Numbers 21:4-9, Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21, Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22

 “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.”

These words from the mouth of Jesus himself are very familiar and have been passed about so much that we tend to not listen and absorb their sensational meaning.  It is interesting to note that the writer of the Gospel of John never uses the word  “faith.”  For John, the key word is “believe.”  And, for John, believe is an action word rather than simply a mental acceptance of a certain proposition.  To believe is to obey as the Israelites obeyed by keeping their eyes upon the bronze serpent as described in the account we read from our Old Testament lesson for today – the bronze serpent, so strangely described, became the symbol of the Israelites obedience.  To not believe is to disobey.  To disobey is to perish among the fiery serpents (KJV).  But, to believe is to have eternal life here and now.[1] 

So, should we say:  For God so loved the world that he sent fiery serpents, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish bur may have eternal life?

Commentators of today’s Old Testament lesson from the book of Numbers agree:  the snakes were not simply a desert hazard but were God’s punishment of the Israelites for their sin. 

This generation of Israelites had already been condemned to die in the wilderness, never reaching the Promised Land, because of their habitual disobedience.  Their previous confessions and pledges of repentance had been shallow and short-lived, and they had begun to believe that their own efforts were sufficient, that God’s guidance was unnecessary.  They had begun to trust themselves for deliverance from the wilderness rather than to trust God.  Lacking trust in God is the deepest source of their sin – and ours.  Whether you believe the story of God’s sending of the poisonous snakes to bite and kill his chosen people is literal or metaphorical, the very important message is that God’s judgment is real and our lack of belief and trust in Him always always brings pain and death.

Death is not created by God, but by man’s transgressions.  St. Athanasius, the fourth century bishop and defender of Christian orthodoxy, describes our falling into sin as our “throwing away of our birthright of beauty” that brought about the “natural law of death.” [2]  Thus, God’s intention at creation was not death and tragedy for humans.  Along with the Israelites stranded in the wilderness, these are conditions for which all humans bear responsibility.

We might compare this command to the consumption of a tiny drop of live polio that immunized us and, eventually, eradicated the disease.  Obeying God’s command to look upon the serpent relegates the serpent’s bite to nothingness in the same way that Christ’s death and Resurrection saps all the power from our human immorality and death.  Faith is the action of trusting and obeying God’s command.

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”  (John 3:14, NRSV) – lifted up and exalted.  Listen again for the first time: “God so loved the world “that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”  The all-knowing and almighty God through Christ came readily into the world as flesh and went willingly to die for the express purpose of saving mankind from death that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 

The purpose of Christ’s coming was his death and Resurrection.  This is God’s re-creative plan to save us from the death we have brought on ourselves.  In this way, again to quote Athanasius,  “He would make death disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire” for He so loved the world.

We cannot have the eternal life of the Easter Resurrection without the reality of the death on Good Friday and the separation from God through Holy Saturday.  In this Holy Lent, we remain drawn to the Cross, transported away from the nothingness of our disobedience, transported away from the pit of snakes that seek to destroy us, focused on the death of the death from which comes life everlasting.  For God so extraordinarily loves us – his children whom he created – and desires to save us “that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes (believing, which is active obedience), everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  [John 3:16 NRSV]