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Center for Theology, Lenoir-Rhyne College
Holy Cross Day
September 14, 2003

Pericope Study

Gospel Lesson:  John 3:13-17

"No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man. And 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, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might saved through him. He who believes in him is not condemned; he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. -  RSV

A few scattered thoughts…..

1. Just prior to the pericope text, Jesus has asked of Nicodemus, his nocturnal interlocutor, how it is that the Pharisee cannot understand earthly things … as, for instance, what it means to be born anew (or, born again) … the second time "of water and the Spirit … That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit….Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand this?"

Even less, continues Jesus, will you be able to grasp heavenly things: "If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man."⁽¹⁾ But notice: the verb is shifted from understand to believe, from ginwskw (ginwskeis) to pisteuw (pissteute) in the Greek. The connection that exists between "understanding" and "belief" was noted powerfully later by both Augustine and Anselm, each in carefully crafted phrases: fides quærens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) and credo ut intelligam (I believe in order that I may understand). In the case of both teachers of the Church, rational understanding presupposes faith. Augustine and Anselm argue that faith is required in order to receive genuine understanding of the things of God. Jesus wonders about Nicodemus' ability to comprehend heavenly things if he cannot even understand earthly things. In fairness to the Pharisee, however, the concept of being "born anew of water and the Spirit" would have been more strange than commonplace, a baptismal understanding far beyond a ritual for cleansing.

2. "So must the son of man be lifted up" - St. John knows already in the writing what Nicodemus can only puzzle about. If baptismal theology escapes the Pharisee so does theologia crucis. Jesus' understanding of his mission as to its terminus is parallel to his understanding of its telos. That St. John should be privy to the Nicodemus conversation suggests that Jesus recounted it privately to him, or to him and other disciples.⁽²⁾ However the privilege, the beauty of the theology surpasses even the mystery of the encounter. Nicodemus, himself a scholar, would know instantly the reference to the Exodus incident, and the yield of gazing upon the one lifted up. That it should be upon a cross would have been to him distinctly cognitively dissonant with his understanding of reality - to die "upon a tree" was lower than a disgrace, in Jewish estimation. Even the Romans used the mode of crucifixion as much to slur the crucified as to intimidate the bystanders.

3. "For God so loved the world…" - St. John's commentary (as to Jesus' invocation of the cross, belief and eternal life) rivals his genius in chapter 1, "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." God gave him insight into the meaning of Jesus' teaching, and gave him also, whether by native endowment or by momentary inspiration, to write it beautifully. But the beauty of the literature, magnificent as it is, pales along side the beauty of the assertion: that God so loves the world. That He gave His only-begotten Son. That whoever believes in Him shall have eternal life. Focused as our culture is on things, and things of the moment, eternity is often obscured, a concept of the future cast aside in the pace of everyday life. Relegated to Sunday morning. For some, relegated to the dustbin of their memory. For Christians, it is "front and center," and not just in the football end zones, signs held up as extra points or field goals split the uprights. For God so loved ….. the world…..that he gave …..his only-begotten Son ….that whoever believes in Him…..might have eternal life. George Forell says that the Christian axiom (the fundamental assertion that gives meaning to all other assertions) is "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself" (II Cor. 5:19). Perhaps. But John 3:16 is equally axiomatic - a fundamental assertion that gives meaning to all other assertions.

"For God so loved ….. the world…..that he gave …..his only-begotten Son ….that whoever believes in Him…..might have eternal life."

JLY - 09.08.03 [for Holy Cross Day, September 14, 2003]

Numbers 21:4-9 [from Lent 4, 2003]

They traveled from Mount Hor along the route to the Red Sea, to go around Edom. But the people grew impatient on the way; they spoke against God and against Moses, and said, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!"

Then the LORD sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, "We sinned when we spoke against the LORD and against you. Pray that the LORD will take the snakes away from us." So Moses prayed for the people.

The LORD said to Moses, Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live." So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.

*****

1. Apart from any other evidence to the contrary, this may be the first recorded instance of the now-famous "hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you" therapy. Only it started not with canines, as now referenced, but with vipers. A lot more lethal than hangovers, despite the blazing katzenjammeren that now call forth the remedy!

2. The children of Israel were, by most accounts, more miserable in the desert than they had been in Egypt, where they were less rancorous, though more prosperous (or at least better watered and fed). The scriptures give us bare accounts of the conditions of their bondage - only that there arose a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph but who knew how to get conscripted labor to work for food, and the less of it the latter the better. "…(The Egyptians) put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worried them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly." (Exodus 1:11-14) Labor was cheap, and so was life. First it was directing the Hebrew midwives (only two?) to execute boy babies at birth. The midwives were better instructed by God, so the second set of orders from Pharaoh was to pitch the boy babies into the Nile. Cheap labor can itself become too dear, if the slave population grows restive.

3. From God we get a clue as to His attention to their suffering. To Moses He said at the theophany: "I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey." (Exodus 3:7-8) Ergo, the Exodus.

