The Bible Verse We Thought We Knew

     This is a verse we know, John 3:16 "God so loved the world he gave his only Son that whomsoever believeth in him (I'm switching back to the older translation) whomsoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Now that there's no longer a single translation used in churches all over, we have different ways of wording John 3:16.   But it's a verse that people know; especially people who were raised in church, who grew up going to Sunday School; people who had kindly ladies or thoughtful gentlemen teaching them how to master these words, how to repeat these words and how to grow into an understanding of these words - John 3:16.

     In today's scripture passage, however these words are found in a different setting.  And it makes the words themselves seem somewhat different; maybe very different.  It's as if you took a diamond out of a wedding ring and reset it in a jeweled bracelet.  It's still the same diamond, the words effect, the words meaning are still present; but because it's in the new setting, it seems very different indeed.  John 3:16 in its larger context is a verse that we thought we knew.  A verse that has connotations, different ideas that go along with it when you put it in the light of these different, surrounding verses.   And we don't know whether Jesus is the one who spoke these verses or whether its the narrator of the Gospel of John. 

     Scholars disagree about where to put the quotation marks in John 3.  The chapter begins with Nicodemus, the wise old rabbi comes to visit Jesus at night because he doesn't want his friends to know that he's interested in what the young teacher is saying.  And he comes and talks with Jesus about being born again.  And they have a long discussion about what it means to be born again.  And Nicodemus doesn't quite get what Jesus means and so he keeps asking him pointed questions, (that's called "dialectic" in education), he keeps asking these kind of contrary pointed questions as a way of trying to get Jesus to fill out his meaning and make it more understandable.  So Nicodemus and Jesus have this conversation but eventually, at the end of the conversation Jesus, alone, is talking and the Bible never tells us that Nicodemus left the room.  That happened "off-stage" if you will; and what we see is Jesus talking about the significance of the fact that the Son of God has come into the world. 

     And that speech of Jesus' probably comes to an end some point in those last few verses of John 3, but we're not exactly sure where. So John 3:16 might even have been stated by Jesus.  But there are other things in this passage that are also unfamiliar to us; the connection of John 3:16 with all this talk about how people have loved the darkness rather than the light, and people who love the darkness do not come to the light because they don't want their evil deeds to be exposed.  So there's a lot of light & dark, good & evil talk that surrounds this passage as well.  But perhaps the most striking thing in the passage is the very first thing that I read in reading this lesson to you this morning; this whole thing about lifting up the serpents in the wilderness.  What's all that about? 

     It refers to the story of the little red book of Numbers in the Old Testament.  An episode in the lives of the children of Israel as they were wandering in the wilderness between slavery in Egypt and the Promised Land.  In those years of wandering they frequently grumbled against Moses; and they asked Moses to account for why he had brought them out there, why were they in the wilderness starving and dying of thirst, they had been better off when they were slaves.  Why had Moses done this to them?  And whenever this happened, God would do something to respond to the people's grumbling.  Sometimes he would give them water, sometimes he would give them bread; those are the more familiar things.   But then, in this story he gives them death; so it's kind of a grim story.  He sends fiery serpents into their midst; poisonous snakes, I think we can surmise.  And people are bitten by the serpents and many of them die; and they come to Moses and say Do something about these fiery serpents!  Ask God to take them away from us!   And so Moses had conversations with God and received instructions - that he is to make a bronze replica of the serpent and affix it to a pole and lift the pole up in the air so that all the people can see the bronze serpent.  And then, by looking at that bronze serpent, those who have been bitten by the poisonous snakes will be healed. 

     A striking story; a story we have mixed feelings about, I'm sure, because we don't like the idea of God sending death.  But also, a story that has a very interesting way of connecting the means of death with the means of redemption, or the means of help and salvation.  The lifting up of the serpent so people can gaze upon that serpent and live.  The lifting up of an image of their own death, of their own guilt, of their own wretchedness, their own separation from God; the lifting up of an image of that so that they can look upon that image and find restored life from the same God who had sent the snakes in the first place.   That's the Old Testament story.

