Sunday, March 10, Fourth Sunday in Lent
“New Life for the Snake-Bit”
Psalm 107:1-9; Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
Divine Service III without Communion
Hymns… #435 “Come to Calvary’s Holy Mountain”; #585 “Lord Jesus Christ, with Us Abide”; #571“God Loved the World So That He Gave”
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.
Do you like snakes? Some people do. Some people even collect them; little ones, big ones, really, really big ones. Some people like to let them slither around, and crawl up their arms, and drape them around their necks. That’s not for me, thanks.
I once saw a documentary about a snake-handling church down south. The pastor said he’d been bitten dozens of times, by rattle snakes, copperheads, and water moccasins; and he had the scars on his arms to prove it. He also drank strychnine and other assorted poisons, all to no apparent ill effect. The reporter asked him, “How do you do that? How is that possible? And he answered, “Son, don’t try it if you ain’t living right.” (I read six months later that he’d been bitten one time to many, and finally died. That made me wonder what sin he must have done that made him run out of luck!)
We have some snaky Bible readings to look at today. Maybe the reason I don’t care for snakes, is that God’s Word doesn’t speak very highly of them either. Snakes are a biblical symbol of evil, treachery, lies, and deceit. The devil came into Garden of Eden as a snake - a serpent, a scaly reptile. The Book of Revelation calls him the “great dragon”, the “ancient serpent” (a really big snake!)
And the devil bites! His venom is the bitter poison of sin. If the devil, the old snake, sinks his fangs into you, you’re going to die. The wounds he inflicts upon us are 100% fatal, unless we find some way to remove the poison, or unless we find an antidote or an anti-venom. Maybe you’ve seen the old cowboy movies where they had to cut the wound and suck out the poison, or they had to ride for miles, hoping to find a doctor in time.
Biblically speaking, the devil can only bite you if you get too close – if you get too close to his den or to the places where he lives, or invite him into your life, or let him slither up and down your arms and hang around your neck. Then you’re going to get bit; and sin bites hard. “Resist the devil and he will flee from you,” St. Peter says. But ignore him, pretend he isn’t real, or convince yourself he’s some harmless cartoon guy, with horns, red tights, a pitchfork, and a pointy tail -- & you’re sure to get caught off-guard.
Oh, pastor, that can’t happen to me! Oh, really? God’s chosen people Israel had been blessed more than any people on earth. They were His chosen ones, the apple of His eye. He loved them enough to remember them, bring them out of their misery in Egypt, and put them on the road to the Promised Land. Along the way He led them, in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He fed them every day with manna, the bread of angels, the bread of heaven. They should have been so grateful and faithful and obedient to their Lord. If they had been, they might have made it to their new home in a matter of weeks, instead of taking that forty-year detour through the snake-infested wilderness. But look what they did…
They grew impatient with God along the way, our Old Testament reading says, which is just the opposite of being faithful, and a gateway to sin if there ever was one. They spoke against God, and dumped their complaints on poor Pastor Moses, and made his life a misery. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this God-forsaken wilderness?” they complained. “There’s no bread here, and no water, and we detest this worthless bread!” What bread were they complaining about? God’s manna! Angel bread, the bread of heaven, heaven’s perfect food. Didn’t God have a right to be angry?
Now, one of the things to remember about the devil is that he can only do what the Lord allows him to do. He is a great dragon and all, and much stronger than us; but still he’s only a fallen angel, a created and limited creature. He has to bend his knees to God, the same as the rest of us (if snakes had knees!). God has him on a chain, so to speak, but he can still bite you if you get too close. Mess around with sin, and won’t sin have its consequences?
The children of Israel paid a heavy price for their griping and rebellion against Moses and God. The Scripture says, “The Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people, and many Israelites died.” Then those desperate, dying, snake-bit people cried out to God. It shouldn’t take things like this to get our attention, but sometimes it does. They came to Moses, God’s prophet, and asked him to intercede before God for them and ask Him to take the snakes away. They repented; it was out of desperation, but they repented. And Moses prayed for them, because he loved them, and God had mercy on them because He loved them, sins and all.
So God made a way for them to be saved, and gave them the anti-venom they needed. He had Moses fashion a snake out of bronze and raise it up on pole where everyone could see it. All anyone had to do was take their eyes off the ground, where fiery serpents were, and look up to where God told them to look instead, and they’d live. A very strange story, to be sure; it’s hard to understand why God chose to do things the way He did. Until Jesus, many years later, used this story as metaphor for what He’d come to do for a snake-bit world.
