That the World Might Be Saved
(Look Up From Time to Time)
Numbers 21:4-9, John 3: 14-19
Lent 4B

This strange little story from the Old Testament was quite the buzz this week—at least in the circles in which I travel. I talked about it Monday, with the lectionary study group—which it is still not too late to join, by the way. I talked about it Tuesday in the virtual sense with a sermon discussion group I have joined in an online forum. I talked about it with the clergy women friends I had my monthly lunch with on Wednesday, and I talked about it on Thursday night with the local first-call clergy group I meet with, also once a month.

And although I discussed this story with people who probably collectively have over 100 years of Bible study under our belts, nobody really quite knows what to think about this little story. The most we can hope to do is to listen to the Sprit as best we can. One person even declared it categorically unpreachable, which I kind of took as a personal challenge, so there you have it.

So…what’s going on here in Numbers? Well, the children of Israel are still journeying to the Promised Land, still out in the wilderness. They’ve had their battles; they’ve won some and they’ve had some setbacks. It must have seemed sometimes as if God was literally on their side: some battles seem to be won so easily, without lifting a finger, and yet there are just some boundaries they cannot penetrate no matter how hard they try. They are tired, they are far from home, even if that home was Egypt. They are hungry for familiar food, and thirsty for familiar water. The manna that seemed to be such a blessing earlier in the journey has become tiresome to them, perhaps it has become a symbol that they are still wanderers, and not yet home. A granola bar on an airplane ride sure might hit the spot, but if the plane ride lasted for years and there was nothing but granola bars…well I think we can begin to see how it might start to grate on our nerves.

Even though the children of Israel know that God has delivered them time and time again, or perhaps precisely because they know that God has delivered them, they complain. Now, let’s think about this for minute. You’d have to be pretty familiar with someone to complain openly about the food that they offered you, wouldn’t you? This tells us that the Israelites have formed some relationship with God, rocky though it might be at times. God is no stranger to the children of Israel, nor they to God; that’s the good news about their complaining.

Maybe they thought they were just letting off steam, that no one would take them seriously. But Someone did. I’m pretty sure this next part is what my friend thought rendered this story unpreachable. The children of Israel grumbled, and something happened. Before they knew it, there were snakes everywhere, and not just harmless garter snakes that used to live in my parent’s garden when I was growing up. These were fiery serpents, and they bit. And some of those whom they bit died.

What does this mean for us? Is God hovering on the margins of our lives, waiting for us to complain, so that God can say to us, “You want to cry? I’ll give you something to cry about!” Honestly, if that is what God is trying to tell us with this passage, I would have to close my Bible, close my mouth and go sit down. Because I don’t know how to preach that. If we stopped at verse 6, if we ended this story as soon as the snakes showed up, it’s a pretty awful story, indeed.

But that’s not the end of the story, for the Israelites, for the snakes, for God, or for us. There is really no way around the description of God sending the snakes, so we have to accept that there were snakes, no matter how puzzling it is to us. But we can’t really overlook the snakes because Scripture tells us that the people did not overlook the snakes. When there are fiery poisonous snakes biting and killing your friends, and coming after you next, you tend to notice. And whether God meant the snakes for a wakeup call or not, that is what the snakes became.

The snakes changed the way that the people felt about hardship. No longer worried about manna, they were worried about poisonous snakebites—justifiably so I would think. The Israelites realized that complaining about the food was a ridiculous thing to do when you are getting eaten by snakes, and their focus was changed. They did something they hadn’t done very often. They confessed their sin. They asked for help.

The relationship between God and the Israelites is not a perfect one; no relationship that involves humans can be. Even at our best we grumble and complain; we lose focus of what’s important, we take things for granted. But occasionally, either because of circumstances or because of divine intervention, or just plain Providence, we get it right, just like the Israelites did. We see where we have fallen short, we recognize that we are not all we can be, and we look to God for help.

The help that God sent to the children of Israel probably took them by surprise. When Moses first showed up with a bronze serpent on a pole, just as God told him to, I can imagine that those suffering from snake bites thought it was just another strike against them. Perhaps they thought that somehow Moses was taunting them with the very symbol of the thing that frightened them the most. It wasn’t until they let go of their grumbling, and looked up, that they received the healing that they asked for.

Sometimes I worry that the danger in living the Christian life is that there seems to be so much opportunity, so much encouragement for navel-gazing. Now, I’m all for living the self-examined life. In fact I find it very unfortunate when people live a life unexamined—the kind that Socrates said was not worth living. But our Scripture today seems to be telling us to look up once in a while, and notice the healing, the deliverance, the redemption in our midst. The kind that can only come from a God who loves us as God’s very own children.

Of course, this short story in Numbers is not even the last word on the bronze snake. Eventually the snake itself became a god, a thing to be worshipped and it had to be destroyed because it had ceased to be the symbol for God’s love and care for God’s own. The people for whom God had provided life-giving healing, even after they grumbled and complained, those people repaid God’s generosity with idolatry. It seems we are not quick studies, we humans. We are fragile and forgetful, and downright predictable in our taking things for granted.

But God does not forget. And God’s predictability lies in the way God cares for us, and provides for our redemption, over and over again. In the gospel passage for today, Jesus reminds Nicodemus of this wilderness incident when he is talking with him hundreds of years later. Just as a bronze serpent, the symbol of the sin of the Israelites was lifted up and became a source of healing for them if only they would look up from time to time to remember that God loved them, so would Jesus be lifted up for all to see and know and believe that only God brings salvation.

You see, brothers and sister in Christ, there came a time when God was no longer satisfied with sending the beloved children mere symbols of redemption, healing, and love. No longer content to be perceived by us as hovering on the margins of our lives, merely watching over us, God needed to be fully with us on this earth. Our bronze serpent on a pole has transformed into the cross. A symbol for death and destruction has become for us the very symbol of freedom, redemption, grace, healing, and love for all humanity.

John 3:16 is perhaps the most memorized verse on earth. Remember seeing, at large sporting events, someone holding up a sign that says “John 3:16” in the background? For everyone who was familiar with the New Testament, that sign became shorthand for "God loves us." But I always wondered why people stop at verse 16. Verse 17 is for me the one that makes it all make sense: For God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. There is so much grace in that verse, beloved. In fact, it is pure grace. Verse 17 says that we can stop beating each other over the head with crosses. Verse 17 says that our snakes have forever been rendered harmless. Whatever troubles have been biting us on the ankles, might continue to bite us, but they can never kill us again.

All God asks of us is that we look up from time to time, that we remember from whom comes our help, remember “who so loved the world.” We can stop placing our trust in the bronze serpents of this world, in the petty idols we have created to heal us—those will never work, anyway. The One who created us and loves us and rendered all our snakes harmless and gave the best part of Godself to be among us wants us to look up, and live.

Thanks be to God!