God's Hit Squad

Propers: The Fourth Sunday in Lent (Laetare), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

It is an easy thing to say that God is good when life is going well, when everyone is healthy and your income is secure and things improve from day to day at a slow and steady pace. It is quite another to praise God, to have faith in God’s faithfulness, when everything falls apart, when we lose that which we hold dear, and life appears as little more than a litany of our failures. Then it becomes something scandalous, something powerful.

Such is the Cross. Such is the faith that raises the dead.

We have two very different pictures of God in our readings from this morning, the first from the Book of Numbers. In it, the Israelites have been liberated from slavery in a foreign land, led out by the mighty hand of Moses, as God executed 10 terrible judgments upon the false gods of Egypt. And of course they use their newfound freedom to complain. What a bunch of whiners. One must admire the Hebrew Scriptures for this: they ever depict their forebears, even the greatest of their kings, warts and all.

There’s humor in their complaint: “There is no food … and we detest this miserable food.” Waiter, my dinner is awful, and such small portions! Thus annoyed at their annoyance, and understandably upset at their ingratitude, God sends venomous serpents amongst them, and many of them die. Rapidly they repent of their impiety, and on God’s orders Moses fashions a serpent of bronze upon a pole, such that the bitten may look upon the snake and be miraculously healed.

A little background may be helpful here. The Hebrew term for “venomous serpent” is more literally “fiery serpent,” only in an active voice: “burner-snake,” a little dragon. And in the world of the Ancient Near East, the milieu into which Numbers had been written and compiled, such burner-snakes were understood to accompany divinities. Gods had these fiery serpents, these seraphim, on retainer as the avengers of their dignity, little scaly hitmen, agents of divine retribution.

And in the logic of sympathetic magic, it was common to fashion images of such serpents as amulets of protection. Think of the flaring cobra on the headpiece of King Tut. The metal snake guarded, protected, against divine displeasure, spitting venom, spitting fire. Thus the imagery in Numbers, of heavenly snakes sticking up for their boss, and only being pacified by a metal idol of their likeness, would have been very familiar to its audience.

The message would have been that these ingrates should not trifle with the dignity of God. Here had Yahweh gone to extraordinary lengths to bring Egypt, the superpower of her day, down to her knees. And for whom? For slaves! For homeless desert wanderers. Show some respect. We know that in later years—centuries after this story takes place—such a bronze serpent, called Nehushtan, resided in the Temple at Jerusalem. This story from Numbers may have been told to explain its presence there.

Greeks had their own variation, by the way, the caduceus, the staff of Hermes. This depicted two serpents wound about a winged rod, the same image that we see on ambulances and in hospitals. The serpent holds a dual role, bearing both wisdom and death. The same venom that harms us may heal, as the difference between medicine and poison lies in the dose. From Apophis through Genesis to Jormungandr, snakes are dangerous divines.

We cannot take this literally. I thought about sugarcoating it, but I just can’t. This is precisely the sort of Old Testament tale that the Church Fathers would insist we must take allegorically. Otherwise it’s a horror story, a savage and frightening image of God. Our understanding of God, our one true Image, is Jesus Christ, who, to say the least, would never send fiery serpents after gripey apostles. Lord knows they gave Him opportunity.

“Which of you, if your son asks … for a fish will give him a snake?” Jesus says. “If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” When the Father’s children beg for food, Jesus says, He will not send them snakes. I can’t imagine that Jesus did not have this precise story in His mind. He is specifically refuting a literal interpretation of Numbers. The God we know in Jesus is no monster.

How then shall we interpret it? Well, John is glad you’ve asked. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” the Johannine Jesus proclaims, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life.” John’s Gospel is all about Jesus being raised: raised up upon the Cross, raised up from the empty Tomb, raised up in His Ascension unto Heaven. John’s Jesus comes down to pull us all back up, to lead every lost and wayward sinner back to the bosom of God.

If we but look upon Him, our sins are forgiven, our wounds are healed, our life restored. If we but look upon Him, we have eternal life—for to have eternal life is to know God in Christ Jesus. This is the picture of God we would claim, the true and only Image: “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. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.”

Easily the most beloved verses in all the Christian Scriptures. Why has the Father sent the Son? Why has God come into this world as one of us, descending as Light into darkness? Is it to condemn us, to punish us, to throw us to fiery snakes? Hell, no! Christ has come to die for us, at our hands and for our sake, to raise us up forever, to draw all things unto Him, and to save the entirety of this fallen bloody cosmos! He has come to love us all the way to hell and back, and nothing and no-one can stop Him.

“This is the judgment!” John thunders. Not some future tribunal offering thumbs-up or thumbs-down, but Jesus Incarnate, Jesus Crucified, Jesus Risen, Jesus Ascended! Those who see Him, know Him, love Him already have eternal life for they have seen the face of God. And those who do not believe have already been condemned, not to some future hellfire but by their very lack of Christ here and now.

They don’t know what they’re missing, John says; they love darkness more than the Light. They condemn themselves to dwell in shadow, not knowing the true face of God, not knowing the infinite ocean of mercy and love poured out from His side on the Cross. But they will. They will all know someday. At the Name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue confess. If they do not see Him now, in us, that is punishment enough. Jesus shall draw all men unto Him; at the last all this world shall be saved.

Eternal life is not some future pie in the sky by and by. It begins here, now, in the Light of the Christ. To love that Light is salvation; to shun it is self-condemnation. No-one needs Christians to sit around condemning sinners, condemning the world. Certainly Jesus doesn’t. The world needs Christians to actively show them the Christ, the love and mercy and self-emptying compassion of the God who sustains all the cosmos, and who loves every iota and atom of it.

Lots of people see God as good when life is good, and God as cruel when life is bad. But He isn’t the one sending snakes. When we suffer, God suffers. When we mourn, God mourns. When we die, God rends open hell and shatters the gates of the tomb. Real faith is not just for fair weather. Real faith is the conviction that God is always good, always loving, always forgiving, always resurrecting; that it is not His will the we suffer; and that far from remaining aloft and aloof, He descends to our world in the flesh.

He suffers unjustly. He undergoes betrayal. He is humiliated and abandoned and tortured and displayed like some slaughtered lamb. He collapses into nothing, into death, into hell. And there He conquers! So that there is not one single aspect of human life, human agony, human disappointment that He has not claimed and redeemed in His flesh. He is the only God whom we worship. He is the only God who can save. And by the will of the Father, the whole world shall be saved in Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, you may do so here, and we would thank God for your generosity.