Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Fourth Sunday of Lent, 10^th of March 2024

John 3:14-21
Ephesians 2:1-10

‘O give thanks to the Lord for he is good; for his great love is without end.’ ‘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.’ ‘God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ’.

Despite these words of comfort and praise, today’s lectionary readings do not fill me with joy. Indeed, when I saw what it was that I had to preach on this week my exact words were: ‘Oh bother! It’s bronze serpent Sunday!’

In today’s gospel reading, we have Jesus being enigmatic with the Pharisee Nicodemus. Nicodemus has come to Jesus by night because he has recognised that Jesus is a teacher who has come from God by the ‘signs’, the miracles, Jesus has shown. The two discuss being born again or born from above, and then Jesus says: ‘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.’ Commentators understand what Jesus means by being ‘lifted up’. In his crucifixion Jesus will be lifted up on the cross, which in the Gospel according to John is seen to be simultaneously his glorification. But no one has the slightest idea why Jesus compares his own crucifixion and glorification to the story of Moses making a serpent of bronze, and placing it on a pole.

This is partly because Biblical commentators do not understand the point of that serpent of bronze in the first place. Why did the Lord not do what the people asked Moses to pray for and simply take away the serpents from them? Suggestions have been made. Maybe to look up at the serpent on the pole the people needed to kneel, demonstrating with humility that they had overcome their impatience with Moses and with the Lord. Maybe the Lord thought that they still deserved the punishment of a painful snake bite and the sickness it brought, even if they no longer needed the final punishment of death. In the verses we hear today from Psalm 107 the connection is made between sin and sickness; did the people still need to be reminded that sinning would be bad for them? Maybe the people needed to learn that danger can be a road to new life and that sometimes suffering is necessary for healing. Biblical commentators throw up their hands.

Three years ago, when the lectionary gave us these bizarre readings, I shared Martin Luther’s reflection on this story and his connection between the ugliness of the snake and the offensiveness of the crucifixion. I talked about the need for us to recognise the hideousness of the crucifixion, the horror and scandal of Jesus’ death, to see the God who comes to us in powerlessness and is tortured and killed in solidarity with human suffering. I believe that all that is still true. But Danish physicist Niels Bohr once wrote, ‘ There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.’ Bohr was writing on atomic physics, about which I know less than nothing, but I am going to use his insight today. I am going to do what I said would be wrong when I preached on these passages three years ago, and ignore the horror and scandal of Jesus’ death.

Last Sunday a small group of us gathered after the service to spend some time with the writings of Julian of Norwich. The society in which she lived, fourteenth-century England, was as complex and terrifying as ours. The Black Death did not simply decimate Europe. In Julian’s Norwich, it is estimated that seven thousand people out of a population of twelve thousand died. The feudal system was unsettled, both rural peasants and the urban poor were being exploited by the wealthy, and the suffering created by plague and famine led to the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. The church itself was in trouble. In 1377 the Great Western Schism began and there were two popes, one in Avignon in France and one in Rome, until 1417. During the second half of the fourteenth century, Oxford Professor John Wycliffe argued that the church should give up its property and that the clergy should live humble lives rather than being feudal lords. Wycliffe also advocated for the translation of the Bible into English and may have translated the New Testament himself. After he died in 1384 he was posthumously declared to be a heretic, as were his followers, known as Lollards.

If we did not know about all this upheaval from other sources, we would not learn anything about it from the Revelations of Divine Love God gave to Julian. It is not that Julian was not experiencing them together with the people around her. It was that for her the revelations she had to share, about God’s extraordinary, overwhelming, inclusive, love, filled her with such astounding joy that they put everything else into perspective.

Late last century American Presbyterian minister and theologian Frederick Buechner wrote:

The world floods in on all of us. The world can be kind, and it can be cruel. It can be beautiful, and it can be appalling. It can give us good reason to hope and good reason to give up all hope. It can strengthen our faith in a loving God, and it can decimate our faith. In our lives in the world, the temptation is always to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running strongest. When good things happen, we are in heaven; when bad things happen, we are in hell. When the world strikes out at us, we strike back, and when one way or another the world blesses us, our spirits soar … In other words, we are in constant danger of being, not actors in the drama of our own lives, but reactors. The fragmentary nature of our experience shatters us into fragments. Instead of being whole, most of the time we are in pieces, and we see the world in pieces, full of darkness at one moment and full of light the next.[1]

