Reflection -- Lifted Up

This passage echoes with the most important themes in the gospels, themes that belong at the heart of our Lenten preparation for Easter celebration.

In the opening verse, Jesus alludes to a story told in Numbers 21.  The Israelite's camp was invaded by poisonous snakes after they had complained against God.  At God’s instruction, Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole.  Any snake-bitten person who looked at this bronze snake would live.  This bronze snake is, therefore, an Old Testament symbol of God’s salvation and healing.  Jesus too will be lifted up as a mark of God’s salvation and healing -- lifted up on the cross, lifted up at the resurrection, and lifted up in the human soul as the child of God coming into the world. 

This passage makes it clear that Jesus comes to the world not with judgment or condemnation, but as a source of hope and restoration springing out of God’s infinite love for us.  Seeing Jesus with our spiritual eyes and believing in him offers the chance to be restored to relationship with God, whose very essence is love.  Just as looking at the bronze snake brought healing from the poison of the snakes, looking at Jesus with the eyes of faith brings healing in a world poisoned by the evil that flourishes where love is shut out.

Jesus would also not have us be surprised that he is a source of division.  "For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed." The presence of God’s pure love in any situation always brings a reaction.  Evil must oppose it if it has any hope of survival.  God’s love shines a bright light on the deeds of those who reject it, deeds they would far rather be concealed in the dark of the night that always falls with the rejection of love.  Jesus lights the way of those who long to “do what is true”  -- deeds “done in God.”

Even if you have been fortunate enough not to personally experience it close at hand, the reality of evil is as fresh and current as the morning newspaper.  Evil likes nothing better than to have us focus on it, drawing us ever deeper into a night of despair.  But our focus belongs elsewhere -- on the One lifted up. 

revclay

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John 3:14-21

[Jesus said] “ … And just 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. 

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.  Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.  And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.  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.”

[NRSV]