Lent 4 - Love Lifted Up. John 3:14-21 and Ephesians 2:1-10
This image of Sister Ann Rose Nu Tawng has gone viral over the past week.
As tensions build in Myanmar and protestors fight for democracy, this action by one woman has stood out as a single act of courage and love.
The military coup in Myanmar has been combating protestors with savage force, using tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and even live rounds.
Dozens of people have been killed in the chaos.
Just this Monday protestors took to the streets again in the streets and police responded with brutal force.
The police started chasing the crowd, including children down the street. At this point Sister Ann fell to her knees begging them to stop. As this unfolded a man was shot dead right before her.
And yet she knelt here in the midst of this violence, begging, praying and pleading that the violence would stop.
What prompted this act of complete bravery and madness?
I don’t think it is incidental that this woman is a nun.
I don’t think it is incidental that she follows a Messiah who himself laid down his life for the world.
Today, in this fourth Sunday of Lent we hear the beautiful and famous words of Jesus: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
These words make sense of Sister Ann’s actions.
They are the logic by which she can kneel before violence as an act of solidarity, hope, and love – even to the point of sacrifice.
So, as we reflect upon Jesus’ words in John 3:16, we are going to look at them set in their context and ponder their meaning for our lives today.
This famous passage is set with in John chapter 3, in which we catch Jesus in the middle of a conversation with a man called Nicodemus.
Nicodemus is a Pharisee. This means he’s a religious teacher. He is the one who grew up in the Jewish equivalent of Sunday school and has trained to be a leader in the religious community. Here is one person who we might assume has a lot of answers.
Yet Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the darkness. In the quiet hours of the night this man seeks out Jesus to find out who he really is. He comes with questions and is curious about the good news Jesus has come announcing. He has a hunch that Jesus is of God and is worth listening to, but he is not quite sure what Jesus is really about.
So here as we hear the second half of John chapter 3 we see Jesus speaking of his own life and mission – who he is and what he has come to do.
Here we encounter that line:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Right at the outset it is helpful to pause and ask: “For God so loved the what?”
The world!
The world is the context that is front and centre here.
Now, for a start this may have surprised Nicodemus. There was certainly a school of thought amongst the Jewish religious leaders that the Messiah would come to rescue Israel, God’s chosen people. But the world?
However, the mission of Jesus is to the world. In fact, Israel were chosen to be a light to the world, not just for their own sake.
This is worth emphasizing, because today in some Christian circles we too easily speak of the world in negative terms.
There is an aspect of “the world” refereed to in negative terms in Scripture. Jesus later in John’s Gospel will speak of the world in this way. But when used like this it refers to people rejecting God’s plan of rescue and rejecting Jesus and preferring to go their own way. To be “worldly” in that sense is negative, but here Jesus speaks of the world as the place and the people God has come to rescue.
It’s important to distinguish between the ethical concept, as in “of this world” and the world which God made and loves but is broken and needs healing.
Here we see the “big picture” mission of Jesus, and it would be a shame for us to miss it in all its scope and beauty and cosmic significance.
In our reading from Ephesians today we see this cosmic emphasis.
“2 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 2:6-7)
Paul here in Ephesians speaks of the “world” in ethical terms – that which has chosen to rebel and disobey God.
This provokes God’s wrath and judgement, but God being rich in mercy and out of deep love does not leave us without a rescue plan. God does not leave this world to suffer and die without hope. He initiates a rescue plan – in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
In God’s giving to this world, Jesus, his one and only Son, we see God’s immeasurable riches and kindness.
We see God’s kindness in his rescue of us.
I love the way that the Message translation puts vs 17: “God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.”
So, how does this work? How does the coming of Jesus into the world make a difference? How does it put “the world right?”
This is where Jesus draws on a story from the Hebrew Scriptures to make sense of who he is and what he will do in his death on the cross and resurrection.
In verse 14 we hear “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.”