     And here, in this discourse of Jesus, as he talks with Nicodemus, here he mentions that story in talking about the significance of life.  And I think, for Christians, it's impossible to hear this story and to think about it in connection with Jesus' life without thinking about it as a reference to the cross.  When the cross is lifted up it will draw all people to the one who is on the cross, to Jesus.  When the Son of Man is lifted up, all who look upon him will be saved.  That is the way in which the symbol of the brazen serpent, the bronze serpent, has meaning for us; and this passage connects that symbol with the crucifixion itself.  So that the idea - God so loving the world that he sent his only Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life - that idea is connected with the crucified Jesus.  When you see in verse 14 the reference to the brazen serpent, I think you can't help but see that God's salvation is found at its heart, it's in the crucifixion.

     But as a child, because I only knew John 3:16, I didn't connect it with John 3:14 and 16, the other earlier and later verses; because I only knew John 3:16 I never made that connection.  AT least not for many years.  Instead I thought about Jesus being born into the world; and Jesus growing up in the world; and Jesus teaching us how to be like God; and Jesus showing us, by example, how to love one another; and Jesus blessing us in all these ways. That that was God's sign of his love for the world, and certainly that is the sign of God's love for the world.  But here's where I think I've wandered from an appropriately Christian understanding of all this; I then concluded that the crucifixion was a very bad and unfortunate twist in the story.  And fortunately, God raised Jesus from the dead and so it turned out all right after all. At the heart of God's plan of bringing Jesus into the world, the crucifixion was the devil's attempt to stop God and God stopped the devil and therefore salvation was allowed to go forward.  That was how I interpreted it as a child. 

     It wasn't until later that I saw that it should be interpreted differently; that it should be seen that all the signs and wonders, the goodness of Jesus on earth, finds its focus and concentration in the crucifixion itself.  That that is the heart of the story; and the resurrection is God's way of telling us that yes this crucifixion is the heart of the story.  The resurrection is God telling us what is happening in the crucifixion.  In the resurrection God is making clear to us that the crucifixion was not just another innocent person being killed.  That has happened since the dawn of the human race: innocents have died at the hands of the cruel and the strong.  But the crucifixion was more than that, it was God pouring himself into that injured innocence and being killed for us in order to deliver us from that horrible predicament that the human race have found ourselves embedded in for all of our collective memory.  The resurrection is God's sign that the crucifixion is the heart of the Gospel. 

     Seeing Christ on the cross is for us like looking at the brazen serpent lifted up in the wilderness so that we can be healed of that poison that flows through the veins of all human beings; so that we can acquire a new kind of life and move into a new level of existence that includes and culminates in and is nothing other than life everlasting.  This, I think, is clearly what John 3:16 looks like in its new and larger setting; and it's what John 3:16 ought to look like.  It's a statement about the crucifix, about Christ affixed to the cross, and how we need to gaze upon that so that we can fully understand what it is all about.   So that we can understand, not just with our minds, but with our hearts as well.

     I never have had a problem with crucifixes.  As a child I heard the idea that the Catholics have crucifixes because they want to emphasize the death of Jesus but in Protestant churches we have an empty cross because we want to emphasize the resurrection of Jesus.  But I've learned since then, that that's a gross misrepresentation of what the Catholic church teaches.  Devout Catholics are as fervent in believing in the resurrection as any devout Protestant would be.  But Catholicism, drawing upon centuries of discussion of scripture knows that the crucifixion is at the heart of the Gospel.  Now, yet, you can be superstitious about crucifixes; and I think that was the original problem that the Protestant reformers had.  It was an emphasis of sacrifice in a superstitious way that it worked into the piety of the people in the 1500's.  And that's why Martin Luther and John Calvin thought that an empty cross was best; although they were not adamant about that and Luther, at least, still adhered to the crucifix.

     It was later on that the Protestant crosses became empty crosses.  And I think they still convey, even in their emptiness, they convey the reality that it was upon this cross that Jesus died and it was after his death that Jesus rose from the dead.  I think Protestant crosses are okay; but I think the crucifix is also a valuable thing.  And even though we do not, as a church, use a crucifix in our worship; nevertheless the crucifix exists in our Protestant way of worshipping God in the form of the narrative of Jesus' passion, Jesus' suffering and death.  That story, it's a story version of the crucifix; and that story, I think, is what gives us something beyond words - a sense, a connection with what God was doing for us.  A connection that lies deeper than words.

     In C.S. Lewis' novel, That Hideous Strength, one of the main characters falls into the hands of an evil group of men.  And these evil men have, as their design, the idea of remaking the human race.  And they begin with him; they try to deprogram him of all the notions he has picked up through the years of his growing up and being educated; the notions of goodness and truth and beauty that human beings have been discussing as long as humans have known those things.  So, they try to deprogram him, they try to take those ideas out; they try to make him a completely blank slate so that they could reconstruct in him new notions of goodness and truth and beauty that would be the opposite of the older, out-moded, Christian-influenced ideas that this young man had. 

