Summary: By gazing upon the cross, we experience God's grace and saving power.
As a kid, did you ever skip stones? You know what that's all about. You stand at the edge of a pond or lake and pick up the flattest, lightest stone you can find. Then, with that odd, sidearm throw, you send the thing winging over the water. If you get the throw just right, the stone goes skipping along the surface: two, three, four, even a dozen times.
Few satisfactions in life are purer and simpler than skipping stones.
We're going to skip a stone today, in this sermon. We'll start with one biblical text, then skip to another. Let's see where it takes us.
It makes sense to do it that way because the two texts are linked together. First, there's our reading from John, chapter 3. In it, Jesus refers back to the Hebrew Scriptures, to a passage from Numbers. The Numbers passage belongs to a very primitive era in Israel's history, and it paints God in a rather unusual light. But because Jesus uses it to explain to the Pharisee Nicodemus what eternal life is all about, it's worth more than a glance.
So, let's begin. The Israelites are wandering in the wilderness. Egypt is far behind them, but the promised land doesn't seem even close.
The children of Israel are engaged in their favorite occupation: complaining. There's no food! There's no water! And by the way, the last food we got, we didn't like very much. (This from the people God fed with manna and quail, and quenched their thirst with water from a rock!)
Moses is used to it. He's been putting up with their groans, gripes and grievances for a long time now. But this time, the Israelites have truly crossed the line. This time, they're not just complaining about him. They're griping about the Lord.
How swiftly they learn: it doesn't pay to second-guess God! The Lord unleashes a plague of poisonous snakes upon the people. Many of them die.
Oozing remorse, the survivors creepy-crawl over to Moses and confess that, yes, they have sinned with all their bellyaching, and won't Moses offer a prayer so God will relent and send the snakes away?
Moses prays. God answers, telling Moses to make a bronze replica of a serpent and hang it up on a pole, so everyone can see it. God tells Moses that every snakebite victim who gazes upon this image will live.
That's what Moses does. And it works. End of story.
It's hard to find much redeeming value in this little tale. No character except Moses appears in a good light. God's chosen people are whining malcontents, and as for their Lord -- well, unleashing hundreds of rattlesnakes doesn't seem to raise God's benevolence quotient, does it?
Then there's the strange detail of the bronze serpent on the stick. The anthropologists would have a field day with that one. They'd flip open their notebooks and write it up as a totem, a fetish, a talisman -- something used to ward off plagues and evil spirits. They'd explain that displaying an image of the thing one most fears unleashes a certain sympathetic magic that causes its maker to feel protected.
If you want to keep the lions away, you carve a little statue of a lion and hang it outside your tent. Primitive peoples the world over practice this sort of "sympathetic magic" -- but it's a bit of a shocker to discover it here, in the Bible.
This ancient tale would have remained buried deep in the Hebrew Scriptures -- squirreled away like some dusty family heirloom -- were it not for the inconvenient fact that Jesus refers to it. In the third chapter of John's gospel, in his famous dialogue with the Pharisee Nicodemus, Jesus trots out the old story of Moses' snake-on-a-stick: "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," Jesus tells Nicodemus.
From there, Jesus goes on to utter the sublime words of John 3:16, that beloved memory-verse: "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."
As well-known as that verse is -- its chapter and verse painted by football fans on bed sheets they hold up at games -- probably only a handful of believers could tell you what Jesus means by "the serpent in the wilderness" reference that precedes verse 16.
Frankly, it's a bit of a mystery what Jesus does mean. Some scholars think it has to do with his ascension into heaven. But a greater number think he's referring to being lifted up on a cross.
They think so because of the function fulfilled by Moses' bronze serpent, elevated on a pole for all to see. When the poor, afflicted snakebite victims gaze upon that magical talisman, they're healed. When we gaze in wonder upon the cross of Jesus Christ, we too are touched to the heart. We feel the love of God warming us within, extending to every fiber of our being.
Still, it's a peculiar thing, that serpent on a stick. Peculiar for another reason: because it hardly represents the most direct way for God to help the people.
Why -- you may ask yourself -- doesn't the Lord just lift the plague, sending the serpents slithering back to wherever they came from? Why go to all the trouble of the bronze-serpent ritual?
The Numbers passage tells how snakebite continues to be a problem for the Israelites, even after they repent. Moses keeps the snake-pole around as a kind of snake bite kit.
Second Kings tells us the snake-on-a-stick stuck around for centuries. The reforming King Hezekiah is described as "[breaking] in pieces the bronze serpent Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it ...."1
Wouldn't it have been easier for God to have simply equipped Moses to cast the snakes out of Sinai? But that's not, evidently, how God rolls in this circumstance.
But then, we have to wonder why God allows children to get cancer, and hunger to ravage whole nations, and divorce to tear up families. Why is there such a thing as human suffering, when God's supposed to be all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good?
It's only natural for us to ask questions like these. It's only human.
The only answer that begins to make sense is the one implied by Jesus himself. Just after he speaks of the Son of Man being lifted up, like Moses' snake in the wilderness, he adds these words: "that whoever believes in him may have eternal life."
The cross of Jesus is not altogether an image of abandonment and despair. For the human race, it's also a sign of hope.
Moses raises the bronze serpent in the wilderness so the chosen people may look on it and live. Maybe that's why there's a cross in God's plan for the universe: God raises Jesus on the cross for all to see, so the people of the world may look on him and live.
Just as the bronze serpent is a way for ancient peoples to deal with their fear of snakebite, maybe the cross of Jesus is the way peoples of every age deal with their fear of death -- and not just death as the cessation of biological life, but eternal death, cosmic oblivion, the black hole of despair.
In the wilderness, Moses elevates an image of the thing ancient Israel most fears. On the skull-shaped hill of Calvary, God raises up an image of the thing you and I most fear -- and somehow, in gazing upon God's crucified Son, we know there's no human suffering that's utterly beyond the reach of God's healing and sustaining love.
This is not how everyone views the cross of Jesus. It's not true in Judaism, for example. There's no role in that faith for a messiah who dies. Nor is it true of Islam: in that faith, Jesus is an honored figure, but his violent death is rejected as an affront to Allah. The Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh calls the cross "a very painful image to me. It does not contain joy or peace, and this does not do justice to Jesus."2
But not so for us. We believe our Lord, raised high upon the cross, takes on the entire burden of human existence, including death. And because of his resurrection, we know death is defeated, once and for all.
St. Paul calls the cross a stumbling block: "For Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."3
The apostle goes on to explain, "For God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God's weakness is stronger than human strength."4
Wouldn't you like to have something wiser than human wisdom, something stronger than human strength? You already do! All you need do is look to our Lord, hung high on the cross for all to see!