Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Samuel Kennedy
The Fourth Sunday in Lent B, March 10, 2024
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Jesus begins this portion of his discourse with Nicodemus in a bit of a strange place — with a reference to the first lesson we heard read this morning — a relatively obscure story from the book of Numbers. In our Gospel lesson, we heard Jesus say, “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.”
The passage from Numbers places us in the middle of the wilderness after the children of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. The people were exhausted, tired, and not shy about expressing their discontent. “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in this wilderness, without fresh food or water, and the food we’ve got to eat is just miserable.” In the story as told in Numbers, God gets irritated with the people's complaining and grumbling and sends a plague of venomous serpents among them. The serpents bite, injure, and kill many of the people. As their suffering mounts, the people begin to beg Moses for forgiveness, and what God tells Moses to do, to free the people from their suffering — is fascinating. God tells Moses to create a serpent of bronze an image of the agent of their suffering, and if the people would but look upon the image, they would find healing and relief.
Now the concept we see playing out in this text seems to be based upon a principle commonly held in many ancient systems of medicine where a small amount of a poisonous or virulent substance would be used to counteract a larger dose of the poison or virulent substance itself. It’s not entirely dissimilar from the concept of vaccines where, we take a a tiny subset of that which would harm us — perhaps a few unique surface proteins from a virus, if you will, to provide us with protection from overwhelming infection.
Fine and dandy you say, but why is Jesus referencing this principle when he is explaining the way of salvation to Nicodemus, a leader among the Pharisees?
Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John opens with Jesus describing the path of conversion as a process of rebirth. This metaphor was understandably confusing to Nicodemus, so Jesus tried again here, to describe how the way of salvation he was proclaiming worked.
“Just as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. For God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him, will not perish, but have everlasting life.”
It’s a condensed soteriology to be sure. But before we can discuss the nature of the cure, it would be good to remind ourselves of the malady — the fiery serpents — we are being delivered from.
A crisis of belonging has “ailed” us since the dawn of our human story — this sense of estrangement that is coupled with a longing to belong —to belong within our community, with our God, and with ourselves. We see these tensions echoed in our sacred texts as early as the story of Adam and Eve. A fundamental challenge that we have is that we seem to be nearly hard-wired to conceive of belonging as a limited resource, and we tend to turn our efforts to obtain that limited resource into a zero-sum competition with those around us.
One of philosopher René Girard’s key insights was that we humans tend to build social cohesion — our sense of belonging — on the back of exclusion. And these dynamics work themselves out no matter how large or how small the community is — be it as large as a nation state or as small as a family, or a group of friends. As rivalry and competition grow within the community (along with their attendant social tensions and, in some cases, violence) human societies will often select a scapegoat —a person or group who is blamed for the turmoil and conflicts within the community. The scapegoat becomes the target for all of that collective blame and hostility, and is often subjected to violence or expulsion as a means of purging the community of its tensions and conflicts.
This often happens subconsciously, but the striking thing is that this process works — at least temporarily. For a season, social cohesion and sense of safety in belonging are restored, but in the long run, this mechanism only perpetuates cycles of violence, as the social order, the “sense of safe belonging,” is maintained via cycles of ritual expulsion and violence. The irony of building community by this mechanism is that one is never actually ever safe — subconsciously we all know that we might find ourselves selected for expulsion at the next round of sacrifice— and this leads to deep, subconscious anxiety at both the group and individual levels.
And we participate, I participate, in these patterns of scapegoating and sacrifice all the time.
“The Gospels show us that Jesus understands this mechanism,” of inclusion via exclusion; (Allison, 152-153) of maintaining social cohesion and order through expulsion, and Jesus understands that the religious and political structures of this world depend on this mechanism and therefore often unconsciously shore up these sacrificial cycles. Through his life and ministry, Jesus lures the mechanism and these institutions into behaving according to their usual patterns, and that, predictably, gets him killed. He dies a death of shame and suffering on the edges of the City —lifted high on the beams of a cross.
Jesus dies, as countless others have and will continue to die — alone, expelled, and rejected. In fact, even at his death he’s surrounded by two others suffering a fate the same as his— a death on the fringes of society, having been sacrificed to the idols of shaky social cohesion and fragile political peace.
But Jesus endures this precisely in order to reveal that the whole exercise is unnecessary — to reveal to us that there exists the possibility of another way of being together. With Jesus’ reference to the story of the fiery serpents, it’s as if he is saying, “My death is going to look like the very thing that plagues you — it is going to look like one more ritual expulsion, one more sacrifice,” but, this time, because the Victim is the very wellspring of life himself, his death strips the sacrificial system of its imagined divine imprimatur allowing it to begin to wither from the roots up.
“For God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him, will not perish, but have everlasting [overflowing, abundant] 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.”
The only One who very rightly could judge us and condemn us via exclusion has done precisely the opposite. Instead of excluding us, he has instead welcomed us into a state of beloved belonging that is grounded securely in the unending flow of the life and love of the Trinity.
We are welcomed into the light of beloved belonging.
As verse 21 reminds us, it is a bright, revealing light — a light where we are seen for who we are, faults and all, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But what this light most clearly reveals is just how deeply we are loved. And because it is the light of beloved belonging, we can stand in that light with hope and rest and freedom from fear. And now that we are set free from the need to cast others out to secure our own place in this community, we can instead, stand like Jesus did with outstretched arms inviting others off of the sacrificial altars of our own making and into this marvelous light of beloved belonging. If that isn’t a life that pulsates with the rhythms of eternity, I don’t know what is.
So the next time we see John 3:16 emblazoned on a placard behind home plate, may we remember that we, the real us, the us with all our faults and imperfections stand in that eternal light of beloved belonging and what it reveals most clearly is just how deeply we are loved.
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