I'd like to tell you three stories today
The first story is that there was once was a poor family that lived in misery and squalor, nine of them sharing one room. No one had enough to eat, everyone’s clothes were in rags and their life was one of utter, unrelenting misery. Finally one day the man of the house set off to visit the sage and said to him, “Great sage, we are so miserable that we can barely stay alive. The noise is terrible, and the filth is awful, and the lack of privacy could kill a person. We never have enough to eat, and we are all beginning to hate one another. Things are just horrendous. What should we do?” The sage replied simply, “You must get a goat and have the goat live inside the house with you for one month. Then your problems will be solved.”
The man looked at the sage in astonishment. “A goat? You want us to live with a goat?” But the sage insisted, and since he was a very wise sage, the man did as he had been told. For the next month, the hellish life of this man’s family was beyond intolerable. The noise was worse; the filth was worse; there was nothing remotely resembling privacy; there was nothing to eat since the goat kept eating everything; and there were no clothes because the goat ate everyone’s clothes as well. The rancor in the house became explosive. At the end of the month, the man returned to the sage in a fury: “We have lived for one month with a goat in our hut,” he said. “It has been horrendous. How could you have given us such ludicrous advice?”
The wise man nodded sagely and said, “Now get rid of the goat and you will see how peaceful and sublime your lives are.”*
The second story is today's Old Testament lesson. After God gave the people the Ten Commandments, they continued their journey across the desert. And just as they came upon the land of milk and honey that God had promised them, they learned that it was already occupied by the Canaanites, who were fierce warriors. The Israelites weren't so sure that they wanted to fight for the land that God had promised them, so they turned around and headed back into the desert. God saw this as an act of rebellion and faithlessness by the Israelites, and punished them by giving them what they wanted – life in the desert – for the next 40 years. Now of course 40 years is a long time, and the Israelites were great complainers. They complained about everything – they were tired of wandering. It was hard to find food and water, and the food they did find was lousy. They were angry with each other, they were angry with Moses, and they were angry with God. “We would have been better off staying in Egypt,” they complained.
God heard their complaints, and decided it was time to show the Israelites just how bad things could be. So God sends a plague of poisonous snakes to the Israelites. But God's punishments always bring us back to God, and the people, realizing the snakes to be a result of their sinfulness, repented and asked Moses to intercede for them. So God tells Moses to make a bronze snake and mount it on a stick, so that anyone who is bitten could look at the snake and live.
Goats? Snakes? What does all this have to do with the Good News?
There are times in our lives when our expectations don't match reality. There are times in our lives when it seems that God's promises fall short. We might pray,“help me find that perfect job, Lord,” but that job doesn't come. Or “please don't let me lose my home, Lord,” and still the banks foreclose. Or “heal my mother, Lord,” and she gets sicker still. There are times between God's promise and his fulfillment, times when we might begin to doubt the faithfulness of God. In other words, we forget that it is God who is making the promises here.
These are the times when it's important to remember how God responded to Moses' prayer – God didn't take away the snakes. God did not take them out of their misery. God only had Moses make a bronze snake and put it on a pole. Was the snake magic? Of course not. But it was a sign of God's promise that they would survive. Those who had faith in God lifted their eyes up, away from the snakes, to gaze past a symbol of their own misery and pain. The bronze snake was a reminder of who sent the snakes in the first place, and who has the power to save them in spite of their faithless response to his promises. It was snake-on-a-stick to remind them of God's promise to survive in the wilderness.
That brings me to the third story, today's lesson from the Gospel of John. It contains perhaps the most famous passage in the entire bible, a passage that's carried to every football game on television: John 3:16. That's the passage that goes “God so loved the world...” It's a passage of amazing power. It's a passage of incredible triumph. A passage that's so famous, we forget about the line that comes just before it:
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.
In other words, just as God once saved the Israelites who believed in him by giving them the sign of a serpent on a stick, now God would save the entire world by giving us a sign of such incredible power that those who believed would have life everlasting. God loved the world in such a way that he made another promise, marked by the sign of his son, lifted up on a cross, so that we could live. We can lift our eyes up; up from our own sin and misery, to see past the symbol of ultimate sin and misery. We lift our eyes up from our own deaths to see his conquest over death. We lift our eyes up to the cross, so that we might have eternal life.
There will be times when we forget that God promises to love us. There will be times when we forget that God calls us to new life. But the cure for evil snakes was faith in God's promise of life through a snake on a stick. And the cure for human weakness is faith in God's promise of eternal life through Christ on a cross.
God loved the world so much, that he gave us his only Son, so that we might believe in him and have everlasting life.
Thanks be to God.
*Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon, An Atlas of Depression (Scribner, 2001).
LINK TO THIS ARTICLE - http://www.ecsssj.org/show_article.php?myid=60
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