here loves “all the world,” not just chosen people.  This birth from above is for everyone. 

Jesus being raised on the cross like the healing bronze snake on the pole speaks against, not for, the idea of transferred punishment.   The thing that heals the Israelites is a representation of the very thing afflicting them. 

So how is Jesus on the cross like this? 

Looking on the true nature of the evil we suffer and inflict, identifying their exact nature, is the start of healing, the beginning of recovery.  Lifting up a graphic representation of the fiery serpents heals the Israelites through, it seems, some kind of sympathetic magic.  Likewise, hoisting Jesus high upon the cross is a prime example of human evil, a representation of the very problem it cures.  Jesus’s sufferings are the example par excellence of how rotten we human beings treat each other, of how badly we distort God’s good creation.   Look at the nature of our evil, lose false conceptions about the heart of darkness and cruelty in us at times: only then can we embrace Jesus, the God who loves us so much that he chose to become one of us and suffer such evil.  Trusting this loving God on the cross heals us.    

We read in Deuteronomy that anyone who is hanged on a tree is accursed (Deut 21:23).  Paul says that thus Jesus became a curse for us, became sin for us (Gal 3:13). This does not mean that Jesus was bad or evil.  It means that the very fact that we human beings did this thing to him, the fact that we are capable of such cruelty to each other, points to our need for transformation and enlightenment.  In looking at this horror, we see the nature of our ills, and in trusting the one so cursed we find redemption and reconciliation with God and each other.  This is not transferred punishment, but the mystery of God becoming one of us, suffering along with us the worst that we can mete out to each other, dying alongside every other human being, and then being rising as Victor.    

That’s why the passage continues, “God loved the world so much that He sent his only son.” Note:  it’s the world we’re talking about here.  In John’s Gospel, that means the wicked world, the big, bad, dark world that rejects the light.    It doesn't mean the good and glorious creation that God declared in Genesis 1 to be so very good.  Rather, in John, the phrase means:    “God loved bad guys so much….”  “God loved messed up humanity so much…”  “God loved those who dwell in darkness so much…” “that he sent his only son, so that everyone who trusts him, finds faithfulness in him, gives their heart to him, should not perish, but live eternally.”  The Greek of the passage is clear—the people who trust Jesus have already attained the unending life his sending was intended to provide to the world. 

The point is the universality of God’s love and of God’s gift to all.

But a gift is a gift only if it is accepted by someone.  That is what looking at Jesus, or looking at the snake, is all about.  Salvation is there.  Healing is there.  You just have to turn your hearts toward its source and trust.

This is not a call to a formal acceptance of a doctrine of salvation by grace, or transferred punishment. It is an invitation to trust Jesus, to be in relationship with him. 

“But what about people who decline the invitation?” you might ask, thinking of how the banner carriers see in this passage a condemnation of those who disagree with them rather than an affirmation of God’s universal love. 

The passage is clear:  Jesus came to save, not to judge or condemn. 

The refusal of people to accept the gift freely given won’t bring judgment or condemnation.  Rather, it is their very act of refusing that means they, at least for now, cannot enjoy the blessings of relationship and trust. 

Sisters and brothers at Trinity:  Jesus of Nazareth taught the arrival of God’s Reign, of God being fully in charge, right here, right now.  His teachings demand much from us, but also give us compassion and enable us to be instruments of God’s compassion.  His cruel death on the cross came from the sickness of the powers of his age, in some ways very much with us to this day. 

But his rising from the dead vindicated his teaching and meant the cross was not meaningless, that life is not random or pointless.  Christ’s victory over death saves us by pointing all the more to God’s love in the face of the sickness of broken humanity.  If Jesus on the cross is like that bronze snake, it is because we are the snakes that are biting ourselves, ruining God’s good creation. 

I pray that this week we may reflect on this passage, so public and popularly misused, and find in it the point John’s Gospel is trying to make:  God loves everyone and is compassionate.  In following Jesus, in trusting him, we can also be compassionate and overcome the sickness that often infects us and our society.    Thus victory is won, brokenness healed, and rescue achieved.

In the name of God Amen.