John 3:14-21
Over the last few weeks, we have been looking at the great movement of God, from creation on, to draw to people to himself. A people whose whole identity is anchored in their name - the children of God.
John 3:16 is probably the most famous verse in the bible. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.’ And it is magnificent, but needs to be read in context (like all scripture!).
So today’s gospel comes in the middle of a profoundly deep conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, the Pharisee, that began at v.1 of this chapter. Now Nicodemus believes. He has just told Jesus that no one could do the signs that Jesus has been doing unless they have come from God (v.2).
Jesus replies that no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born again, or born from above. Nicodemus does not understand this.
Nicodemus, just like us, must approach this just like a new-born baby.
Now Nicodemus was a very educated, experienced scholar, lawyer and Pharisee – yet everything Jesus says is troubling and confusing and not at all obvious to him.
But to our Lord it is quite clear. He says to Nicodemus in v.10, “You are Israel’s teacher, and you do not understand these things? (John 3:10).
To understand the good news of Jesus Christ, Nicodemus has to let go of all that he has accomplished and understood — let go and become like a newborn, ready to receive the world on completely new terms.
Some things are hard to grasp not because they are difficult to understand necessarily, but because they ask so much of us. We don’t want to understand, John says, because if we understand, we are implicated and need to choose, as John puts it in today’s gospel, between light and darkness.
God loved the world so much that God gave the Son so that we may believe and have eternal life. What is it about this “simple” Good News that we don’t want to understand?
Firstly, we must contend with the peculiar and troubling image Jesus has chosen to describe himself. He says that he is like the serpent that Moses lifted up in the wilderness (v.14).
In the story from Numbers 21:4, (our OT reading today), God sent poisonous serpents into the Israelite camp as punishment for the people complaining against God. When the people repented, God told Moses to fashion a serpent out of bronze and lift it on a pole, so that anyone bitten by a serpent could look upon it and live.
In the same way that the serpent was lifted on a pole, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up” (John 3:15). The term translated ‘lift up’ also means ‘exalt,” or ‘raise up’. and John uses that double meaning to communicate a theological paradox.
It prophetically points to both the physical lifting of Jesus into the air on a cross, and the lifting up in glorious exaltation of Jesus by God (see also John 8:28, and John 12:32).
In terms of humans being in control of their own lives, of course the cross is a moment of profound humiliation and defeat. But in John’s magnificent gospel, the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus are collapsed into a single movement of absolute divine control.
Jesus is raised up by God. Just as the Israelites were required to look upon the very thing that brought death in order to receive life, so we are asked to look upon Jesus’ “lifting up” in humiliating crucifixion and receive it as part of God’s plan to glorify Jesus and be the saviour of the world.
Jesus, crucified and raised up by Romans soldiers, was the very location of the entire sin of the world that his very ‘raising up’ defeated. We look to what would have killed us, too, just as the Hebrews did.
The image of Jesus as the serpent “lifted up” is paradoxical, not simple.
God’s motivation for sending Jesus is not condemnation, but love. Lifted high, Jesus’ broken, and pierced body demands attention.
Jesus’ body, the very location of God’s glory (John 2:21-22), is the most staggering revelation of the whole gospel. Rather than actively judging, Jesus’ form just hangs, to be looked upon by those who dare face the horror, the darkness as John puts it, of “the sin of the world” that caused the Lamb to die (John 1:29).
Yet, rather than despair, this sight is also the place of life, the sign of God’s profound love for creation. So v.21 ends with great hope; ‘But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’
Jesus, the Light of the World, exposes truth all around him. That truth is not all beautiful; most of it is human mistakes, wickedness, and hatred prompted by selfishness and fear (vv. 19-20).
So what does it mean to “believe” this good news that is in Jesus being “lifted up.” On a very basic level, we might say that it requires us to intellectually agree to the idea that all of this happened in just the way the story describes, and to accept that it means precisely what John claims that it means.
To “believe that” Jesus died, in this intellectual sort of way, and was raised to save us is easy to understand in the sense that it requires almost nothing of us.
But such simplicity does not honour the larger story John is telling. This is a story about an encounter with Jesus that left an intelligent and accomplished man, Nicodemus, scratching his head in bewilderment as he went back out into the darkness.
This is a story about how any one of us might reject the light offered to us because of the way it exposes what is dark in us (John 3:19–20).
To “believe” this Good News in a way that brings salvation requires more than believing that it happened. It requires “trusting in” this good news.
To “trust in” Jesus is not simply to believe something about what happened long ago, but also to let our own lives be transformed by the Jesus we encounter in this story.
Trusting in Jesus means withholding our ultimate loyalty and trust from other things that ask us to pledge our allegiance. Jesus has always, and does now, offend people. It is sometimes easier to be loyal to our worldly selves than to our gracious Lord. Just as the disciples were when they denied Jesus.
The “lifting up” of Jesus on a Roman cross places ever before us the question of who we will serve.
Secondly, when we look at the reaction of Nicodemus, placing our trust in this Jesus means noticing that the new life Jesus offered was especially difficult for what we can call the religiously accomplished.
We don’t need to be religiously educated as such, rather we need to come to the Lord as a newborn baby – instinctively trusting our Father. We must turn away from all other ways of approaching God.
The “lifting up” of Jesus is a stumbling block for those obsessed with decorum and conformity to tradition.
Finally, placing our trust in this Jesus means confronting the inconvenient truth that God’s purposes for those God loves are not synonymous with our own common-sense values of happiness, health, and safety.
The book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the pioneer, the author and perfector of our faith. The trail of faith that Jesus blazed reveals that there are things worth dying for.
The “lifting up” of Jesus reminds us that the true life God has promised us is not the life that we can secure for ourselves through self-interest and caution.
Rather that this true life is a total gift and if we have the courage of Christ on the cross, this new life becomes as natural as breathing is for a newborn baby – and just as satisfying and necessary. And it is through this belief of a new-born that all things are added to us. Let me pray...