When God shows up in the story of the killing snakes in the wilderness, he shows up as the healer of his people. Anyone who will look on the uplifted fiery bronze serpent lives.
Our superstitions, our misapprehensions, about a God who brings death and destruction, a God who cannot be trusted, led the people, lead us, to hide from the face of God in their complaints and misery.
All of today’s lectionary readings have a common message: all the ways that we walk away from love are the origin of the evil and the death that befalls the cosmos, and the good Creator is the healer who restores his beloved world.
In our superstition and worship of idols we always want to pin darkness on the Light of the world. These superstitions have their basis in our fall from God,
In our self-imposed about the charitable character of the Creator.
It was not the bronze serpent who rescued the people from the death they imposed on themselves but God and so when Hezekiah finds them worshipping it and other pagan idols in the Temple some seven to eight centuries later he destroys it.
When Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night, Jesus mentions the episode with the snake and says that the Human One must be lifted up so that all who believe on him (look on him) will be saved.
Jesus tells Nicodemus that God so loved the world that he sent the Son, his only perfect mirror, so that all who believed in him might share the divine life without end.
There’s that word again: believe. We often think of this in terms of our dialogues with our brother skeptics and atheist friends about the very existence of God. Jesus has something far deeper in mind: trust; trust in the God who comes not to condemn the cosmos but to rescue it from death.
His final comments to Nicodemus require wisdom (the Bible is not self-interpreting). Jesus talks about those who do evil remaining in the shadows, unable to trust in the Good and transforming light that shines from the crucified God.
If we pay close attention it is not “the good” who emerge from the shade but the “true.”
Not one of is good, not one, but the “true” humans approach the transfiguring light of God trusting in his deep goodness; knowing that it’s the enemy of their souls, the prince of the powers of the air, the thief, who comes to kill, steal, and destroy; trusting that the Light comes to bestow on us life without measure; trusting that the uncreated light of God that shines from the human face of Jesus Christ will burn away all that is not of or from God and leave only God’s work in us to shine forever like the son in the kingdom of our Father. It is only the works of God for us and in us that survive when we leave the shadows of shame and gaze on his fiery Love.
This means we trust in the goodness of God, renounce our superstitions about a God who brings or cooperates with evil, see our own hand in our deprivations and false paths and devastations, and fearlessly meet his gaze, where his fire makes us eternal.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”
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