The Gospel in Miniature
Fourth Sunday of Lent (Year B)
15th March 2015
Laetare Sunday
8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon
8 am Spoken Mass; 10 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church, Ashland, Oregon
The 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.” I once saw one at a professional
golfing tournament. Jan Robertson reminds me that such a banner is
carried each year in the Ashland July 4th Parade.
The
text is not quoted. You as a viewer are
expected to either nod your head in knowing agreement or be intrigued enough to
look it up and be brought to true faith.
“For
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who has
faith in him may not perish but may continue to have eternal life” (John 3:16).
The banners at sports events and parades—I
suppose it’s a kind of evangelism, the sort that makes people want to put Jesus
fish on their bumpers, or, worse, stickers that say “God said it; I believe it;
that settles it.” It seems to be aimed at calling sinners to
repentance, the disobedient to submission, and a few chosen ones from the
damned mass of humanity to a special, rare, and exclusive salvation.
It is unfortunate that the verse has come to be
used in this way. I love this verse,
as, I think most of you do. Martin
Luther called this verse, “the heart of the Bible, the Gospel in
miniature.” It has deep meaning. But it is not the meaning that the banner-carriers
see in it.
They understand it as a call for the act of a
profession of belief in the doctrine that Jesus is Savior and Lord, who was
punished in our stead by suffering death to pay the penalty we deserve by our
sins, death and torture at the hands of a just God. They see assent to such a teaching as the
act God requires for salvation. Become a
Christian as we understand that word, they think, or suffer eternal
damnation.
But this misses the point of the verse and its
context.
John’s Gospel here has Jesus 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 and thought this was some kind of second
physical birth: it’s all about ethnic background, identity at birth, and your
relationship to God’s covenant people. Jesus
corrects him and says this is about starting a spiritual life in God, which is
like the wind or breath. He or the
narrator then adds that Jesus should know about such things, since he came from
above.
And then comes today’s verses: 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 those who see him and trust him are saved from destruction.
Two points here that most of the banner carriers
miss:
First:
God loves “all the world.” It is
not just the chosen people, part of covenant by virtue of birth, by who they
are. The birth from above, the spiritual
birth Jesus is talking about, is for everyone.
Second:
the comparison of Jesus being raised on the cross with Moses raising the bronze
snake on a pole does not make a lot of sense in the transferred punishment
understanding that the banner carriers place on John 3:16. We
read the story about Moses and the snake as our Hebrew Scripture lesson
today. The interesting point in the
story is this: a bronze representation of the very thing that is afflicting the
Israelites, fiery snakes falling from the skies, is what becomes the instrument
of their healing.
So how does that compare to Jesus on
the cross, to “the Son of Man being lifted up?”
If looking at the bronze snake was
looking at the source of the problem resulting in healing, then looking at
Jesus on the cross is in some way doing the same thing according to this
passage.
Jesus on the cross is the symbol,
like the snake, of the source of our problems.
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. It is by looking at the nature of our evil, losing
false conceptions about the heart of darkness and cruelty in us at times, that
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, we are healed.
We read in Deuteronomy that anyone
who is hanged on a tree is accursed.
Paul says that thus Jesus became a curse for us, became sin for us. This
does not mean that Jesus was bad or evil.
It means that the very fact that we humans 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.
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 take this very issue as the point of departure for their
use of this passage as a club to beat up on others rather than an affirmation
of God’s universal love.
The
passage is clear: it is not at all that
God or Jesus will come some time in the future and judge them, condemn them,
and send them to everlasting pain. No,
the passage says clearly 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 are, at least for now, as good as condemned,
because they 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 in giving us compassion, make us able to be instruments of
God’s compassion. His cruel death on the
cross came from our sick system of society, something that in some ways remains
very much with us to this day.
But
his rising from the dead verified his teaching, and though it did not undo
anything that had been done, or erase the profound solidarity and love God
showed us in condescending to be one of us, it meant the cross was not
meaningless, and that life is not random or pointless. Christ’s victory over death saves us by
pointing all the more to God’s love and the sickness of broken humanity. If Jesus on the cross is like the 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.
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