Sermon Sunday, March 14, 2021

 

March 14, 2021                       John 3: 14-21                          Rev. Peter Hofstra

            The defining event of the people of God-the Jews-is the Exodus.  The Jews were slaves in Egypt, they were liberated by the outstretched arm of the power of God, and they arrived in the Promised Land, the Land flowing with milk and honey, that had been promised to their founding parents, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekkah.  But in between, the people seemed to do everything in their power to get God to destroy them.  While Moses was getting the Ten Commandments up on Mt. Sinai, they created the golden calf as their ‘god’.  Want to know why they wandered for forty years? 

            It was not because Moses would not stop for directions… 

            Rather, the people complained SO MUCH about the trip, about going back to Egypt, about Moses’ leadership, that God decided that every Israelite over the age of 20 was going to die in the wilderness and NOT see the Promised Land.  Literally an entire generation would pass away.  There were other moments along the way where more of God’s punishment came down.

            This is one of those moments.  The people have just been told they need to take the long way around.  So they complain, about everything.  So the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people, killing a lot of them.  Salvation came when the Lord commanded Moses to make a bronze snake and lift it up on a pole.  This Moses did and those who were bitten who looked upon the snake lived, cured of the snakebite.

            In our generation, we have Snakes on a Plane, in the time of Jesus, this Snake on a Pole.    

            The bronze serpent was lifted up and the people who looked upon it, who would have died, had their lives saved.

            This is the lead-in to the most well-known verse in the Bible.  The Lead in continues, Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man also be lifted up.  That is its own gruesome process.  The pole of the cross would be laid out on the ground, the crosspiece, which Jesus was forced to carry out of Jerusalem until it became too much for him and they drafted another to carry it for him, that crosspiece would be set into place.  Jesus will be laid out, nailed hands and feet to the cross, and then the whole thing will be lifted into the air until the pole drops into a hole carved in the rock.  If you go to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher today in Jerusalem, there is a chapel built with an altar, and under the altar you can see the bare rock beneath with the pits bored in where they say Jesus’ cross was lifted up.

            As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so was Jesus lifted up on the cross.  And as the people bitten by the poisonous snakes were saved from death when they looked at the bronze snakes, we read verse 15, “that whosoever should believe in him shall have eternal life.”  And then some context, the most oft quoted verse in the Bible, John 3:16, "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.”

            One of the great powers of sin in the world is apathy, the spirit of “who cares?”  One of the most damaging power this spirit wields is the power to take words as powerful as John 3:16 and from sheer overload of repetition, make it as easy to rattle off as our A,B,C’s with just as much interest and attention paid to the letters we have known since childhood.

            Maybe that is why Jesus led with this rather obscure but very visceral image from the Law of Moses.  After all, isn’t that why Snakes on a Plane is so powerful?  Well, the snakes and Samuel L. Jackson and his trademarked potty mouth.  But remember the scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, Indiana Jones surrounded by all those snakes in the Egyptian temple? 

            When I was starting in ministry, I had the privilege of preaching a couple of summers up at Culver Lake, in Northwest Jersey.  It is a lakeside, seasonal community with a summer chapel.  One side of the lake is on the edge of a state forest.  One summer, there was a forest fire there, and it drove the snakes down from the forest into the community on the northern shore of the lake.  It gives me the heebeegeebees just to think about it.

            Snakes are why I do not have a grand desire to go to Australia.  And serpents have a negative reputation in Scripture.  Cue the serpent with Adam and Eve.

            Remember the power of the bronze snake?  It did not drive away the poisonous snakes, but it saved the lives of those who were bitten and would otherwise have died, probably in a most horrible fashion.

            Jesus!  You had to start with snakes to get my attention?  I can say without fear of contradiction that, as I wrote my sermon, my attention was got.  In fact, as I was preparing this sermon, I looked up to see what kind of snake it was thought to be in Number 21.  Earlier translations into English did not say ‘poisonous snakes’ but ‘fiery serpents’.  Snakes and fire, lets just crank up the fear just a little more.  If we want to keep going down this road, one commentator thought these snakes were some kind of cobra.  I do not want to keep going down this road.

