NewCreation

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the fourth Sunday in Lent. In today's Gospel we carry on pretty closely from where we were last Sunday. Last Sunday, if you remember, Jesus performed the cleansing of the Temple and gave us a sign: "If you destroy this Temple, in three days' time I will raise it up." And the question was, what sort of sign was this? What was the meaning of what he was doing? Thereafter he hung around in Jerusalem, and the issue of what sign he was doing was talked about by different people. Amongst the people who came to talk to him about the signs that he was doing was Nicodemus, and it stresses that Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And so we have the beginnings of the discussion between Jesus and Nicodemus – the Pharisee who came to Jesus by night. In other words, he didn't want to be caught talking to Jesus; he wanted to find out what was going on without being exposed. And he was considered to be a representative, if you like, of the Mosaic teaching. If the Jews in the Temple had been, if you like, those in charge of the cult of Yahweh, the Pharisees were those who took very seriously Moses as teacher. In fact, when Nicodemus doesn't get one of the things Jesus says to Nicodemus – "Are you a teacher in Israel?" – actually he doesn't say that; that's a mistranslation. He says, "Are you the teacher in Israel?" In other words, he's referring, and uses "you" plural, he's referring in other words to Nicodemus as the representative of the cathedra of Moses, if you like, the Mosaic teaching. So, if you like, on the one hand we have the Temple, on the other hand we have the Law. Jesus is going to be explaining what he's about, what the sign means, in the midst of both of these. Last week it was with the Temple; this week it is with the Law. So that brings us to the beginning of today's Gospel, which is about halfway through Jesus's discussion with Nicodemus. And he starts by appealing to Moses, explaining what he's talking about in relation to Moses: "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up." Okay, this is very odd. It's an odd little incident in the book of Numbers, Numbers 21, where after Aaron has died – just as he's about to die, he's stripped of his priestly garments and then left to die, his son is vested, and then the priesthood starts up again – Israel carries on its trek, but they fall into a fit of complaining. The Lord gets annoyed with them and he sends poisonous snakes amongst them. Or – because the translation could be exactly the same either way – fiery seraphs. Now, fiery seraphs were symbols of the bad priests essentially, and it may be that this passage in Numbers is a part of a Second Temple period row about the priesthood. There were a good deal of Second Temple rows that have found their ways into stories of how Moses and Aaron and Miriam worked things out between them. This might be one of them. But anyhow, the poisonous serpents or the fiery seraphs, whatever it was, they were biting and causing harm to the people. Just as in our first reading today, the priests and all those who were around them in the temple at the time of Zedekiah were doing terrible things and doing nothing good for the people, so it was not surprising that the Lord had the temple destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. So the people in the desert were dying of the bites of these poisonous serpents — or was it fiery seraphs? — and people complained to Moses, and so Moses, showing how things were going to be, made a bronze serpent, lifted it up, exalted it. In other words, from the same thing that caused the poison, he made the remedy. This is an absolute standard trope, something which we know ourselves. You know what is a vaccine but a little bit of what causes us trouble, in such a way that we protect ourselves against it — the poison turned into a remedy. The same word, pharmakon, can both mean a poison and a remedy in Greek. So this is standard. But Jesus is bringing out something rather remarkable here, because he says, okay, what Moses did was he took the poisonous reality, the fiery serpents, the fiery seraphs, and he offered up something better than them — another fiery serpent, made of bronze — and if they looked at it, and exalted it, they lived. So that's what's going to happen with me. In other words, he's saying: what I do may look like a priestly sacrifice. And of course in one way it is, but it's exactly the reverse of that. It's the remedy to the whole of the sacrificial world, which tends to bite and destroy people. I'm going to be doing the exact reverse, enabling people to live by that which seems to be that which killed them. That's going to be the sign. So the Son of Man must be lifted up in the same way. So this priestly anointed figure is going to be lifted up, and people are going to be able to live through that. They're going to be able to say, "Oh yes, he's done this for us, therefore no one is against us, therefore we don't need to sacrifice anymore, therefore we don't need to drive our goodness over against other people anymore, therefore we don't need laws to live by — we can work out what is true, because we can trust that the Creator will make these things available for us." So that's all being hinted at in Jesus's answer to Nicodemus. And then Jesus gives his most famous line — maybe the most famous line in the Bible — which is translated here, as so often: "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." Okay, the little word "so" is almost certainly better translated as "in this way": "For God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him…" In other words, this is not Jesus talking about the intense passion, the emotional degree of God's love. It's talking about