Be Lifted Up

John 3:14-21

Numbers 21:4-9

Lent 4

March 11, 2018

William G. Carter

And 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. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

It is always risky to pick a single verse out of scripture. But if we are going to do it, John 3:16 is a pretty good verse.

Football evangelists paint the verse on large posters and hold them up in the end zone during football games, gaining it the title of “the End Zone verse.” The hope is that during a touchdown or extra point, someone will see that verse, look it up, and be instantly converted. That may be a superficial approach to evangelism, but I could never deny the Holy Spirit such an opportunity.

And John 3:16 is an excellent verse. Not only is it a pretty good summary of the entire Gospel of John, it points beyond itself to the whole stretch of God's saving story for all humanity.

God has a mission for this planet and its people. It is to offer the gift of life, which is so much more than respiration and brain activity; it is the “life of eternity.” That is the sense of the phrase zoe aionion, literally “life of eternity.” Jesus is sent to Earth as the mission of his Father, and the life they share in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit is now offered as a gift for all Humanity.

The gift is given yet must be received. The best way to receive the gift is by trusting it, by holding it in your heart and mind as the ultimate truth that the Triune God wishes all creatures to remain in the abundance of eternal fellowship. Not only do we live in the presence of the Trinity when we die, we live on through Christ and with Christ forever more. This life begins in the moment when we trust this gift to be true; from that moment, the Life goes on forever.

According to John, this is why God sends Jesus to the Earth, to the rebellious entity that John calls “the world.”

John 3:16 is a summary of what John wants to tell us about the Gospel. It’s glorious, it’s generous. We dare not make smaller, or reduce it to a “me-and-Jesus” relationship. John says, “everyone who believes.” The promise is for the whole “world.”

And he’s summarizing the whole Christ event, not singling out a moment of it. That’s important to remember, because to hear some well-intentioned Christians summarize the summary, they declare that John 3:16 is all about the cross.

Now wait a second. Did you hear anybody mention the cross in that verse? Let’s say it again: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Hmm…the verse doesn’t mention the cross at all. It talks about life, not death. It talks about the whole mission of God, and not merely a single event on a Friday afternoon.

To hear John tell the story of Jesus, it was always about life. “All things came into being through him…and what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.” This was his work from the beginning, says John. From the very beginning.

In this Gospel, Jesus gives life to the living. To the confused Pharisee, to the outcast woman of a different race, to the crippled man unable to climb into the miracle pool, Jesus cuts through the fog of religiosity and declares that God is alive. And his abundant gift of life is so effusive that he gives it to those threatened by death, first to a royal official’s son who is dying of a fever, and then most dramatically to his beloved friend Lazarus already in the tomb.

This is what it looks like when heaven invades the earth. Jesus says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (10:10)

To listen to John tell it, the problem is the world that God loves does not love God in return. “He came to his own,” says the Gospel, “and they would not receive him.” They shrugged him off, pushed him away. The people who purported to love God the most, namely the religious professionals, were obsessed with rules and regulations. The ceremonies that once were so full of power and transcendence has lost their juice.

So, they said things like, “You can’t heal somebody on the wrong day of the week.” Or “give us a sign to show you come from God” while he gave one sign after another. “Surely we see, don’t we?” and they didn’t perceive much at all.

Maybe you never noticed that John 3:16 goes on for a while. In verse 17, God is not interested in condemning the world. The mission of Jesus is to give life, to save life, to connect our time-bound mortal lives with the life of eternity.

But here’s the big crisis, says John: light has come into the darkness. That’s the good news and that’s the problem. Light has come - - and the darkness says, “Turn out the lights!” If the lights have come on, we will see what the darkness has been hiding.

Fred Craddock says the human situation before Jesus arrives is like hanging out in a darkened room with no windows. Since the lights are out, you don’t see that the floor is covered with cockroaches. Oh, once in a while you might step on one and hear a crunch, but you try to get it out of your mind. Occasionally one may crawl up your leg, but you can’t see it, so you shake it off.

And then, when the lights come on, you see quite clearly what you’ve been living with. It’s going to have to be addressed. The light has come.

Like the family that must confront a terrible smothered secret that everybody had been trying so hard to cover up. It’s painful. Nobody wants to mention it. Everybody avoids it. And the secret gets out, and suddenly everybody is really afraid because we are going to have to deal what we have worked so hard to avoid. Light comes into darkness. That’s a crisis. Jesus calls it a crisis, even though his mission is to bring the whole world into the light and life of God.

So that brings us back to the cross. We know God loves the world, that God sends Jesus to bring life into the world, and that the world resists this love and life. In the deep magic of the Gospel, the “death” of Jesus becomes the way to life. It is the paradox at the heart of all things, a mystery that takes a while to trust and settle in.

When John speaks of the cross in his Gospel, he uses a strange phrase to push through the paradox. He puts the phrase on the lips of Jesus: “When I am lifted up.” Four times in this Gospel, Jesus speaks of being “lifted up.” In case we miss what he’s talking about, he says in chapter 12, “This was to refer to the kind of death Jesus would die.” He will be “lifted up” on a cross.

And to tie it together, we step back a couple of verses to John 3:14-15. The Gospel writer John refers to a really strange story from the Hebrew archives. It’s that story from the 21^st chapter of the book of Numbers, an obscure and out of the way story. Nobody would ever have thought of it ever again, except that John says it is a way of understanding the mystery of the cross. The old story goes like this:

Moses was leading the people through forty years in the desert, and the people grumbled. The journey was taking longer than they wanted. It was stop and go and stop some more. The people had limited resources – all they had was sand for their sandwiches. So they grumbled. And they complained. And they bickered, and they blamed. It got ugly. Very ugly.

Suddenly some poisonous snakes appeared, and they started to bite. It seemed inevitable, in a way: there was poison in the air, so along come the poisonous snakes. Moses said, “God, what do I do?”

God gave some very strange advice: make a bronze snake, put it on a pole, and raise it up high. When the people look up at the symbol of their poison, the poison will be lifted away.

So… John refers to the story here in chapter three, and pauses, as if to say, “Do you get it?” No, not really.

He tries to make it clear: “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.” (3:14-15)

This is John’s view of the power of what happens on the cross. The poison of an angry, rebellious world is what puts Jesus on the cross. But when he is lifted up, God takes the poison away from those who are looking at the one who is lifted up.

Or as John the Baptist declares the first time he lays eyes on Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” The sin is taken away. Forgiven away. Released and dismissed away – as long as we let go of it, and as long as we lift our eyes to Jesus.

In the briefest of words, this is how the death of Jesus opens us to the “life of eternity.” Think of what the life of God’s eternity must be like: there are no more grudges, no more grabbing, no more grievances, no more mutually inflicted pain. In a nutshell, there will be no more sin, just the glory of God and eternity. And we can live that way now, if we let go of the poison and look up to Jesus.  

Once again, the End Zone Verse is lifted up: “For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son…” The whole Gospel is held in that single verse. God sends light into darkness. God sends life into a world preoccupied with death. And when his Son is lifted up on a cross to die, once again God offers light and life and the opportunity once again to begin anew, to let go the destructive impulses, and to trust there is light.

The eternal life of God is for us and for all. All we must do is trust that. Let go of the poison, look up to Jesus. 

Thank God.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.