CLICK HERE for a worship video for March 10
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Lent – March 10, 2024
Numbers 21:4-9, Ephesians 2:1-10, John 3:14-21
Dear friends, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
When I’m sick, if it gets bad enough, I will end up looking at a snake on a pole. When someone in my family is hurting, they too will look at a snake on a pole. My wife just started seeing a chiropractor for some low back pain, and part of her treatment involved looking at a snake on a pole. My oldest son had his tonsils and adenoids taken out last year, and before he underwent surgery, he looked at a snake on a pole. Here’s what I mean: my medical insurance card has a picture on it of a snake on a pole! Blue Cross/Blue Shield has it as part of their logo, and so every time anyone in my family needs medical attention, we pull out our card and see this snake on a pole.
Why would that be? Why would this image be found on our medical insurance card? Why would a medical insurance company include it as part of their logo?
Well, it isn’t just them. You can find this image in lots of places related to medicine. It is found in the insignia of several medical institutions. It is often found on nurses’ uniforms or on patches on the shoulders of EMTs or on the side of their ambulances. It is also found on medical bracelets people wear. Some of you might be wearing one with it on it right now.
So what is this image, this symbol? Why this snake on a pole?
This symbol is called a caduceus. It is also sometimes referred to as the Rod of Asclepius. Asclepius is a figure from Greek mythology associated with healing and medicine. But how in the world did Asclepius come to be associated with this strange image of a snake on a pole? It is widely believed that the Greeks “culturally appropriated” this symbol from the Jewish people and their story of Moses in the wilderness – the very story we hear in our first reading for today.
Moses led the Israelites out of slavery and through the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. Almost as soon as they were out there in the wilderness, the people started to grumble against Moses and against God. They complained about everything! The water they had to drink was yucky. They were hungry. When God gave them manna to eat, that wasn’t good enough. They wanted meat too. When God gave them meat in the form of quail, they said, no, not that meat, we want that other meat, like we had back in Egypt.
Even worse than being a bunch of ungrateful whiners, the people of God started to doubt God’s goodness. They started to think God had led them out into the wilderness only to let them die there. They failed to trust in God’s promises to them, that he was with them, that he had a future in store for them. And so God sent poisonous serpents among them. The snakes bit them. Some of them died. This sounds harsh, and maybe it is, but God was showing his people that sin leads to death.
Thankfully this is not the end of the story! God went on to provide a way for his people to be healed. He provided them with a way to be saved from death. God instructed Moses to make a serpent of bronze and hang it on a pole. Then Moses was to lift this snake on a pole up before the people, and all who lifted their eyes and looked upon it would be healed. They would live. As they lifted their eyes to this symbol of their sin, it became the very means of their salvation. That snake on a pole, then, has become a symbol of healing and of life.
Today in our gospel reading we hear Jesus using this story and this symbol to describe what he has come to do. Jesus uses the snake on a pole as a way of pointing to the healing he has come to bring. He uses it to describe how he would save people with the venom of sin pulsing through their veins, how he would save them from death.
Just before our reading picks up, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. This is who Jesus is talking to. Nicodemus was trying to figure out who Jesus was and what he was up to. He and his fellow Pharisees had established that Jesus was a teacher, but Jesus wanted him to know that he was much more than that. Jesus told Nicodemus that he was the Son of Man who has descended from heaven. The Son of Man is a phrase from the book of Daniel, where it refers to the Messiah, the long-promised Savior. Jesus explained to Nicodemus that the Son of Man would save by being lifted up, just like that snake on a pole. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus said, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever who believes in him may have eternal life.”
Jesus was more than a teacher. He was more than a prophet. Jesus had come down from heaven to save those who had been bitten by the serpent – which is everyone! Jesus had come to be put on the pole that is the cross, where once again the symbol of our sin becomes the very means of our salvation. Jesus had come to be lifted up on this pole, so we would lift our eyes to him in faith and live. As N.T. Wright puts it so succinctly in his commentary on this passage: “Humankind has been smitten with a deadly disease. The only cure is to look at the Son of Man dying on a cross and find life through believing in him.”
This tees up what has sometimes been called “the Bible in miniature,” or “the Gospel in a nutshell.” It leads to what is probably the best-known Bible passage of all. Right after saying this, Jesus tells Nicodemus: “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.”
When you hear the word “believe” in the Bible, and especially in this passage, I would invite you to think of the word “trust.” “Believe” isn’t a bad word. It isn’t wrong. But in modern usage “believe” is often understood as something related to knowledge and then personal assent. It is often thought of as accepting a proposition. Again, this isn’t entirely wrong, but the Greek word here is more nuanced. It can also be translated as trust. Trust is something that is elicited. It is something that is cultivated in us and directed towards another.
For instance, when you’re receiving medical treatment, there is a lot of trust involved, isn’t there? To believe your medical provider when they tell you what is wrong with you is a good place to start, but when they start prescribing meds or putting needles in you or cutting you open, you have moved into trust territory. You are entrusting yourself to their care. You are putting your life in their hands. Faith, too, involves not only belief, or believing, it involves trust, entrusting yourself to another.
And so to look upon the Son of Man as he is lifted up is not only to believe an idea. It is not merely to say, “Yep, there he is!” To look upon him with faith is to trust that what he is doing there is for your benefit. It is for your healing. It is what saves you. It is what has opened the door for you to eternal life. To look upon him with faith is to entrust yourself entirely to him.
Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we often grumble against God when things don’t go exactly as we’d like them to go. Even worse, there are times when we, too, start to doubt the goodness of God. In spite of God’s ongoing patience and grace and faithfulness to us, we start to believe God doesn’t care about us, that he has abandoned us in the wilderness. Sometimes we fail to trust God’s promises to us.
And so we, too, are snakebit by our sin. We, too, have the venom of the serpent pulsing in our veins. We all have this same condition, and it is fatal. As St. Paul writes in our epistle reading for today: “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once lived.”
But just as God saved the ungrateful Israelites from sin and death, so too has God saved us! As St. Paul continues in our epistle reading, “But 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—by grace you have been saved.”
The Son of Man has been lifted up for us. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that all those who believe in him, all those look upon him with faith, all those who entrust their lives to him, may not perish, but may have eternal life.
Just as with the Israelites, the symbol of our sin – the cross – has become the very means of our salvation. And so we look upon it with faith, with trust. We process the cross during the Lenten season to train our eyes and our hearts to look up, to look upon the Son of Man lifted up for us in every time of need.
Jesus is our snake on a pole. In looking upon him, we find healing and life.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Jeffrey R. Spencer
Oak Harbor Lutheran Church