The context for our Gospel is a conversation Jesus was having with a man named Nicodemus, a Pharisee, who’d come to Jesus by night, under cover of darkness, to ask Him questions. Nicodemus was wondering about himself and his own salvation, and what he had to do to be saved. And Jesus told him he had to be “born again from above.” Nicodemus wondered how a man could possibly crawl back into his mother to be re-born; and Jesus told him it wasn’t a physical rebirth he needed, but to be made brand new by the Holy Spirit and baptismal water. Nicodemus, finding it all so hard to understand asks, “How can this be?” And Jesus takes him back to Sunday school, to a Bible story he’d been hearing since he was a child.
Jesus told him, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life.” Just as the snake-bitten children of Israel were blessed to able to look up to God and be forgiven for their sins and be saved, so the Son of Man, says Jesus (pointing to Himself) has to be lifted up on a cross.
“For God so loved the world,” says Jesus, “that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Because God loved Nicodemus, and you, and me, and everyone else so much, He gave His only-begotten Son, His dear One, His dearest treasure. The only way not to perish and be lost forever to the snakebite of your sins, is to look up to Him. His blood, given for you, is your antivenom, your antidote, your holy cure. “The blood of Jesus purifies us from all sin,” the apostle John says.
“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him,” says Jesus. Nicodemus, good and righteous Pharisee that he was, had always been taught to believe that the way to be right with God, and the way to heaven, was to “do the works the Law requires.” The trouble with that is you can never do enough. You can lie to yourself, convince yourself you’re doing OK (usually by comparing yourself to someone else); but the snake will always be nipping at your heels, reminding you of your shortcomings, the things you did and the things you didn’t do. Nicodemus took big risk of coming to see Jesus. He was risking his reputation, his position as a Pharisee, and his place and good name in the community. He came because the light of truth was shining through the cracks, and he was afraid; afraid he wasn’t doing enough, afraid God would find him wanting, afraid he’d be condemned no matter how hard he worked or what he tried to do.
Jesus loved Nicodemus, and wanted to draw him in, ease his fears, and bring the man home to God. “Whoever believes in Me is not condemned,” Jesus tells him. “There is now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus,” says St. Paul. Believing, simple faith, a simple confession, is all it takes to suck out the poison and take the sting of sin and the fear of death away. Without faith, belief, and a good confession, the serpent’s bite is always fatal. If you’re living apart from Jesus, you’re as good as dead already.
What did poor Nicodemus, or you or me or anyone, have to do to be saved? Come to the Light! Jesus, the Light of God, has come into the world. “Coming into the light” is simply an honest, sincere confession of sins - like the one the Israelites made in the snake-bitten wilderness. That was a confession made in desperation; but isn’t that the case with us as well?
Jesus says, “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear his deeds will be exposed.” Jesus is jabbing at Nicodemus a little bit here for coming to Him in the dark, afraid of what his friends and colleagues in the Sanhedrin will say. But only evil people hate the light of truth, Nicodemus. Only people with something to hide are afraid of the truth. Thieves, bandits, and robbers do their thing at night, when no one can see. Snakes and slithering reptiles don’t come out until after dark. You’re not one of those, are you Nicodemus?
But if you live by the truth and bring your sins into the light; if you look up to Jesus, who’s been lifted up for you; if you let whole world know who it is who’s saved you, and who it was who washed away your sins, and who is was who in love and mercy took the poison out of your soul -- then you’ll live. Denying you know Jesus, or keeping your faith to yourself, can never be part of the equation. “Confess with your lips and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, and you will be saved.”
Nicodemus went away to think about it. He turns up two more times in the Gospel; once when they’re discussing in the Sanhedrin what do about Jesus and how they might do away with Him, and Nicodemus finds the courage to stand up and defend Him; and once more when he comes out in broad daylight to help Joseph of Arimathea take the body of Jesus down from the cross and bury him. Is that evidence of a changed life? I really think so. The Scriptures tell us no more about him; we’ll have to wait until we get to heaven to ask him.
As for you and me, St. Paul says, we were as dead as dead could be in our transgressions and sins, and following all the wrong things – the ways of the world, the “cravings of our sinful nature,” the way of the old serpent who still rules in this world. We were all snake-bitten, sin-ruined, and “objects of God’s wrath.” “But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions… For it is by grace you have been saved, thru faith--& this not from yourselves, it is gift of God.”
What can we do now to give thanks to God but help point this snake-bitten world to the Light? There’s a whole world full of people out there who are giving up hope; sad and disappointed in life, mad at the world, and mad at God; looking around at a world full of serpents and snakes, thinking there’s nothing they can do about it; mourning and missing their loved ones, and thinking they’ll never see them again. And we who believe have what they need, and what everybody needs – the blood of Jesus that takes away all sin, the cure for sorrow and the hope of heaven. We know the peace that comes from looking up and knowing there’s a God of love and mercy looking back at us. May we all make it the business of our lives to help everyone we know and everyone we meet look up to Him and be saved. Lord, give us the courage and strength to do this. In Jesus’ name; Amen.