The background story that John refers to here is the story of the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, led by Moses. The people grumble against God and go their own way.
The Israelites are punished by poisonous snakes invading their camp.
Many are bitten and die.
In the midst of this, God also in his mercy gives the people a remedy, he instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent which he sets on a pole and holds up so that when people are bitten and look at it, they will live.
So, while the whole story is fairly bizarre in lots of ways – the symbolism is clear – the snake is a sign of the saving power of God.
This symbol is borrowed by Jesus to allude to his crucifixion and death.
Jesus will be lifted up, like the pole, and Jesus will bring a cure = this time for sin-sick humanity.
One helpful metaphor for sin is to think of it as a disease from which we need healing.
We are well familiar with this concept in our current climate, as we face the ravages of covid.
Sin, is the word used to describe the disease that causes us to walk away from God, to reject the gift of this life he has given us, and consequently to live in destructive ways that go against God’s good creation. This manifests itself in all kinds of behaviours, but at its core it is a kind of sickness of the heart, of our wills and desires.
The point that Jesus makes here is that without the remedy of the cross we would perish, like the Israelites in the wilderness.
Just for clarity’s sake, I found these thoughts by Biblical scholar, Tom Wright, and Pastor Brian Zahnd helpful and illuminating…
“What he (John) is saying, and will continue to say in several ways right up to his account of the crucifixion, is that the evil which was and is in the world, deep-rooted within us all, was somehow allowed to take out its full force on Jesus. When we look at him hanging on the cross (or ‘lifted up’, as John says here and several times later in the gospel; the cross is an ‘elevation’, almost a ‘glorification’), what we are looking at is the result of the evil in which we are all stuck. And we are seeing what God has done about it.” – Tom Wright[1]
The cross is where the sin of the world coalesced into a hideous singularity so that it might be forgiven en masse. The cross is where the world violently sinned its sins in the body of the Son of God, and where he absorbed it all, praying, “Father, forgive them.” The cross is both ugly and beautiful. It’s as ugly as human sin and as beautiful as divine love — but in the end love and beauty win. – Brian Zahnd [2]
THE INVITATION:
We are invited first and foremost to look to the Cross.
Here is where we will see the love of God lifted up for all to see, we are invited to trust in Jesus to save us and rescue us through his sacrificial love. This is the central truth and hope of Christianity.
The invitation is for the world, to each and every one of us. There are none of us disqualified from the summons of the cross. Yet we are reminded of the seriousness of the situation by John. He says: “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”
One of the earliest thinkers of the church, from the 2nd century, Irenaeus puts it well:
“To those who keep their love for God, He grants communion with Him. And communion with God is life and light and enjoyment of all the good things He has in store. But on those who, by their own choice, turn away from Him, He inflicts the separation which they themselves have chosen. And separation from God is death; separation from the light is darkness; separation from God is the loss of all good things He has in store. Those, then, who by their apostasy have lost these things, who are destitute of all good, experience every kind of punishment. God does not punish them immediately Himself; no, punishment comes upon precisely because they are destitute of all good…’He who does not believe’, says the Lord, ‘is already judged.”[3]
The point here is that how we respond to Jesus and his love lifted up on the cross really does matter.
We are called to put our faith and trust in Him.
We are invited to be a people of the cross, bearers of light in the world…
Coming back to the image of Sister Ann, we are invited to put our faith and trust in Jesus and be transformed by his cross shaped love.
God, who loves the world so much, calls us to let his love flow through us into the world too.
Ephesians 2:10 “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
As we encounter the cross of Jesus, we will like Sister Ann, be moved to love our world, to love our community and to be more like Jesus, God’s gift to this broken and hurting world.
By Joshua Taylor
[1] Tom Wright, John For Everyone
[2] https://brianzahnd.com/2020/04/the-crucifixion-of-jesus/
[3] Irenaeus, quoted in “The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus Against the Heresies: Selected and Introduced by Hans Urs Von Balthasar.”