The Serpent and the Cross

Today we celebrate the most central mark of Christianity: the Cross of Jesus Christ. Yes, the Resurrection is critical, as is Jesus’s ascension, and his expected return when all things will be gathered to God finally and completely. But it is on the Cross where Jesus reveals to us the fullness of who God is: for God so loves us that he sent his Son who came into this world, freely took on our sin and suffered the consequence of permanent death on the Cross, so that we don’t have to. God so loves us that he was willing to suffer our fate so that we might not die, but have eternal life, perfect life, with him. This is who our God is: perfect love. God is fully revealed in his humanity: to take on our flesh, our condition, our betrayal, our brokenness; to bear these things for us, so that he can retrieve us; so that he can heal us from the bite of sin that warps who we are and how we live in this world.

No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven. Not one of us is able to overcome sin - not through our actions, not through our sacrifices, not through our intellect or our supposed wisdom - to ascend to heaven. This is what we hear in John’s Gospel, echoed by St. Paul’s proclamation to his Corinthian congregation. So God in his wisdom comes to us in a way that demonstrates the foolishness and arrogance, the capriciousness, and violence of our presumption to chart our own way: he comes as an infant and dies as a man at our hands, at our ultimate sin in rejecting God. He sacrifices all that belongs to him, even his own life, so that he might, as God, overturn the consequence of that rejection - our separation from God - and join us to himself and so to eternal life in relationship with God: if we so desire it.

God’s love is eternal and unchanging. So we hear the story of the Israelites - folks struggling with frustration, doubt, anger, at God, jealousy, and warring with one another because of this uncertainty, folks just like us when we find ourselves in this kind of situation. Their poisonous words and actions became poisonous serpents that bit them and killed many of them. It’s a story that expands that of Adam and Eve and shows how sin filters out to all people everywhere. The Lord instructs Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” And of course this is precisely what happened: whenever a serpent bit someone that person would look at the serpent that Moses lifted up on the pole and live. The thing that kills them is transformed by God into what gives them life.

This foreshadows what happens on the Cross. The serpent of course represents sin throughout Scripture. We are bitten by the serpent, by sin, says Jesus, but “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of many be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” The thing that was the enemy, sin and death, is taken on, swallowed up, and so overcome by Christ who is crucified for the sin of the world. And now anyone that looks at him lifted up on the cross, having ascended to God, has life, and life eternal. This is the power and wisdom of God that overcomes our best engineered efforts to make the world in our own image just as did the Israelites.

God so loved the world that he came into it to save us from ourselves. Everyone - anyone - who simply trusts him, who is willing to seek, knock, ask, follow, will be saved. 

Do we really believe this? Do we believe it so that we’re willing to share this with friends, family, neighbours? Do we believe it so that we’re willing to share what we have? To give up our claim to our own possessions, our own lives, allow people to see God through us? Do we give of the resources we have like the wider mission of the church matters? Jesus Christ came down from heaven so that all might know God’s peace, love and comfort. Oh that we might lift him up here in this Church - in our individual and collective lives - that others might see, experience, believe and enter into God’s own life too. AMEN