Journey to the Cross: Our Trespasses

Sorry this is so late. It's been a weird, crazy 2 weeks. This is my sermon from 3/18 - Lent 4. Click the title for Audio.
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Journey to the Cross: Our Trespasses

There is a story in the book of Numbers that seems odd, almost out of place in the Old Testament. Moses is leading the Israelites through the wilderness. Aaron has just died and soon after the Israelites, with God’s help, defeated the Canaanites. They set out and took a detour around Edom. As they travelled, to the surprise of no one, they began to grumble. “Moses, why did you bring us out here to die? The food is terrible, there’s no clean water. We should’ve stayed in Egypt! My feet hurt…” Number’s doesn’t mention the part about their feet hurting, but I’m sure someone said it.

After their whining, God sends poisonous snakes among them. The snakes start biting people and lots of Israelites die. Pretty soon they go back to Moses and say, “Oops, we really shouldn’t have said all that stuff about the food and the water and dying. We were wrong, sorry. By the way, could you talk to God about the snakes? Maybe to get rid of them?”

And Moses does just that. He prays for the people and asks God to take the snakes away. Now, here’s the weird part. Well, maybe I should say the extra weird part. Instead of just having the snakes leave, God tells Moses “Make a poisonous snake and put it on a pole. Lift it up and tell the people that when they are bitten, they should look at the snake. If they do that, they will live.”

So Moses makes a snake out of Bronze, puts it on a pole and raised it up. Everyone who was bitten and looked at the bronze snake lived.

Over a millennium and a half later, a Pharisee named Nicodemus sneaks out late at night to meet with Jesus to try and figure out exactly what this guy is all about. After an awkward exchange where Jesus explains things and Nicodemus misunderstands him, Jesus refers to this story. We’ll pick up the story there. 

John 3:14-21 - ¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

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.

17 ‘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. ¹⁸Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’ .

Some scriptures are really hard to preach. But they are hard to preach for different reasons. Some are hard to preach because they are so familiar. The congregation hears the scripture and thinks, “I know this. I know what it says. I wonder what I’m having for lunch?”

Some scriptures are hard to preach because they are hard to hear. Some passages hit a little too close to home, for the preacher and the preachee. They just ask a little too much. Those are not the most fun sermons to preach, ask Jesus. He preached sermons from scriptures like that and was run out his home town, threatened, and eventually killed. I have to add a little aside here. The DS sends out at least one email a week to the pastors in the district. He ends each with the same phrase, “Preach like Jesus.” That makes me a little nervous.

Other scriptures are hard to preach because they are hard to understand. Some passages seem too thick to cut through. That is part of the preacher’s job, of course; to make the scripture come to life. We should try to explain and apply these scriptures so that you the listener can better understand them. There are some scriptures that defy explanation, though. Not that they cannot be understood, I just don’t know if they can be explained in a 20-30 minute sermon.

Unfortunately, for me, today’s scripture has all 3 of these difficult elements. I don’t think there is a scripture passage more familiar than “For God so loved the world…”

“Those who do not believe are condemned.” “People loved darkness because their deeds were evil.” These are not the most inviting of messages. They don’t give you a warm tingly feeling.

“As Moses lifted the serpent, so the Son of Man must be lifted.” Huh? What? Then there is all of the saved not condemned and condemned not saved.

All in all, it makes for a difficult scripture to preach on three different fronts.

Let’s just take it all in order. This scripture contains the end of a conversation between Nicodemus and Jesus. Nicodemus came to Jesus in the middle of the night to, well, we never really know why he came. He gets one sentence out before Jesus confuses him with talk of being born from above. Then he talks about the Spirit going where it pleases and our human tendency to focus on earthly things instead of heavenly things. Then he throws out this line about Moses and the serpent.

“As Moses lifted the serpent in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” The story of the Israelites and the snakes is odd, but if we look at that story in parallel with the story of Jesus, we see exactly what Jesus is doing. He is predicting his death on the cross.

God told Moses to lift up the bronze serpent so that everyone who looked at it would survive the snakes. So they would live. In order to look at this serpent and be saved, you have to believe it’s going to work. If you don’t believe, you’re going to keep your eyes on the poisonous snakes at your feet.

To be saved, you have to believe. That sounds familiar doesn’t it? The Son of Man, Jesus, must be lifted up, on a cross, and whoever believes will have eternal life. They will live. They will be saved from the poisonous serpents of sin and death.

Which leads into that most familiar of verses. John 3:16 is probably the most familiar and most recognized Bible verse. Even if people don’t know what it says, they’ve probably seen posters at sporting events or football players with the verse written on the eye black under their eyes. For many Christians, it has become too familiar. Familiar in a way that it loses its meaning. One thing we need to realize is that John 3:16 is not about how much God loved the world, but about the way God loves creation. The word translated as “so” in “For God so loved the world” is not about quantity, it’s about quality. We could read it this way, “God loved the world this way, by sending Jesus, the son of God. And if you believe that Jesus is the son of God, you’ll overcome death, too. You’ll gain eternal life.”

Now Jesus tells us why he came. To save the world. Not to condemn it, but to save it. Then he seems to contradict himself. “Those who believe are not condemned, but those who don’t believe are condemned already. How can you come to save the world, but then pronounce who is and isn’t condemned? The world is the world, right?

Jesus goes on to explain. And his explanation is one of those “hard to hear” things I mentioned earlier.

“Light came into the world, but people loved darkness. Their deeds were evil. All who do evil hate the light and won’t come, because the light would expose those evil deeds. Those who do what is true come to the light.”

There’s something important in those first couple of verses. The people loved darkness. Not some people, the people. There seems to be this stark line in these verses between those who do good and those who do evil. This stark contrast between good and evil, dark and light. But really, they are the same people. Because we all do evil. “All have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.” We all have trespasses that call for forgiveness. We all have evil deeds that we don’t want to expose to the light. We all have darkness that needs the light of Jesus.

This brings back a theme from early in John’s gospel. The contrast of light and darkness. In the first chapter, we read that Jesus is the light. That the light came into the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. Jesus, the light, came into the darkness of a broken world. The darkness of sin. And the light over powered the dark.

Sometimes we don’t want the light to shine on us. When the light shines we can see the dark areas. We can see our evil deeds, our sin, and we have to face it. To face the consequences, to face our own fallibility. But if we can’t face our sins, how can we be forgiven. To do what is true, we have to let the light shine on us. We have to let that light expose the things that keep us from really believing.

“Just like Moses’ bronze snake saved the Israelites, Jesus had to face the cross so that those who believe can have life eternal. How did God love creation? By sending Jesus. To overcome death. To overcome sin. To shine the light of love from a cross atop Calvary. God loved all of creation. Jesus came to save all of creation. God loved us by giving us a way out of the dark. God loved us by shining the light on our darkness, exposing the things hidden there so that they are unavoidable.”