            The bronze serpent was raised upon the pole and the people who were going to die from the punishment God inflicted upon them for their sins had but to look upon the bronze serpent and they received redemption from their death sentence, that is the road I wish to travel.

            For this is the gift that every sinner who will die for their sins has received from Jesus.  To look upon the cross, to believe in Him, and to receive redemption.  The rest of our verses in John lay out exactly that message. 

            So, John 3:15.  “Whoever believes in Him (in Jesus) will have eternal life.”-BECAUSE Jesus was raised up as the serpent was raised by Moses.  Now John 3: 16 builds upon it, this comes by God’s love, whoever believes may not perish but have eternal life.  That is the evolution of the discussion.  Jesus goes on to say that it is NOT Jesus who comes to condemn, but to save.  People were condemned already, by their love for evil things, things they want to keep hidden in the darkness because they do not want to surrender them.  Verse 17, God DID NOT send his Son to condemn the world.  Verse 19, people loved darkness rather than light because their deed were evil.  Verse 20, in fact, those who do evil HATE the light.

            When George Orwell wrote “1984” as a prophecy of totalitarian Communism, the final curse was the crushing spirit of apathy.  The hero of the story was beaten down and destroyed by the process.  I remember him just sitting there, drinking away, no longer free in his own thoughts.  A chilling, juvenile, current example of that is from, of all things, “The Lego Movie”.  Remember their song?  “Everything is awesome…”  At the beginning of the movie it was all awesome because it was all the same, down to Taco Tuesday.  It was NOT awesome, it was frightening, the image of such an ordered, copycat society, but breaking it down, that is the movie’s purpose. 

            You know why I print the prayers in the bulletin every Sunday?  I was raised in churches where the custom was to print the first couple lines, then … so the pastor could drone on as long as he wanted, then … Amen.  I lost my focus on the prayer because it was going to be LONG, and monotonous.  Have you had preachers who cannot seem to find the end of their sermon?  Now imagine having your eyes closed for the prayer-leader who cannot seem to find the “Amen”.  Confession time, I have been that prayer-leader.

            As the defining event of the people of God, the Jews, was the Exodus, the defining event of the people of God, we Christians, is the death and resurrection of Jesus.  It is our own Exodus, from slavery to sin to the Promised Land of Everlasting Life.  And thank you Jesus that it is no longer about doing the right thing, but it is all about believing in Your Name!  The greatest danger in this day is that message being drowned by the Spirit of apathy, of ‘who cares’. 

            So what then?  Do I want you going out of here thinking about snakes this morning?  May it never be!  I surely do not want you to go out of here thinking about death either!  I want you to go out of here thinking about life, about life given abundantly, about life lived powerfully.  Jesus came to save us, to save humanity already condemned.      

            Because what did Jesus do?  The Son of God went into death itself, walked into the mouth of the grave, descended into hell, and three days later came back.  For us.  By the power of God.  I read in one place that the bronze snake was obviously some kind of sympathetic magic that cured the people of their snake bites.  No.  It was the power of God to save the lives of God’s people!!  Same thing again.  It is not about a human sacrifice to save us.  It is about God’s power to save us.  Why did Jesus have to die?  Because God knows, in the wisdom of the divine, that we broken, sinful humans need the death of Jesus to know the life of Jesus.  Why?  Because God loved us so much that God sent God’s only begotten Son to take on our deepest, most intense, darkest fear-even darker than fearing snakes-and overcome it with love to give us the grace to live forever.

            When Moses raised the serpent among the Israelites, it was so that those who were bitten could live to continue their journey to the Promised Land.  When Jesus was raised up on the cross, it was so that those who are condemned to die for their sins (all of us) can continue our journey to the Promised Land of the New Heaven and the New Earth, a gift from our God who loved us so much that God sent the Son, that whoever believes in His name shall not perish but live in that Promised Land for eternity.  Amen.