March 14, 2021 – Numbers 21:4-9, John 3:14-21
Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21
Contemplating Human Sinfulness and Divine Love
Fourth Sunday in Lent – March 17, 2021
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The wages of sin is death, Paul famously says in Romans 6:23.
And that is pretty clearly true.
When we hurt one another, when we hurt ourselves,
when we engage in any behaviour that causes harm, the result is deathly,
it takes away from life, the good full life our creator intends for us.
In Lutheran understanding, the fundamental sin is not trusting God.
You can read all about it way back in Genesis 3.
Everything was going along swimmingly,
the man and woman in the garden were having a swell time, everything was beautiful, everything was good.
Until they were tempted to not trust God for their well-being and
were encouraged to take matters into their own hands and become gods unto themselves.
Not only do they stop trusting God – they stop trusting each other,
and seek to lord it over one another – and from there it all unravels.
From gender equality to gender inequity, lies, mistrust, and abuse ensue –
and soon the first murder in Genesis 4.
And so on.
The wages of sin is death.
In the reading from Numbers this morning you have a similar situation.
The people are wandering in the desert after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.
God has promised to look after them while they wander and learn a new way of being and living.
God has promised to provide them.
The people complain, of course, that they are going to starve and die of thirst.
So God gives water from a rock.
And God provides manna to eat in the morning.
When the people complain they have no meat, God then provides quail in the evening.
And so on.
After all this, the people still complain about “this miserable food” and ask Moses and God:
“Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?”
Really? Really? After all God has done? Really?
I take it God just gets fed up and sends them poisonous snakes.
I think you have to understand this, though, in the context of the larger biblical story.
The people in the desert don’t trust God, but as we know, not trusting God has consequences.
The interesting part of the story, of course, is the cure.
The people ask to be saved, and naturally God responds.
God tells Moses: put a bronze image of a snake on a pole and lift it up for the people to see.
Those who gaze on it will be healed and live.
Okay: that is pretty weird!!!!! Like: what??????
I think you have to understand it something like this:
The people are forced to look at the consequences of their sin, of what they have done.
Take a good hard look at what happens when God is not trusted to be good, and to be God.
There is something healing at looking at the consequences of our sinful actions,
as difficult as that can be.
Jesus, of course, refers to this story in his strange and
equally baffling encounter with Nicodemus as night.
I do love the story of this long, strange conversation between Jesus and this Jewish leader.
Nicodemus is a Jewish religious leader who has heard of and seen all that Jesus is doing.
He has seen something happening in and through Jesus that he can’t quite explain.
He has seen and heard of healing and love and celebration.
He has never encountered anything quite like this before and so he asks Jesus in confusion:
“Where are you from?”
To which Jesus ultimately responds with the most famous verse in the New Testament:
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever sets their heart on him
will not perish but find fullness of life.
In other words, Jesus is from God.
This begins a long journey for Nicodemus, a long journey into just what it means for him that
through Jesus God has come to love the whole world.
In John’s Gospel, the world God loves is not just the world of butterflies and rainbows.
In John’s Gospel, the world includes the dark places of the world as well, the not so nice parts.
In Jesus, God has come to love the whole world, every single part of it,
and every single part of you, to redeem it and love it into loveliness.
And the way in which God redeems the world through Jesus is a strange one:
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
that whoever sets their heart on him may have fullness of life.
Jesus is, of course, referring to being lift up on the cross when he is crucified.
I mean, Jesus is smart: Jesus knows where his ministry is heading.
Jesus knows that opposing the reign of Rome with the reign of God will result in his death.
Jesus held up a mirror to the ungracious reigns of this world and
contrasted them with the reign of God.
Jesus exposed the sham of this world’s kingdoms showing how far they are from caring for
the most vulnerable of this world and how they exist for their own benefit and
the benefit of those at the top.
Of course he would be crucified for exposing this.
But here’s the thing: when he is lifted up on the cross,
he exposes the poison of this world’s empires.
When we look up at him on the cross, we are forced to see the consequences of sinfulness.
In the wonderful words of Debi Thomas in her commentary on this passage this week:
In the cross, we are forced to see what our refusal to love, our indifference to suffering, our craving for violence, our resistance to change, our hatred of difference, our addiction to judgment, and our fear of the Other must wreak.
But just here, the cross – like the pole with the snake – not only exposes the consequences of sin,
it also, somewhat mysteriously, heals us from them.
Debi Thomas goes on:
When the Son of Man is lifted up, we see with chilling and desperate clarity our need for a God who will take our most horrific instruments of death and transform them, at great cost, for the purposes of resurrection.
Well, this is the heart of the Gospel and the heart of Christian life:
God’s ability to turn death into life,
to turn a horrific instrument of death into not just a symbol of love,
but into something that turns deathly behaviour into life-giving behaviour,
something that changes hearts.
When are forced to look at Jesus on the cross, we see not only the results of human sinfulness,
we see the great, tremendous, universal love of God that has absolutely no conditions.
We see, in the cross, the extent of God’s love for us and for our world.
With the worst we can do to God and to one another, God still loves us –
because only love will change us lastingly for the better.
There is nowhere and nothing God does not love and does not seek to transform.
God loves without limits and without conditions.
For God so loved the world.
Not just you, not just me. But our neighbours near and far, all the good bits of the world and
all the bad bits because
God seeks through love to transform all of it into goodness and life.
It is this love that loves without limits and without conditions that is the gospel, the good news.
It is this sort of love that changes us,
and it is why we are invited to contemplate the cross in worship every Good Friday
with the section of the service called, “The Adoration of the Cross.”
Ultimately it is why our welcome statement reads the way it does:
We welcome all seeking God’s love and grace. We welcome all because God welcomes all, regardless of age, ability, health, ethnicity, gender identity, language, sexual orientation, life circumstances, marital status, race, or anything else which sometimes divides us. We welcome diversity and uniqueness. Our unity is in Christ, whose grace is freely given to all.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his first sermon in Montgomery, Alabama in 1954
he preached on John 3:16.
God’s love has breadth, he said. It is a big love; it’s a broad love. . . . God’s love is too big to be limited to a particular race. . . . It is too great to be encompassed by any single nation. God is a universal God. . . . This [unlimited love] has been a ray of hope and has given a sense of belonging to hundreds of disinherited people [who proclaiam]: You ain’t no slave. . . . But you’re God’s child.
These are the consequences of God’s love, which are bigger and greater and deeper than
the consequences of human sinfulness and the human need to lord it over others.
The solution is in a love so deep and so broad and so profound that it changes us to our core,
a love revealed on a cross we are invited to contemplate every day.
Okay: maybe the wages of sin is death – but, as Paul continues in Romans,
the gift of God is fullness of life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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