Lent 4

Numbers 21.4-9; Ephesians 2.1-10; John 3.14-21)

Our first reading from the book of Numbers this morning finds the Israelites making the long journey through the challenges of the desert, from slavery to the freedom of a promised home. They may have escaped the slavery of hard labour in Egypt, but they haven’t escaped the nostalgia of longing to be back there; the past hardships forgotten in the midst of the long slog of the present. And so on that long journey through the desert they become grumpy with their leaders, with one another and with God. They lose any sense or hope of their final destination, that promised land; and fall out with one another and with Moses and with God. The manna from heaven that feeds them has lost its initial delight and novelty. And their discontent takes form, as snakes coming among them which bite and poison and kill. And Moses responds by getting them to look at the thing that most frightens them and threatens them. He makes a bronze serpent, erects it on a pole and asks those bitten to look. And in that looking is their healing.

So in our long trudge through a desert landscape, where hope of a better future can seem in short supply, and there is seemingly no shortage of snakes moving among us to bite and poison, what do we need to take a long hard look at? What embodies our fears? What is it that poisons our common life, brings discontent and division?

The temptation in pondering those questions is to identify a scapegoat – those upon whom we can project our frustration and fear. If we could just get rid of them, we tell ourselves, our problems would be at an end. Politicians; refugees; immigrants; the feckless; the super-rich. Name your scapegoat of choice. But the point about a scapegoat, unlike the serpent that Moses offers to the people of Israel, is that we don’t want to look at them. The power of the scapegoat is in the casting out, the expelling, the dismissing – the scapegoat, upon whom we have projected our fears and frustrations and violence, must be removed from among us. Not offered to us to look at as Moses wants the Israelites to take a good look at the serpent. We don’t want to take a good look, get to know, those we have decided are the problem. Looking will involve us in relationship, in finding points of connection, of understanding something of what motivates and animates those we would rather dismiss. We are denied the cathartic pleasure of expelling the scapegoat.

But Moses makes the people look at the embodiment of their fears. And in our Gospel, John takes that image, that metaphor for our healing, and offers it as a metaphor for the crucified Christ. When Christ is lifted up, on the cross, we are invited to look and see. The scapegoat, the recipient of our anger and fury, is no longer expelled, but held up before us. We are confronted with what we would rather not see – the suffering we inflict. And - in an invitation to faith that should continue to shock us - here, says John, is the action of God. In this crucified and dying man, is the action of God. ‘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.’

The poem, 'Tell us' by R. S. Thomas, ends:

Ah, love, with your arms out
wide, tell us how much more
they must still be stretched
to embrace a universe drawing
away from us at the speed of light.

As R S Thomas suggests, our looking re-names God. Re-names God as love stretched to almost breaking point. The paradox at the heart of John’s gospel, at the heart of Christianity, is that when God comes, God does not supremely come in displays of majesty and glory, but in the ignominy, the isolation, the degradation of the cross. And in making that journey to the cross, when it is set up in our midst, in our looking, we are undone; we find our anger and fury, the suffering we inflict on others, here embodied; and we are judged: ‘This is the judgement,’ says John, ‘that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.’ In our desire for security, for power, or even for a quiet life, this is what we do to love: we crucify it. And yet, ‘God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’ For John, our healing is not found in identifying the scapegoat, but in allowing the scapegoat to judge us. In the crucified Christ, we find our sense of self undone so that it might be rebuilt on God’s grace, God’s love. The love that gives of itself in order that others might have life.

'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.'

Our response to the crucified Christ, the self-giving gift of God, to our looking at that which is set up in our midst, is to believe. To believe is not primarily about assenting to particular credal statements – they simply try to focus the more crucial aspects of what it means to believe. To believe is to trust in someone, to commit one’s life to someone; to that self-giving, costly, suffering love stretched almost, but not finally, to breaking point. Amen.