Sermon – 26 March 2006

What shall we make of the Old Testament story this morning. (Numbers 21.4-9)  What use is a story like this to us. 

There were snakes poisoning people.

What the people believed was this – that if they did things which were bad, then bad things would happen to them.

It is a belief as old as the hills and one that we can probably find today.  Perhaps some of us fall for it sometimes.

And of course, Moses gave the people a remedy for the serpents.  He raised up a brass serpent and they started to believe that whoever looked at it would be saved.

What use is it to us to read these stories now?

Worshipping opposite a modern health service, why are we reading about snakes on poles?

We have here a good example of the bible being a record of what people believed at the time.  I don’t think that it is something which we are supposed to emulate.

The history of God’s people is the history of a people moving away from superstition.

For, as time went on, God’s people realised that it was not true.  God did not cause terrible things to happen to terrible people. However tempted we are to believe it, it as true today as it was in Jesus’ time, or even the time of Moses.

God plans nothing bad for us.  I don’t believe that God is a God of vengeance.  I don’t believe that God plans anything for us except that which is good.

I know quite a few people who would disagree with me, and they would find themselves sharing something in common with many others and indeed many people that we encounter in the bible.

But it won’t make it true.  God no more plans our destruction than he plans to heal us by having us look at a serpent.

Indeed, the people gradually got wise to this.  The psalms are full of the people complaining at what seemed to them to be injustice.  The sun still shone on the righteous and the wicked.  The rain still fell on the crops of the good and the bad.

And the realisation dawned on some of them that we are all in this world together, good and bad.  And that God loved the world and his maddening, generous over the top kind of love could not in fact distinguish between those who seemed to be good, or those who seemed to be bad.

The serpent that Moses made lasted quite a long time.  It was set up for the people to look to.  It became a potent symbol of the Jewish monarchy. Things that stick around long enough gain all kinds of symbolic attachment in religion. Sometimes far too much symbolism.

Eventually, the people took the bronze serpent down.  They came to their senses and realised that God was not like that. They didn’t want that sort of symbol any more. And they took the serpent and smashed it into pieces. [2 Kings 18]

It would not be a bad thing if we could identify the origin of our own belief that God causes bad things to happen to us and smash it to pieces too.

Gospel

In fact, God loved the people.  That simple truth is so important.  In fact God loved them utterly.

In fact, God loves us utterly too.

And that extraordinary realisation was what Jesus was trying to get over to Nicodemus, when the great Jewish teacher came to him at night.

Nicodemus, the leader of the people came sneaking up to Jesus the outcast rebel to consult him.

And they got into a conversation about that bronze serpent.

Nicodemus was a learned man.  He knew that the people had taken that symbol and smashed it.

But Jesus turned the symbol around and used it to say something about himself.  Something about the passionate love that had caused God to send his son into the world to live alongside human beings and here, as we hear of this conversation with Nicodemus, we realise, with a shudder that Jesus knew where all this would end.  Jesus knew that just as the people had taken the symbol of the snake and smashed it, they would take hold of him too and destroy him.

We know now, what Jesus knew, that he did not come simply to live alongside us.  He came to die alongside us too.

He came to know our side of the story.  He came to be part of it all.  He came to be involved.

That is the point of all the stories about Jesus that we hear, whether they are about his coming or his parting from us.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.

And if we come to know Jesus saying that, the events that we will soon mark in Holy Week and Easter will take on a new meaning.  For this is not some history story affecting other people at another time.

This is now.

If you have not already committed yourself to coming to the Holy Week services, then please think about it now.  Make arrangements to be here.  In holy week, I promise the journey of a lifetime as we walk with Jesus through Jerusalem, through the garden, up to Calvary and then on into today.

Amen.