In contrast to most of us, fragmented people blown about by the wind, Buechner argues that Jesus was whole. ‘All his life long, wherever Jesus looked he saw the world not in terms simply of its brokenness – a patchwork of light and dark calling forth in us now our light, now our dark – but in terms of the ultimate mystery of God’s presence buried in it like a treasure buried in a field … To see the world like that, as Jesus saw it, is to be whole.’[2]

Julian of Norwich was also, in Buechner’s terms, whole. Like Jesus, she knew that ‘sinners are made in the image of God no less than saints. Even a sparrow fallen dead by the roadside is transparent to holiness’.[3] In the first revelation, God gave Julian a vision of a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and told her that it was all that is made. She wondered how something so small could survive and received the answer, ‘It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way by the love of God.’ All creation had three properties, Julian saw: ‘the first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God cares for it’.[4] Julian saw what Jesus taught: that all creation has the kingdom of heaven buried in it like a treasure buried in a field, like leaven working in dough, like a seed germinating in the ground, like the prompting in his heart that brought the Prodigal Son home.

Love was the meaning of God’s revelations to Julian; after fifteen years of pondering on them she was inspired to write that Love showed them to her; what Love showed her was love; and that Love showed them to her for love.[5] So it is unsurprising that the message of Christ’s Passion for Julian was also love. Three years ago, I quoted words Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison: ‘The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help’.[6] That is true. But to quote Niels Bohr ‘The opposite of a great truth is also true,’ and Julian tells us that no suffering Jesus experienced in the crucifixion can compare to the love that prompted him to undergo it. Julian writes, ‘I contemplating [Christ’s Passion] through his grace, saw that his love for our souls is so strong that he chose the pain willingly and eagerly, and suffered it meekly and was well-pleased to do so’.[7]

The ninth of the sixteen revelations Julian received was of Christ’s happiness in suffering for us because of his infinite love for us. Julian writes:

Then Jesus, our kind Lord, said, “If you are pleased, I am pleased. It is a joy, a delight and an endless happiness to me that I ever endured suffering for you, and if I could suffer more, I would suffer more.” … And in these words, “If I could suffer more, I would suffer more,” I truly saw that he was willing to die as often as he was able to die, and love would never let him rest until he had done it … For his love is so great that everything seems a trifle to him in comparison … And here I saw the second insight into this blessed Passion: the love that made him suffer is as much greater than his pain as heaven in above the earth; for the Passion was a noble, glorious deed performed at one particular time through the action of love, love which has always existed and will never end; because of this love, he very affectionately said these words, “If I could suffer more, I would suffer more.”[8]

We are not saints, and the world’s light and dark call forth in us now our light, now our dark. We struggle to see the wholeness of God’s love behind the fragments of the world that confront us. Sometimes the world shatters us into fragments. But the prophets, and the apostles, and the saints, and the mystics, and Jesus himself, speak with one voice and tell us that God created the universe out of love, and so the world is holy, even if we struggle to see it that way. And God created us out of that same love, and so we are holy, too, even if we struggle to see ourselves that way.

I do not know exactly how Jesus’ crucifixion can be compared to that serpent of bronze Moses made and placed on a pole in the wilderness, but I can be certain that God, who is rich in mercy, created us out of the great love with which he loved us even before we were born, and that God wants us to rejoice in that love. As the psalmist encourages us to sing:

Let us thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for the wonders God does for us.
Let us offer a sacrifice of thanks
and tell of God’s deeds with rejoicing.

O give thanks to the Lord for he is good;
for his great love is without end.

[1] Frederick Buechner, ‘Journey Toward Wholeness,’ Theology Today, vol. 49, (January 1993), p. 457.

[2] ‘Journey Toward Wholeness,’ p. 458.

[3] ‘Journey Toward Wholeness,’ p. 458.

[4] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, translated by Elizabeth Spearing (Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 47.

[5] Revelations of Divine Love, p. 179.

[6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘Letter to Eberhard Bethge, 16 July 1944’ in Letters and Papers from Prison, (London: SCM Press, 2002), p. 134.

[7] Revelations of Divine Love, p. 71.

[8] Revelations of Divine Love, pp. 73-4.