The Son of Man Must Be What? (Numbers 21:4 - 9, John 2:14 - 22)

For those of you who don’t know, or have forgotten, or nodded off the last time—it can be a little boring—the lectionary is a list of four scriptures suggested for reading each Sunday. It goes on a three-year cycle, with one gospel the focus for each year, and if you’re thinking “wait a minute . . . I thought there were four gospels” you’d be right, there are four, but only three years, so we squeeze John in around the edges, because nobody knows what to do with John anyway, and Lent is one of those times. And not only is today’s second reading from John, but parts of it are in the lectionary twice, it’s so important, and the reason is the 16th verse, known to most people as John 3:16 which, for our more evangelical brothers and sisters, sums up the good news in one pithy saying: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. Note the begotten and believeth and whosoever . . . I, like Christians of a certain, uh, age, best remember the King James translation.

The reason a lot of folks know this verse even if they don’t know any others is because they’ve been beaten about the head and neck with it for years, again by some of our more evangelical sisters and brothers, as if by itself it could effect the salvation of which it speaks. Usually what it effects is annoyance at seeing it on billboards and in the end-zone at ball games and—this is my favorite—along the sides of U.S. highways like Burma Shave ads. For God—fencepost, telephone pole, fencepost—so loved—fencepost, driveway, fencepost—the world—dirt road, fenceposts, fencepost . . .

Ok, so you have to be a certain age to even remember the Burma Shave signs, but you get the picture . . . it’s certainly the most famous single verse in the New Testament, if not the whole Bible, and it’s a shame that it gets taken out of context so consistently. You remember context, don’t you? It’s that thing that helps determine meaning. And the context for John 3:16 goes something like this: “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.” And we get the lifting up part: it refers to Jesus’ being lifted up on the cross, which we remember at this time of year, but Jesus could have said “just as I lift up this stone here” or “just as Peter lifted up his toast at breakfast this morning” . . . instead he used some obscure episode from Numbers that Sharon just read to us.

And the first thing to notice about that is that it’s a bronze serpent that’ Moses nails up, not a flesh-and-blood one, wouldn’t want to get PETA after us, and he hangs it on a pole, and whoever looks upon it lives instead of dies of snake-bite. And the second thing to notice is that “poisonous serpent” is not a literal translation of what went after the Israelites. The Hebrew word is actually fiery serpent or “seraph,” which is found in other parts of the Old Testament. My favorite one is from Isaiah, where a bunch of seraphim (seraphim is the plural of seraph) are flapping around the Temple, and Isaiah describes them as having three pairs of wings: one pair covering their faces, one pair flying and one pair covering their, uh, “feet,” a Hebrew euphemism for “genitals.” Anyway, these flying snakes swoop down on Isaiah and brand him on the lips, thus imparting God’s word into his mouth.

And besides proven g that snake-on-a-pole is not the weirdest story involving seraphim in the Bible, what the Isaiah passage shows is that these critters tended to be associated with God’s word, and in Numbers that word is “judgement.” It seems Israelites are prone to murmuring, this is just the latest example in Numbers, it’s happened four times before, but this time they murmur against both Moses and God, which is apparently the last straw. And what they’re murmuring is “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” I guess it’s so bad they don’t know whether they have food or not.

Be that as it may, all the griping represents something that ticks God off more than anything else in the Bible: a lack of faith. I can just hear God now, saying “”Geez . . . I made you my people, brought you out of bondage to the Pharaoh, gave you my law, what do you want from me? When have I ever let you down?” And since in the Old Testament, our God is not only an awesome God but an irritable one as well, he dispatches those flying snakes.

And in the New Testament, lack of faith is arguably the main concern of Jesus, God’s anointed one, as well, so there’s definitely a parallel here in John to that strange story, and it fits perfectly with John’s theology of Christ as the Word. Just as the seraphim were the word of God to Isaiah and Moses, Jesus is the word of God here in John. But we have to be really careful here: as I stressed at the outset, what Moses nailed to a tree was not a living creature, it was made of bronze, so it was not a sacrifice , so I’m sorry sacrificial atonement fans, that’s not what John is going for. He doesn’t liken the crucifixion to snake-on-a-stick because it’s a sacrifice.

But if that’s not it, then what is? Why, other than the fact that something is lifted up, is this an apt metaphor for Jesus being crucified? Well . . . what else is being lifted up besides the bronze snake? What does it represent? We’ve said that the fiery seraphs/poisonous snakes represent God’s word, in this case it’s a word of judgement. The people are just not showing any faith, they’re faithless, so God sends a word of judgement, and what is the judgement? Death. Every time a person is bitten by a snake, they die. And Moses cries out to God, much as he did when they were in bondage to Pharaoh, God relents, and gives them a way out.

And what is that way out? Well, it’s to hang that word from God, that word that is death, up where everyone can see, and anyone who looks upon death will, paradoxically, live. And right here we have a meaning of the story, a possible reason that John found it such an apt metaphor. When the Romans hang Jesus on the cross, they hang the Word of God, they hang the judgement of God, the judgement which is death. And Jesus says “whoever believes in him”—whoever sees, whoever accepts this crucified Word, this judgement made flesh— will not die.

Whoever accepts the judgement of God, whoever accepts the death sentence—as Jesus did—will be saved. Whoever acknowledges their complicity, their faithless disregard for God, will have eternal life. And that life, especially here in John, begins not after we die, it’s not pie in the sky, it begins right here, the moment that one believes in that judgement, accepts that one is complicit in all the woes of the world.

But wait . . . there’s more! In John’s theology, Jesus is not only the Word made flesh, but light as well . . . the light that was coming into the world. And do you hide that light under a bushel basket? No! You put it up where everybody can see, where it can illuminate the whole world, shining into the darkest corners.

So for John—who’s the only one to relate the story of Jesus comparing his own death to snake-on-a-pole—the crucifixion is not about Jesus being a sacrifice, nor is it about him being a substitute for us, or paying some price we owe. It’s to lay bare, to put on display, the end-product of human faithlessness, the inevitable result of the mess we’ve made of our lives and culture, and that end-product is death.

And we can see that there’s a certain psychological sophistication at work here . . . we’ve all heard stories of—and maybe even experienced—looking death in the eyes, how it can be liberating, how it can put things in perspective . . . once you’ve accepted death as inevitable, once you’ve maybe even had a brush with it, it can be liberating, there’s not a lot else that can terrify you.

But more important, I think, than what it is is what it isn’t: In John’s theology, Jesus’ death is not a sacrifice. To John, God is not a vengeful God, who demands human sacrifice to calm himself down. God is not some Aztec deity, as theologian James Allison puts it, thirsting for blood appeasement. God is a god of enlightenment, not darkness, a God of relenting, of second chances. No matter what the crucifixion is, no matter how atonement works—and there are as many theories as there are theorists—it’s not sacrificial, God did not send his only begotten son as a sacrifice on the altar of our sin. Amen.