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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, the text for this morning comes from the gospel reading.
You can’t read or hear read those five verses from the book of Numbers and not wonder in your mind that people prayed that God would deliver them and send the snakes away, and it was within God’s power to shoo those snakes away, but instead, of all the bizarre things, He would take the very thing of judgment, which was those serpents because they were God’s judgment upon the people’s impatience, grumbling, and complaining against God and against Moses that He would use the very symbol of His judgment to be the very symbol and icon of their salvation, both health-wise and, of course, the forgiveness of their sins. How unusually bizarre to take a symbol of judgment and to use it as the symbol of salvation. That’s exactly what Christ our Lord did. This is like the serpent on the pole. It is God’s judgment against us, but it is not borne by us. It was borne by Christ, the Son of God, and so important is it that Christ would make mention just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that all who look to Him believing would have eternal life.
The thing of judgment. The people experienced God’s judgment in order to pull them into repentance. You and I have experienced that in our lives, have we not? When God allows things to come together in such a manner, whether it’s our fault or whether it’s been done against us, whether we can be blamed or blame the other, God allows those things to get us on our knees, that we might repent of our own sin and see again God’s judgment for such sin and be healed again from such judgment of such sin. But it is a frightening thing to have our lives and our sin exposed. In the professional world, very few have the backbone to admit mistakes for that is a sign of weakness. To say that they didn’t understand this correctly, to say that they misunderstood this, to say that they were wrong, oh, tsk, tsk. One does not do that. That is to admit one’s inabilities and when one shows a sign of weakness, others pounce upon it with great fervor.
You’ve seen it in marriages, and you’ve seen it in your families, and you’ve seen it in your workplace. And isn’t it crazy that we, of all people, thinking that we’ve got this whole justification by grace through faith correctly, actually wish to use Lent as a time to self-flagellate ourselves in order to show God we’re really repentant. “Lord, see what I’m doing for you? I am so sorry for my sin.” Pray that that’s all that is done by you, because leaving yourself into God’s hands, He has and will continue to bring you humility by exposing you and all you are about, and it is a very, very naked feeling.
This was written to me by a young man, a student. He’s college aged. “How I despise this nakedness before God, this inability to cover any part of my wretchedness, this humiliating writhing of my soul before the holy gaze of my Creator. I am emptied of myself. My pride and the value of my person have been completely and utterly burned to the ground. I am nothing without Christ. How can I cry out to God? It’s He who has crushed me. It is He who has smitten me. The feeling of hypocrisy burns through my veins for even calling upon Him for my much-needed forgiveness. But that is what He has commanded me to do. That is what He has promised to hear from me, a broken man who speaks broken promises of change.”
God willing, that is the kind of repentance that those serpents brought to the people of Israel. God willing, that is the kind of repentance that God brings to you and me that we may flee to the judgment before us and be saved. But alas, you’ve seen it more than I have, haven’t you, where repentance lasts but a moment. Pride seeps back in and “It’s not my fault” becomes the mantra. In the people of Israel’s case, there were more issues and situations that they came across where they grumbled against God again. Just as the people who gathered around to hear these words spoken by Christ to Nicodemus when Nicodemus came at night to visit him, these apostles, their repentance would come and go, just like yours and mine.
Listen again to this young man’s ability to put it so clearly. “I am damned and I will always remain a damned sinner. God leaves me in this self-seeking so that my flesh may be kept in fear of Him and in humility so that I may keep running to His grace, always in fear of my own sinning, that is, always praying that He would not impute my sin to me and that my sin may never dominate me. But I’ve been baptized. My brokenness has been claimed by the Father in Jesus Christ. He has taken all of my good intentions and all of my best-laid plans and received them, broken and dead as His own, and gives me by His own deigning His garment of holiness. My salvation starts from my being sinful and knowing it. How frustrating it is in this life that God ____ (gap in audio recording) ____ escapes being a sinner, for that is what I am. Yet, in these most fragile moments of my person when I can feel, truly feel my sin pressing hard upon my heart, burdened with overwhelming guilt, there, there’s my loving Father, the most gracious and merciful. There’s where He’s the most gracious and merciful to me. He didn’t come to save the righteous but the sinners. He didn’t come to heal the healthy but the dying. God would have me on His terms as a sinner and only as a sinner. And this means that I cannot escape who I am except through Christ.”
That’s exactly what Paul was saying. While we were yet sinners, while we were dead in our trespasses, he said God made us alive. It wasn’t our repentance. It wasn’t our flagellation of self. It wasn’t our telling the world, “Woe is me. Look what I’ve done. Look what’s been done to me.” It was God crushing us so that He could raise us up. It was God breaking us that He may bind us together. That’s the terms of Christ speaking, “God so loved the world,” that gospel in a nutshell that you and I have known from knee high to a grasshopper. But the context of “God so loves the world” starts with the grumbling and impenitent Israelites continues with the apostles and Nicodemus who heard these words first spoken by Christ and continues on with the church of which you and I are a part today.
What an icon indeed. A symbol of God’s judgment upon a sinful people and a sinful world, but wherein is found life for such sinners. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and your minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting.
Amen.