     The young man who was in their hands was not a believer; he was very eagerly accepted by the great scientists who formed a part of his circle; so he was a willing subject, in a sense, to the idea behind what these men were doing.  But in the deprogramming they did with him, they met unexpected resistance.  He had gone along with a lot of the deprogramming; he had accepted the fact that beauty is arbitrary, that there is no eternal standards of beauty; he accepted the idea that truth is something that looks different from different angles and is therefore relative.  He had adopted these sort of counter-traditional ideas.   But then, goodness became an obstacle.  And what they did was, they locked him in a room with a large wooden crucifix.  The crucifix was awful as a work of religious art; it was gawdy; it was sentimental; it was more like the kitsch that you buy in a five-and-dime store than like a work of art that you would truly admire as you saw in a museum or a church.  So it was not beautiful to look upon, it made Christ look sort of like a mockery, or hideous, but it was a genuine crucifix in the room. 

    And as the young man looked at this crucifix he realized that it had nothing of appeal to it.  And then, what they told him to do was step on the crucifix; to desecrate the crucifix, in other words to act as if the crucifix didn't matter.  And the young man said to the men But you've already taught me that there is no such thing as truth and beauty and therefore it's not significant if I stand on it.  If you're making me stand on it means that you think it is significant and therefore you don't believe in what you said about truth.   That was a clever bit of reasoning on his part, but they said No, the point of stepping on the crucifix is that you've been programmed to believe that the crucifix is a symbol of goodness and therefore if you step on it, you can indicate that you no longer have that part of your childhood prejudices in you so step on the crucifix. And they became more and more forceful with trying to get him to do this. 

     And he looked upon it, and he saw the face of Jesus, the blood.  He saw the wounds in the hands and the stripes on the shoulders were visible at the point were the two crossed pieces of wood meet.  He saw all the wounds.  He saw the suffering on his face.  He saw the crown of thorns pressed down into his head.  And he looked upon these things and he found in his own heart a feeling of pity welling up, pity.  And he found himself pitying not only the idea of someone human being killed in this way; but pitying the fact that the cross itself was a piece of wood and was therefore unable to resist him, helpless to fight back. If he stepped on it he would be destroying something that would indicate a kind of wretched hideousness deep down inside of him that he would not accept and he would not go along with. 

     And so we see, as he confronts this crucifix and he thinks about how he's going to respond, his thoughts are coming together and focusing and he want to make the response different from the way he readily gave in to their other attempts to deprogram him.  He can't step on the cross; and as that resolution forms in his mind he finds the words to respond to the men with instead: It's all bloody nonsense; and I'm damned if I'll do it. 

     Think about those words. They're not meant to be just taking the Lord's name in vain; they're meant to be taken literally.  The strong language is literal language here I'm damned if I do it.   That is what the passage means to me.  It has ever since I first encountered it.  Somewhere in those mysterious years when I was growing up; sometime when I was turning from a child into a young adult; sometime in those years when I started confronting its wholeness, the depth of the passion story; I realized that my response to that story made all the difference in whether I belonged to the darkness or to the light.

     And it wasn't out of fear, but out of a loathing for what the darkness symbolizes; a desire to latch onto what the light shines forth from its very heart; its out of that that my human response to the passion story came.  And I find myself now, still confronting the passion story as something beneath the level of words and yet something terribly, terribly real and important.  If all we wanted to celebrate was that God is powerful enough to wave his fingers and make death go away, that would be something to celebrate; but it wouldn't be Easter, it wouldn't be the resurrection.  It has to have that crucifixion for all of it to make sense.  For Jesus' coming into the world out of God's love, to make sense.   You've got to focus on the cross.

     And so the Bible verse that I thought I already knew has come to mean something entirely different to me; entirely deeper and greater and wider and higher and purer than I ever imagined anything could be.  I hope you, like me, will find yourself unable to think of John 3:16 without remembering that serpent lifted up, and what that means when we think of the cross.  It's only a beginning; my achieving this insight is the beginning of my redemption not the end, but I think it is a beginning that God calls us to.  The beginning that Jesus was inviting Nicodemus to on that night.  Amen.