Lord, you have promised that when two or three gather in your name you will be present with them. We depend on that promise today and pray that you will move among us. Lord, we pray that you have inspired Mike's preparation, that you will enliven his presentation, and that you will empower our application. Amen
Fr Mike wrote this Homily, this week, before he went on leave for a few days. He says the first thing we need to do as we read the Gospel this morning is recognize where we are in the text. We are in the second week of our three week journey through the Gospel of John. As John prepares us for the coming events of Easter, and helps us to examine how prepared we are for the coming of the Messiah. This week our Gospel reading contains one of the most familiar verses in Scripture. We see it in a variety of situations and it sometimes is believed to encapsulate the whole Gospel. John 3: 16. “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. NRSV Fr Mike says that this very familiar verse is introduced by Jesus with a reference to one of the strangest passages from the Old Testament. To understand what this Gospel passage is saying this morning we have to read the passage Numbers and examine that story. And, for him it raises an interesting question. "What kind of God is this God we acknowledge and seek to serve?" In the reading from Numbers we see Moses leading the people on their journey to the Promised Land. He leads the people around the nation of Edom. Surprise, surprise the people get impatient. They begin to interrogate Moses, they pester him with questions. It is like the worst version of children's car trivia. You know how that goes right? "Are we there yet?" "How come it is taking so long?" "Do I have to sit here, next to him or her?" "When will get to stop and stretch our legs or go to the bathroom?" The people of Israel, in the desert, question Moses, They even get to the point of accusing him of putting them at risk. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” How does God react? Well he sends snakes. People died. You see why Fr Mike asked the question: What kind of God is this? The people respond by coming to Moses and pleading for their lives. “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” Moses prays and God instructs him to create the image of a snake and to place it on the top of a pole. Then whenever the people were bitten by the snakes they looked at the snake on the pole and were healed. Now, it is interesting that God didn't take the snakes away. The people were bitten for their complaining but God made a way forward to them to be restored. Now in the Gospel Jesus takes this incident a step further. He uses it to teach and illustrate for his disciples what is going to happen to him. He relates it to a couple of verses from Deuteronomy and draws a new conclusion from it. Deuteronomy 21:22-23: “When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you must bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you for possession." Jesus shows how God takes what is understood to be a curse and reverses it into a blessing. But not without consequences. He links what happens to the people in the desert to what is going to happen to him in the future. Taking the events described in Deuteronomy and applying them to his life and his story. He was to be hung on the tree, the cross, and it should have been a curse, but God turns it into a blessing. God reverses the curse by resurrection of Jesus. It is also interesting to note that his body was taken down from the tree before nightfall, which is one more confirmation of his role as the Messiah. This is a hard passage for us to comprehend and accept. Why would God, our loving compassionate, forgiving God send snakes among the people? I am not going to attempt to answer that question this morning. But can Fr Mike suggests that we can look to a couple of other passages for guidance and helpful instruction. First of all, we live in this world and we experience all those things that everyone else does as it says in Matthew 5: 44 - 45: "But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." We live in this world so we will see the sun rise and the sun set, we will see and feel the rain as it falls on all of God's creation. We don't get to avoid some of the unpleasant things of the world. Then Romans 8:28 says: "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose." How can we look for the good in what we experience. How can we look to see how the Lord is turning the curse into a blessing for us? Or perhaps we need to look for how what we are experiencing is preparing us for ministry? Perhaps what we are going through is equipping us to provide comfort and care for others sometime in our future? In 2 Corinthians 1: 3- 4 it says: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God." The snakes still came to the people of Israel but God turned that into a blessing when they looked to him. How can we look to the Lord in our circumstances and situations today? If we go back to the question I asked earlier in this message, what does it tell or help us to understand when we look at our lives this way? Do we sometimes have to look to a long term result rather than a short term answer. When we face difficulties and trials do we need to remember the people of Israel and the snakes, or Jesus going to the cross for us? What questions do these passages from Scripture raise for us on our Lenten journey this year? Comments are closed.
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