homily for Lent IV 2009

Homily for Lent IV 22 March 2009
Today’s Gospel starts with the phrase “The Son of Man must be lifted up”. The evangelist is saying that when Our Lord will be lifted up, or better because Our Lord will be lifted up, then we will have eternal life- somehow the lifting up will be the moment, the event that will bring the possibility of eternal life, that is, of our reconciliation with God. This is the first of three occasions in John’s Gospel where this phrase “lifted up” is used. Later on, when we find Jesus being cross-questioned by a crowd of Jews, in chapter 8 of the Gospel, and they ask him “Who are you?” (8;25), he tells them “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know” making it clear that somehow his full identity will only be made known in this lifting up, that this act of being lifted up, of allowing himself to be lifted up, will be Jesus being his most authentic- only then will we see who Jesus really is, what his life and mission have been really about- what in other words, Jesus is for…. And thirdly, we find this phrase again in chapter 12, when the events of Holy Week are beginning to gather momentum and the crowd is flocking round him because they have all heard he has just raised Lazarus from the dead and they are hanging on his words in a mood of curiosity that may go sour at any moment. Jesus is having his moment of purely human fear and anxiety at his fast approaching death. “Now is my soul troubled” he says, as he prepares to submit himself to all the injustice that is coming to him- “Now is the judgement of this world.” (12:31-32) He goes on “And I when I am lifted up from the earth will draw all men to myself”. What does “lifted up” mean then? Well, Our Lord himself explains it, because the next thing we read (v33) is “He said this to show by what death he was to die”. It is – as I am sure you have understood all along- all about the cross, Our Lord’s death on the cross.
Now the next phrase we need to look at is this bit about Moses- “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert”. What is that about? Well, it refers to a story told in the book of Numbers chapter 21. The Children of Israel are still wandering round and round the Sinai peninsula at this point, still being led by Moses and gradually being turned by his influence from the “mixed multitude” of slaves who left Egypt into a group of people with their own clear identity, the Chosen People of God. They got more and more fed up of course as time went on, with all this wandering- it must have been a bit like a holiday that has gone wrong- marvellous when you start out, but now the novelty has worn off and you get hot and tired and grumpy! You know what I mean I’m sure- that moment when you’re sick of all this foreign food and all you want is a nice cup of tea. The Book of Numbers says “the people became impatient on the way” and they said to Moses “What have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in this wilderness? For there is no food and water and we loathe this worthless food!” I’ve been on tours like that! They were eaten up, in a sense, with bitterness and anger, and the next thing that happens is that a lot of them get bitten by “fiery serpents” and die- the poison of these deeply destructive emotions- resentment and rage- kills. The people realise, a bit late it’s true, how wrong they have been to harbour all these negative self-centred and self-pitying thoughts, they have seen that they will bring about our death if we let them take us over and let their venom course through our veins unchecked. “Pray to the Lord” they beg Moses “that he take away the serpents from us”. And what happens next is that God tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and set it on a pole “and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live”. And after that if anyone was bitten by one of these snakes, he just had to fix his gaze on the bronze serpent and he would be cured.
What lessons for us lie in this ancient story! The destructive power of bitterness, that warps and withers the personality, is indeed a killer, a snake spreading its poison in our lives. Along with it go those other snakes in the same family, self-pity and ill humour. We all know people who are always complaining, always angry about something or another, always in a bad mood- how boring they are, how we try to avoid them, but what a prison they have created for themselves by getting stuck in such modes of thought, what a death sentence they have passed on themselves when they decide that this is me, I rather like being this self-important never satisfied Mr Grumpy.- or Mrs Grumpy indeed, or Sister Grumpy, or Father Grumpy. What is the only cure for these dangerous, indeed fatal, diseases, for this snakebite of rancour? How can we be inoculated against the fiery serpents, because we need to be- we may not be in the wilderness any more but there are plenty of fiery serpents lying in wait for us right here in Lewisham! They can jump out when we least expect it, in the most unlikely places, at the most unlooked for moments, for “There is no place where Temptation does not have access” as St Francis de Sales once said.
The answer of course, is the Cross- just as in the wilderness anyone looking at the bronze serpent was cured of his snakebite, so looking at the Cross we are brought up face to face with the love of God for us and the price Our Lord paid to reconcile the human race afresh to its loving Creator. The Cross shows us – as Our Lord had predicted in the Gospel- who Jesus really was, and what God wanted to show us through his earthly life and death. It is what St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians that we heard at Mass last week: “ Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles….Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”. Face to face with this total sacrifice, the final proof of God’s radical love for us and the lengths to which he will go for us and with us, our soul searching must begin in earnest and like the baby Hercules, we will want to reach out and strangle the serpents ourselves before they do any more damage to us. Here in the crucifix we see selfless love and willing surrender, and when we hold the Cross up as a mirror to our own lives, may it cause in us a reflection of God’s generosity and goodness. Lord Jesus, we make the same prayer this morning as the Children of Israel did all those centuries ago- “take away the serpents from us”, free us from the poison of rancour, and help us to look upon your Cross, and you lifted up on it, to let ourselves be drawn into your life. Amen.