4. But Israelites free are yet in the winter of their discontent. Stumbling about in the Sinai desert, they forgot that their ancestor was a "wandering Aramean." Abraham and Sarah not withstanding, they grumbled. When they were not grumbling they were pouting, or making bovine effigies to satisfy theological pluralism, or, perhaps, simply because gold is shiny. From species worship they turned to direct attack upon Moses, and, by strong implication, God: "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the desert? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!" Miserable food, indeed. God responded to their misery with a "bruise of the heel." Snakes. Venomous snakes everywhere. Slithering, hissing, striking, biting. And people died.

5. Geniuses they were not, but neither were they stupid. The complaining wandering Jews became victims pleading for Moses to intervene, about the snakes. Here is where God responded with the hair-of-the-dog treatment … a look at (rather than a sip of the hair of) the snake (rather than the dog) that bit you. An icon of therapy from the source of the pain. And the ones who had been bitten, and looked up, were healed. The venom of the snakes was thus neutralized. The venom of the people only went into neutral until, to presage Satan and Christ later in another wilderness, a more opportune time.

6. A snake on a pole is radically different from a crucified messiah, both as to species and as to disposition. The one is the personification of evil, or at least of temptation to rebellion, from as far back as paradise. The other is the suffering servant, by whose wounds we are healed. In both cases, the injunction is to "look up, and live." Jesus knew the connection, and invoked it: "And 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."

Not to go too far into the Gospel lesson, but Jesus himself made the analogy, and that just prior to one of his most brilliant and beautiful assertions. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."

Tillich it was, and then others, who called attention to both the linguistic and substantial integrity of salve and salvation. There is, indeed, "a balm in Gilead that makes the spirit whole." Whole, that is, for those who believe in Him, for they are promised eternal life.

7. It was not, of course the effigy or its elevation that accomplished the healing for the Israelites in their panic and pain. It was God who directed the action, who furnished the meaning, who accomplished the healing. And it is God who accomplishes our salvation. Bitten we shall be, if not by snakes then by our own misdeeds … many times such sins rise up and bite us, fore and aft.

And, make no mistake, we shall be judged according to our deeds, as John of Patmos saw in his visions: "And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done." (Revelation 20:12)

We are not, however, justified by our deeds, good or ill. We are made right with God - justificatio - by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ. For God so loved the world, that whosoever believeth in him will not perish, but hath everlasting life. Right!

8. How did looking at a bronze snake on a pole accomplish healing, while looking at a heifer made of gold constituted idolatry? Because God said so. And that's how, despite our being judged by our deeds, we are justified by God's grace. Because God says so. Thanks be to God.

9. As a kind of footnote: in a "therapeutic" age, when health is an obsession and smoking a mortal sin, remedies abound both physical and spiritual. Pop-up spam on the 'net hawks viagra and various other species of "enhancements." From herbs to exercise machines to pills to membership in the gym, health is a curious passion in what is increasingly becoming the land of the plump, if not the home of the obese. Sundry "spiritualities" spring up in store fronts and on the net, a culture awash in plenty in search of a soul.

What about the "old rugged cross"? Not as a trinket, or a tattoo, or a necklace - or, as the hymn sings, a "symbol of suffering and shame." But as sign of God's love - greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for a friend. The Lord of the universe, Word of God in creation, born of the Virgin Mary … hanging on the Cross to die, for you and me. The Cross is the sign, the stigma, the culmination of the Incarnation, the event at the end of the via dolorosa. It is not, however, with all due respect, the last word. The last word is Resurrection. The empty tomb. The promise of eternal life. The Cross is the means. It is not the end.

JLY - 03.25.03 …for the Fourth Sunday in Lent

1There is a curious circumstance in the text, here: In verse 13, Jesus speaks as if he knows already of the Ascension as a past event. And he speaks in verse 14 of the crucifixion as a coming event. What to make of this? Raymond Brown observes that "in the Johannine references to Jesus there is a strange timelessness or indifference to normal time sequence that must be reckoned with." Of the passage he more fully writes: "The use of the perfect tense is a difficulty, fir it seems to imply that the Son of Man has already ascended into heaven. For those scholars who believe that the evangelist is speaking here and not Jesus, the evangelist is simply reflecting back on Jesus' ascension. Others like Lagrange and Bernard think that the past tense is meant only to deny that up to that time anyone had ever gone up to heaven to know heavenly things, and that what especially refers to the Son of Man is the descent, not the ascent. It is possible that this was the original meaning but that in the course of post-resurrectional preaching the clause came to be understood as a reference to the ascension. In the Johannine references to Jesus there is a strange timelessness or indifference to normal time sequence that must be reckoned with (see also 4:38)." from The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (i-xii) Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966

2The discourses that shape the 4^th evangelist's work are as pregnant with meaning as they are obscure as to how he came by them. He lets the reader know, later and twice, his assessment of the record: "Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name." (20:30-31) … and "But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." (21:25).

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