Looking Up to the Lifted One

…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)

The serpent lifted on the pole is an ancient symbol for healing. The Hebrews had their story of Moses in the wilderness being commanded by God to make such an idol when the people starving and hungry also suffer the affliction of a plague of snakes. The people looked to the bronze serpent to live. The Greek god, Asclepius, was a practitioner of medicine; and his emblem, the snake on the pole continues to be a sign for medical practitioners to this day.

It’s a strange symbol. Why does a snake on a pole symbolise healing? Some people have suggested that the image of snakes shedding their skins is a symbol for renewal. Others have suggested that there is a link between the venom of snakes and the medicines offered by healers. Certainly, the Greek word for medicine, pharmakon, could just as easily mean poison. It is a strange symbol.

And it is stranger still to find this symbol, firstly in a story from the Hebrews and secondly in our reading from the Gospel of John for today. Although clearly John is wanting to depict Jesus as Healer.

…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)

John is using this imagery to affirm Jesus as healer of the cosmos, not just of physical bodies, not just of humanity, but of the whole of Creation, the cosmos.

For God so loved the world [the cosmos] that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. (John 3:16)

It’s the hub of the message of John's Gospel: the focal point of the good news which John has to give about Jesus. For John, the mission of Jesus originates in the love of God for the cosmos, the whole created order, and in God's desire for its healing, for its salvation. But it is an unusual recipe for healing offered in Jesus, an unusual medicine. At first glance, it could well look like and taste just like poison. For like the prescription given for the Hebrew people in the wilderness, the cure offered the cosmos is bit weird.

Think about it! The Hebrews are in trouble. They're in the wilderness, complaining yet again about God and about the wilderness and about leaving Egypt. So, as the story goes God sends them some more trouble to occupy their attention—a brood of venomous snakes. And lo, 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." (Numbers 21:7) And Moses prays to God and God says to make an idol, to make a graven image, to make a serpent and erect it as a standard so that when the people are seen they can look towards it and recover from their bites.

Can you see the problem? The Hebrews are the people who are not into graven images. The Hebrews are the people who have learned to worship a God who has apparently explicitly told them not to make graven images.

Now, we can make all sorts of fine distinctions in an attempt to talk ourselves out of that dilemma but the fact is the people of God make an idol according to the direction of God. It doesn't make sense to everything they would have and we would have understood their idea of God to be. And it's the same with Jesus.

Like the Hebrew cure for snakebite, God's recipe for the salvation of the cosmos goes against everything humans, everything we would usually like to understand our God to be.

For John, the whole of God's intended salvation for the cosmos is achieved on the cross. The resurrection is only important because of the crucifixion. For John, Jesus is glorified at the point at which he is in the most vulnerable, the most hopeless situation he could possibly have faced—being strung up, being lifted up, on the cross as a criminal for all to see. It  doesn't make sense. People like to picture God in glory enthroned and surrounded by bright light unable to be dirtied. It gives us a sense of security to have an all-knowing, all-powerful head-kicker out there on our side.

But Jesus, for John, goes against all our human understandings of what a real God should be. Yet there it is—the reality of the Christian faith—a dying man on a cross deserted by most of his friends, alone and without hope. God lifted up in the fullness of God's glory. No wonder it was said that such an idea was an offense to the Jews and folly to the Greeks.

It doesn't make sense—this great God that people like to keep at a distance achieves the salvation of the whole of the created order at this momentous point of weakness as Jesus dies on a cross with his arms outstretched in a symbolic gesture of embrace for a dying world—a God who loves enough to die for a world which rejects that love. How could anything seem more helpless and hopeless?

But this is the centre of the Gospel, the centre of our faith, the centre of our lives. Those who see it, who understand, who believe it enter into the fullness of the life of God. Those who do not see it, who do not understand, who do not believe it by their own attitudes cut themselves off from the very source of life. And that doesn't mean that God is up there making a list of judgement decisions about whose going to heaven and whose going to hell. That's definitely not what the text says. The text says that God is opening God's self utterly to humanity through Jesus and the cross. Judgement is a result of people choosing to walk away from a God who does not meet their desires for the kind of controller who can be given responsibility and blamed for everything. Judgement is not meted out but is brought upon oneself. Judgement may come as a result of Christ's mission, but it is not its original intention.

You see our God isn't playing the power game. Our God isn't playing the ruling monarch who has power of life and death. Our God is offering God's very self to us so that we too as a part of the whole of creation might become whole, might be healed, might know the fullness of life that there can be.

Our God dared to be one of us. Our God dared to make fun of Jewish legalism and of Greek images. Our God dared to become Jesus, to die on the cross in order that we might understand that we can have life in all its fullness. Not so that we might run to God in fear but that we might make the journey gently on our own two feet to a God who wants to stand beside us not above us.

As Moses lifted up the bronze serpent so Jesus was lifted up for all to see that our God has the freedom to be the God who God is, the one who loves us utterly, enough to die on a cross to show us how to be free.

Our God loves us this much... Only this truth can set us free.