Fourth Sunday in Lent

Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

Have you ever overheard part of a conversation, and realized you didn’t know what people were talking about or what had already been said?

Today’s gospel text is like that. The lectionary reading begins in the middle of a conversation. If you didn’t read the preceding verses in chapter 3, you don’t know who’s speaking. And if you haven’t read Numbers recently – and that probably describes most of us here today – you may not remember what was happening when “Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.”

So, let’s begin with the story in Numbers. “The [fourth] book [in the Torah, or Pentateuch] tells the story of how Israel's exodus generation entered the desert where most of them died away in faithlessness and disobedience, and how the next generation emerged, prepared to claim the promise of a new land.”[i]

After Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt and across the Red Sea, they wandered in the wilderness for many years. The story that is referenced in John’s gospel happened after the deaths of both Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ sister and brother who had accompanied him out of Egypt.

Remember how the people of Israel began grumbling and complaining, and God answered their complaint by giving them manna to eat?

Well, now here they are, grumbling and complaining again.
The text says they “became impatient” and “spoke against God and against Moses.”  Old Testament scholar Dennis Olson describes them as “drag[ging] out the same laundry list of complaints about dying in the wilderness, yearning to go back to Egypt, the lack of food and water, and the monotony of the manna.” It’s like a video clip that gets caught buffering and cannot play to the end, or an audio track that plays endlessly on repeat.
Nothing could satisfy them.

What happens next is surprising. The text says, “The LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many…died.”

It’s surprising because what is described is God’s judgment falling upon a people.

We like to think of judgment as something that happens to “other people” but in Numbers, it’s clear God delivers judgment upon God’s own people.

Facing the reality of God’s judgment, the people offer a confession, but simultaneously, they ask Moses to pray that God would remove the serpents from their midst.

Instead, God tells Moses to make a serpent and place it on a pole and instructs him that anyone who gets bitten will be able to look up at the serpent on the pole and live.  From that time forward until King Hezekiah destroyed it during his temple reform in the eighth century BCE because it had become a false idol, the serpent on the stick was called Nehushtan and the people of Israel kept it with them as a sign of God’s life-giving covenant.

When we hear the story referenced in the gospel text, it turns out that Jesus is the one speaking. The Pharisee Nicodemus has come to Jesus at night time and is asking him questions about what he is teaching and the signs that he has performed.

Recalling the sign of salvation that God had provided to the people of Israel all those centuries before, Jesus tells Nicodemus “so must the Son of Man must be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (v. 14-15)

And then, just as God’s people suffered judgment in the Numbers passage, Jesus says in v. 19, “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people have loved darkness more than light because their deeds were evil.”

Both the author of Numbers and the evangelist John are speaking to the community.

Remember how Jesus answered the scribe who asked which of the commandments was greatest?

Jesus said, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Mark 12:29-31)

For the Israelites wandering in the desert, their sin wasn’t that they complained; their sin was failing to believe the God of Israel, the Lord our God, was going to deliver them. And, they were so curved in on themselves and coiled tightly like snakes themselves that they couldn’t even recognize their own sin!

In Jerusalem, Nicodemus and the other religious leaders and temple priests, likewise, didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God. They studied and followed the Levitical laws meticulously, believing they could achieve righteousness by their good works if they could remain ritually pure and blameless. Their sin was failing to believe God alone was their redeemer and deliverer. (Ps. 107)

God can handle our complaints and our fears and doubts; the Psalms are full of complaints and laments, anger and fear, but the psalmists always return to what they know about who God is and what God’s character and past promises and actions tell us.

What is sinful is the certitude that the Israelites and the Pharisees display and their disregard for what God has done.

In his Lectures on Romans, Martin Luther writes about our natural impulse to “deeply curve in on [ourselves].” That is the very definition of sin: bending everything, even God’s best gifts, toward ourselves for our own elevation, enjoyment and pleasure.[ii]

And, when we are looking inward toward our bellies, we cannot look up.

We cannot look up at the life-giving sign that heals,
and we cannot look up at the cross that triumphs over death.

And when we cannot look up, we die.


It is that simple and that startling.

God breathes life into us and commands us to live, and instead, as Eugene Peterson writes in his paraphrase of today’s passage from Ephesians, we “[fill our] lungs with polluted unbelief, and then [exhale] disobedience.”

Thankfully God doesn’t leave us there. God who knows us and loves us, and has established a life-giving covenant with us, equips us to live an abundant life in the fullness of relationship in faith in Christ.

It’s ours, if only we will stop navel-gazing and look up.

Let us pray.
Lord our God,
heal our brokenness that we would see your gift of life;
God of judgment,
lift up our eyes that we would recognize Your presence in our lives in all circumstances;
Redeeming God,
Strengthen us to live as Your faithful people in a world that loves darkness.
We pray in the name of your crucified and risen Son, Jesus Christ,
Amen.

[i] “Numbers.” Luther Seminary, EnterTheBible.org.
[ii] Lectures on Romans. Luther’s Works, Vol. 25.