the demonstrative way it worked. This fits with the fact that previously we've had the importance of looking upon the exalted serpent, and everyone who believes in him now. In other words, it's the demonstration that is important here. "For God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son" — and again the Greek monogenes is interchangeable from that Abraham story, which you remember with agapetos, "beloved": the only son and the beloved son are the same. This is another reference to Jesus fulfilling the Abrahamic vision. "God will provide" — here is what it's going to look like. God is going to provide. This is the one who is going to be given, because he is exalted, because everything that was done to him — the sacrificing of him, if you like, which was just a criminal and violent act, just a brutal execution — because of that will be made available. Those who believe that he occupied that place deliberately, generously, for people rather than as an act of judgment against them, those people will know that they are loved, they will know that they have passed through judgment, "so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life." Once you know that, you'll start to be able to live with your life opening out for the ages. That's the sense of eternal life. We tend to think of that in a rather dualistic way, but it's much more open than that — it's the beginning of something, you know, living in the age of God now. Once you realize that, you begin to have already in you the capacity to be able to live for and run by God, no longer frightened by death, no longer bowed down by the way that death frightens people into making sacrifices. "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world" — or to judge the world, the same — "but in order that the world might be saved through him." So this is vital. Here is Jesus explaining to a follower of Moses that the purpose of this one coming in is not to judge. There's always the danger that if you treat the law and ways of behavior as central, then judging is what it's all about. Jesus is making perfectly clear: no, no, I'm not actually here to judge people's behavior, I'm here to make completely different sorts of behavior possible. Anyone who understands what I'm opening up for will already be able to start behaving in quite different ways. "Those who believe in him are not condemned." I don't need to hide who I am… If I'm aware that the one who is opening up the hidden places in which we cast people out to us, to make ourselves good and then pass ourselves off as decent because we're over against them – once you know that the one who is our cast-out one actually occupied that place out of love for us, we no longer need to be run by fear. We know that he loves us, he doesn't condemn us even for what we did, so we can start to behave differently without worrying about it. Whereas those who hang on to the old way, making ourselves good by condemning someone else, casting them out in the old method of sacrifice, the old method of the fiery serpents – they're the fiery seraphs in all our societies and cultures. I make myself good along with others who are good like me by casting someone out. That way I will continue to hide who I am. "Those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God" – the only Son, the beloved Son. In other words, they haven't seen the dynamic. The name is the dynamic of God's presence. We're talking about something three-dimensional, which would later be called the Holy Spirit, if you like. The three-dimensional presence of God – that's his name hallowed amongst us. That's his goodness showing forth in how he occupied the space so as to enable us to live, so as to enable us not to be judged and not to judge each other. "This is the judgment: that the light has come into the world and people love darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil." And this is true; this is how we work. If you're desperate to be good, you'll find a way to be good by casting out someone and making them bad. It's only if you believe that someone actually loves you, that you don't need to make yourself good, that you will allow your deeds to come into the light. You'll no longer try to cover them up by making yourself good over against someone, by hiding your shame and creating a fake goodness at the expense of someone else. "For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed." Then we would far rather usually have a cover-up. Not painful for me – I get a quick shot of goodness, of fake meaning, and think that I'm okay. And he's offering much, much more than that. "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." Now notice what Jesus is doing. He's talking outside the Temple and to the representative of Moses. He's talking about the relationship between behavior – which means commandments – and God. He's indicating that actually there's going to be a criterion that's present. The criterion is the self-giving Son, the self-giving lamb, who looks like The poison of sacrifice, and in fact is undoing the whole world of sacrifice from within. And that this is something which Moses, after all, understood – Jesus is suggesting. Hence his lifting up of the serpent not as a form of judgment but as a form of bringing to life. So we see Jesus, having explained himself in the Temple, now explaining himself in relation to the law, and showing how he's undoing something from within so as to make something a new way of life possible for us. In fact, this is how he was undoing the old Temple, which is going to be destroyed, and offering something completely different instead: the way of being that brings people to life so they can share the life of God, starting even now. In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen.