Year B

John 3:14-21

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

A Love That Lifts to Life

Through the years, as I have read and studied the scriptures, I have become more and more convinced that God is not a God of wrath, or set on condemning or vengeful destruction, but on healing, on rescuing or saving the creation that God loves. I have difficulty as many of us have had difficulty resolving what is for us, a conflict between the understanding of God’s love or grace and God’s wrath. For some, wrath is the face God wears in the Old Testament times and grace is the face God shows us in the New Testament. For others, wrath seems to be the way God punishes us when we are disobedient while grace is God’s reward for those who do God’s will.  

The great theologian Martin Luther sought to resolve this conflict when he wrote that wrath and grace are like the two sides of a coin, the two sides of God’s love. Whether we experience God’s face of grace or wrath, what we are facing is God’s actions meant to drive us to God and to the gift of salvation. Our texts today are all about God’s saving intervention in our lives. They speak to God’s wrath as God’s unwillingness to tolerate evil as evidence of his unyielding opposition to sin. That opposition is meant to awaken and challenge us back to God just as God’s love seeks to woo us home again. We need to be saved and God’s nature of love seeks to save us.

Paul writes today in his letter to the Ephesians that by God’s grace we have been saved. Even when we fail, God offers love, mercy, compassion and reconciliation. It is a gift offered to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; a gift offered from God who loves us in each moment of every day. Paul says, we were dead through our sin “But God made us alive together in Christ” and “raised us up” to follow his example of love and to place our trust in God through him. Jesus does not just save us from death and hell, we are saved for life-life that was meant to be. It is beyond our capacity to save ourselves, and the Old Testament text today presents such a situation.

Israel’s wandering in the wilderness depicts another incident in which the people of Israel become their own enemy by rebelling against God. According to Hebrew tradition, this incident described in Numbers is the last and the worst of Israel’s abandonment of God while wandering in the wilderness. The people, seeking to avoid the enemy territory of Edom, are wearing out and have become impatient. They voice their complaints to God and Moses. Once again Moses hears the familiar lament, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt to die in this desert, where there is no food or water?

God heard their complaint and God’s reaction is to allow poisonous snakes to bite and kill many people. This story is a difficult one for me and maybe for you also because the people certainly are behaving in an obnoxious manner, but the punishment seems a bit severe. Does God really turn rattlesnakes loose among the people? It’s very possible. Yet, I’m sure I’m not the only one here today who has come near a snake and went the other way quickly so it is hard for me to imagine the people not trying to get out of the snakes way. Unless there were so many, that the people could not get out of harm’s way. They plead with Moses to intercede with God as they acknowledge their speaking against God and Moses and God provides a simple way for those who have been bitten to live.

There tormentor becomes their savior. Once Moses makes it possible for them to gaze fully upon what they are afraid of, they gain access to its healing power and they are saved from death. They are “healed” and “rescued” as the psalm affirms today. This OT story of the bronze serpent raised on a pole provides the backstory for the Gospel today making a clear analogy between the bronze serpent being set on a pole and lifted, and Jesus being lifted up. The purpose for the Son of God being lifted up is that God loves the world in this way that he gave his Son so that “Everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.” As the Israelites look at the bronzed serpent and live, so those who believe in the Son have eternal life.

We may note that it is no death that accomplishes salvation, but belief that does so. No serpent dies for the sake of the Israelites’ healing and John emphasizes that we are not saved from death by the death of Jesus. Rather, we are saved for life through belief in the Son, the light of the world. John presents Jesus as the true light that shines with divine brilliance into the world’s sin or darkness. Some people are drawn into this light; others, however, are not and they retreat from it. Lent is the time for us to decide which we are drawn to and for repentance. This crisis of decision is clearly voiced today in this portion of Jesus’ astonishing nighttime conversation with Nicodemus.

This powerful meeting between Jesus and Nicodemus is so beautifully acted out in the movie The Chosen. You can watch this scene on YouTube. Jesus asks Nicodemus to be born again and follow him. He tells Nicodemus that what he will gain is far more than what he will ever gain from the world. By grace the faithful are saved. By grace through faith, the children of God are lifted to the very throne of God. As God lifted Jesus to the cross, God lifted him to resurrection life and lifts us to resurrection life. In spirit of our selves this is divine love, stronger than well-deserved judgment. A love of God that carried Israel during the time of wilderness and exile that was celebrated in the rebuilt temple.

It was God’s love that sent Jesus to teach that this love is not merely for those who look and think and believe like you and me, but even for our enemies and those who persecute us. It was God’s love that opened the hearts and doors of the first century church to not only Jews but to Gentiles; to not only those who were seen as worthy but also those whose very existence was troubling the sick and the poor. And it will be because of God’s love that the church will continue despite itself until Jesus returns. Even as the world resists and opposes God’s Son, God will persist in loving the world. The invitation of this Gospel is to recognize the love of God, believe and allow God to help us respond in a positive way to that love.

Nicodemus responded to God’s love as he stood up for Jesus in the Sanhedrin the final week of Jesus’ life. He threw dignity to the wind by carrying a sack of burial spices after the crucifixion to the tomb, when all seemed lost. He evidently looked up to Jesus on the cross and was ready to believe and got busy. God once looked upon a people who were dying and God’s response was to give them the remedy on a pole. So that all who looked to it, all who looked to the Son lifted high on a cross and believed would live. “For God so loved the world.”