Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. John Forbis, OHC
Like we heard in yesterday’s collect for Saturday of Lent week 3, “Set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright.” In the darkness no one has to know that I’m flat on the floor.
In the light, all of this is exposed. In the light I will be naked. Jesus tells us, the judgment is “the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” So this sudden burst, this brilliance is the crux of the judgment of God. It becomes our decision what we do when facing it, stand right where we are and shade our eyes? Do we come to it and believe in it or do we remain in the darkness? Here is where I can remain and live with my suspicions and my most prized possession … fear, the only protection I have against this exposure. If I come to the light, God will see how I obviously don’t belong there. I’ll most surely be condemned.
Only, I have completely breezed past the beginning of Jesus’ teaching and honed straight in on the judgment. For God so loved the world … God loved the world! God loves the world! That is the light. That is the judgment. The Son, didn’t come to condemn the world, to shine a blinding spotlight and interrogate us, but to save us! Condemnation doesn’t belong in the light.
In the darkness, fear eventually and inevitably leads to abuses I can so easily inflict on myself, on others and the world. Fear can become the one blight that blocks out any earthly light. Staying huddled in the darkness, we are condemned already. But not by God. I condemn myself by being prosecutor and judge of myself and others. God is not my judge. I am. Unfortunately, Lent can be so distorted to reflect exactly the opposite.
Lent’s purpose, I often believe, is to turn this home in which I’ve made myself most comfortable into a jail cell where I either languish through a life sentence or await execution. Yet it is no defense against the light of God’s redemptive power and desire. God wants to draw the world into that saving light that condemns no one.
Still, this love can be frightening. God shows a vulnerability that I’m not used to seeing nor am I used to admitting or believing. I’m too busy looking for a God who can exact punishment on people who I deem evil, show them who’s in charge and that they deserve what they get. Is that another lie I’m telling myself and others about God?
Again, in the light, that lie will be exposed. I am faced with it head-on to the point of turning my eyes anywhere else I can’t escape the betrayal of just how false my image of God really is. Looking around me in the light, if I really open my eyes and heart, I see how God truly acts in the world and how she acts in my life.
I am vulnerable myself. The truth is I am incomplete and sinful as anyone else. Not any more, not any less. Can I accept this fact and do what is true? Can I accept the light and come to it? I AM part of the world that God loves, and so I’m not set apart or special. I am loved as much as the world is, I am loved IN the world, not sequestered in the darkness. God desires us all to come to her into the light.
Jesus equates himself with the serpent raised up in the wilderness to save the Israelites when they looked on the snake of bronze. The serpents who were so poisonous, so dangerous, vicious lose their power to one serpent, cast in bronze, still, trapped, inanimate. Here is their enemy now, helpless, harmless, frozen in bronze mounted on a pole and then, miraculously the source of life for those who look upon it. However, they must look upon what they fear most to live.
“Just 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.” God so loved the world that his only Son allows himself to be crucified like someone to be feared, a common criminal, an enemy of the state. Jesus offers himself to be hated, to be the light that the people hated.
He is willing to allow love to become the enemy. He accepts the accusation of being a serpent, the resemblance of the first serpent that tempts Adam and Eve to commit the first sin. This resemblance can be a symbol of how he can and does redeem the world throughout history, even the first serpent. He can be the salvation who was, who is and who is to come.
But we must also see just how much love will suffer, will endure and then, eventually triumph, not by conquering, condemning, but just showing us its true beauty. He is trapped, nailed, mounted onto a cross. He chooses to be the instrument of God’s love and sacrifice and the object of darkness so that we can see where that darkness eventually leads. He becomes the victim so that no one else has to. He becomes the criminal to blast light into the darkness that creates the perfect conditions to commit the true crime – condemning a man, an innocent man to death, God’s only son.
But the light is right here in the midst of the darkness as well. It will not be overwhelmed or extinguished. Christ can live in us and we in him. I don’t have to live anymore in the house of shadows I have built for myself. Christ certainly doesn’t want to live in there either; he wants to live in us.
Amen.
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