Standing Under the Scriptures
March 29, 2009

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this Sunday are:

Jeremiah 31-31-34: The prophet announces the new covenant, in which the Lord’s law will be in the people’s hearts.

John 12.20-33: Just following his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, Jesus speaks of his impending death and its implications.

Our first reading last Sunday (Numbers 21.4-9) was concerned with an episode in the long wilderness wanderings of the Israelites on their way from Egypt to the Promised Land. Initially it seemed a little bizarre. In the course of their journeying the people have become disheartened, as we well might in similar circumstances. And in their discouragement and anxiety they turn against Moses their leader and the Lord himself, saying, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food [manna!].” Whereupon the Lord sends fiery/poisonous snakes to bite them, many fatally. This brings them to acknowledge that they have sinned, and to ask Moses to intercede for them. The Lord responds by instructing Moses to make a serpent and set it on a pole. So Moses sets on a pole one made of bronze. And the people, when bitten, look at it and live.

In sorting out this apparent strangeness, we supposed that the Lord sent the serpents not so much to punish the people as to rescue them, by bringing them to repentance. For in turning against him and against Moses they had cut themselves off from their one source of salvation and life. And only in turning back to the Lord could they be redeemed. As for the healing efficacy of the bronze serpent, we adduced a parallel in our own experience, in terms of which this might be understood. When we have a phobia or a problem that seems beyond us, the best way of dealing with it turns out to be not to ignore it in hopes that it will go away. It is instead to confront it squarely, in effect to look at it. It then tends to shrink to manageable proportions. In my Foreign Service tour in Vietnam in the latter1960s, I was frequently required to fly around the country in small planes, subject not only to monsoon weather but to being shot at, and down, by the Viet Cong. I had not had any special fear of flying previously. But after that I had none at all.

Reverting to the Israelites, in looking at the bronze serpent they were not only confronting the source of their dis-ease, they were reminded of the Lord’s institution of it for their healing. I would see another instance already in the Old Testament, in Psalm 22. It begins, as we know, with, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me?” Then in verse 11, “Be not far from me, for trouble is near and there is none to help.” (In Hebrew the play on the word for “be far” is more direct than in English.) So from the initial questioning the Psalmist goes to the acceptance of the remoteness of any help. And in this acceptance of it, somehow God becomes present. Jesus is recorded as quoting only the first verse on the cross. But it is reasonable to suppose that he meant to convey verse 11 also.

Our second reading, John 3.14-21, contains verse 16, perhaps the best-known verse in the New Testament: “For God so loved the world… “ But as we saw, it contains much more than that. It goes on to say that God sent his Son not to condemn the world but to save it, through him. This does not mean that there is no condemnation, or judgment, however. For a distinction is made between those who believe and those who do not. And the latter are condemned. Still it is not by the Son that they are condemned but by themselves. For they avoid the light that has come into the world, namely the Son, because their deeds are evil. And they do not want the light to expose them. But the believers, whose deeds are true, come to the light. They do this not so that they may receive credit for their deeds but so that their deeds may be seen to have been wrought “in God,” to whom and not to us, therefore, be the glory.

But in some ways the most interesting part of the passage is the first two verses, which we then considered. These hark back directly to our first reading.

“And 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.”

The link between the lifting of the bronze serpent on the pole and of Jesus on the cross was evident enough. We could see also a connection between the life given back to the snake-bitten Israelites and the eternal life conferred by Jesus. But we wondered in what way Jesus was comparable to a serpent. Our analysis of our first reading, in Numbers, turned out to be applicable here. Jesus on the cross was bearing our sins. And in looking at him there we are looking also at our sins. Further, on the cross he was utterly powerless, the more so because of the shame attached at the time to such a death. So we are looking also at our powerlessness, the powerlessness even of our death. The New Testament regularly speaks of Jesus as having overcome both sin and death, for us. And it was God who instituted that he would overcome in this way, out of his love for the world, so that we “might be saved through him.”

In his sermon our rector put the capstone on all this by citing the store that Luther set by these verses. I had heard and read much about Luther, but I had not run across this particular insight of his, like most of his others truly profound. Some words of Luther’s relating to it, albeit rather informal, are worth citing.

“You cannot become before God who you would like to be if you first have not become before yourself and others who he wants you to be. And God intends that you should become before yourself and others what you really are---namely a sinner, bad, sickly, perverse, and devilish. These are your names. These are the things that you are in truth and they are your humiliation. As soon as that happens you are already before God who you wanted to be: holy, good, true, straight, and pious. On this basis you become a new person before yourself, others, and before God. Why are you surprised? Why are you bothered when you displease yourself and others? Because if you don’t displease them, you cannot please God.”

To this I would only add that Cranmer caught this insight singularly in the Confession and the Prayer of Humble Access of his Eucharistic liturgy, now our Rite I---an insight which so much of today’s church seems to have missed completely. For in reciting these sections of it, with conviction, we indeed become sinners before ourselves and others. But at the same time, as Luther so remarkably perceived, we become holy before God.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted