The 4th Sunday of Lent: Cycle B 23-24
The 4th Sunday of Lent
2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23 | Ephesians 2:4-10 | John 3:14-21
Oh God, who through your word reconcile the human race to yourself in a wonderful way, grant, we pray, that with prompt devotion and eager faith the Christian people may hasten toward the solemn celebrations to come. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.
The scriptures are a treasure of information, of wisdom and knowledge, and many say that the scriptures are both anthropological and theological, meaning they reveal to us the nature and the evolution of human beings and the nature of God as he slowly reveals himself to his people. So through scripture we learn about who we are, we learn about who God is, and we learn about why we are here in this world.
So let’s look for a moment at this notion that we have of this God who reveals himself slowly to us, and it’s so interesting in this reading from Chronicles. We see the evolution of God from a God who, when he saw his people not being who they were supposed to be, who we long for them to be, he made them in his image, and they were not initially in that image. In the time of Noah, he saw what he created. Even though, when he created it he said it was so very, very good, he looked at it all and said, “I made a mistake. I’m so sorry. I don’t like these people. Their hearts are filled with darkness, and I’m going to destroy everything I created,” a very strange story in a sense. But it underscores the fact that we have a destiny that is so much higher than what he saw in his people, and in a way that we see in God a kind of connection to our humanness, it made sense. He created something he hoped for that would be so much more than it was, and he was so disappointed that he said, “I want to scrap it all.” So he reveals himself as someone like us, but in this story, it’s different. In this story, we see an evolution of God, because we see the same situation. These people are filled with all kinds of iniquity and all kinds of sinfulness, and they are just turning from God completely. And so instead of wanting to destroy them, his first reaction now is compassion. “I have compassion for them.” And so early and often — I love that set of words, early and often. He kept saying, “Listen, you’re in the wrong direction. You’re going toward something that will destroy you. Please, listen to my word that I give you through my prophets, and change. Change. Turn away from what you’re doing.” And they didn’t, and then you’ll notice, instead of God punishing them, he allows the enemies to punish his people. It’s a way of saying, “All right, you’re going to choose a way of life that is destructive. Well, I’m going to allow you to have that way of life, and it will destroy you. And what happens? You lose everything that you have, and you become a slave.” It’s a perfect image of a kind of — how would I say — addicted qualities of human nature that can turn away from light and truth and continue to go to darkness over and over again, and they are slaves of it. They can’t — they’re not free to do anything else. It’s a beautiful description of human nature. And so we see in that particular passage then something that God is doing, because at the end of a very difficult period, 70 years that these people had to live with the results of their choices, they were ready to change. And then God infuses in a man, Cyrus, who is able to create the world that God wants them to live in again for them. He allows Cyrus to build this wonderful temple, and they go back, and hopefully all those experiences change them. So you get a different image. God is not wanting to destroy that which is not what it should be. He wants it to grow and to change, but the only way he can do that in the Old Testament was to put them through a period of great suffering — great suffering. So there is always that image of God working with people, taking people on a journey, bringing them into something new, and they have to go through something that’s difficult and painful. So there’s something about, in a way, in that system, we earn, in a way, God’s favor, because we learn from our mistakes. We changed, and now we’re pleasing to him.
Something is coming. Something is coming, and the thing that is coming is so different from that that we don’t always understand how much we have received from God’s mysterious gift of revealing himself in the person of Jesus to be the one who is really the fullness of who God is. And he is mercy. He is absolute love and forgiveness for the sinner in his or her sinfulness. I don't know why that’s so hard for us to understand, the shift that Jesus reveals in the world of who God the Father truly is. He is not anyone who is interested in turning away from anyone who is failing. He wants to turn toward them, transform them, awaken them, and it’s done through this mysterious thing that is talked about in Paul’s letter. He says, “There is this thing called grace.” Grace, what is grace? It is an unbelievable understanding of who God is in his love for sinners. It is love incarnate, and when we think about the things that we have failed at, we think about the things that we’ve not done. We feel the shame. We feel unworthy of being loved, and we get caught in that, and that’s the antithesis of grace, because grace is never earned. Grace is graciously given. It’s not out of obligation that God loves us. It is a free gift. It is his favor, and it’s so hard for us to understand that God has such favor for us in our most unattractive states, when we are absolutely destroying one another, hurting one another, harming ourselves and others, and yet his response is not to destroy us, not to give us over to our enemies but in the fullness of revelation to do something radically different, to tell us over and over again that we are loved and that it is his and that it is his grace that enables us to realize that, even in our greatest imperfection, we have this God who loves us because he sees and understands and is aware of the seed of goodness within us. And he knows us. He created us, and he knows the thing that will work best is when that seed is loved for what it is. We put so much emphasis on our actions as that’s who we are, but there is a core of all of us that knows — that knows who we really are. It’s like everything — I think education is trying to awaken us to the things we already know, so it seems clear that human beings had to go through a process of evolution before they could fully understand the mystery of grace, redemption, forgiveness for sinners as we’re sinning, not when we change, not when we’re sorry, not when we ask for pardon. The love is given consistently. If we accept that love, that’s a way of realizing what we’ve done, and we go through a thing called repentance. And repentance means we regret what we did, and it doesn’t mean that we have to have the repentance before we have God’s love. That’s what I think is a mistake. I think I’ve been always told unless you choose freely to not ever sin again, promise you’ll never sin again, you can’t be forgiven. Well, that doesn’t make sense in human nature. We don’t sin because we want to necessarily. We sin, because we are drawn to it in a way that is somehow overpowering our own free choice.
So this image of grace is at the heart of this set of readings. So I want to see if I can awaken you to this gift a little more by showing you what Jesus did when he was talking to Nicodemus. You know this story of Nicodemus and Jesus. Nicodemus was one of the Pharisees or maybe a scribe. I forget, but he was a high official in the temple. And he, unlike many others, but maybe there was more than we know, were really intrigued by the message of Jesus. They had something in their hearts that made them realize what he’s saying would be incredible awesome if it were true, that we are truly forgiven, not because we’ve changed but because forgiveness is the stuff we need to change. It’s being loved in our sinfulness that awakens us to our goodness. So Nicodemus comes and wants to know about this thing that Jesus is teaching, and he uses a phrase. He says, “Just as the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” And what is lifted up? What does it mean to be lifted up?
You know the story about the snake. The Israelites were on their journey with Moses, and they were uncomfortable, and the food was lousy, and the accommodations were terrible. They even said, “I wish we could go back to where we were in slavery, because at least we had good meals and things like that.” All that was just so typical human nature. God is taking you on a journey to change you, to bring you to something so much more than you ever could imagine being, and we want to go back to something more comfortable, easier, less stressful. And so what we see in that story with Moses and the serpent is all of a sudden, serpents started to appear. Serpents are kind of hidden. They come in through the grass, and you can’t see them, and they bite these people, and they die. And so it’s like some hidden thing is attacking them, and so Moses was asked to put the snake on a pole. It was basically, “Look at what’s going on. Look at the sin that you’re caught up in. Look at the effects of that sin. Look at how it eats away at you. It destroys you.” When you lose faith in God, you lose a source of life, and you die. And so it was like — it seems to me that the lifting up of the serpent was a way of saying, “Look at evil for what it is and what it does.” And the most evil, dangerous thing we can do is turn away from the truth of who God is and reject his absolute total, incredible, faithful love for us in our brokenness, in our awfulness if that’s a word.
So what is Jesus then saying about lifting up this cross of his crucifixion? He is saying, “I want you to be aware of what I did when I died on the cross for you. I made up for every sin you will ever commit. They are no longer anything that keeps you from the presence, the love, the attention of God. Do you believe this?” And of course he didn’t. Nicodemus didn’t understand redemption yet, because it hadn’t happened. And so Jesus is talking about something that he can only wonder about rather than understand, but he’s saying, “If you really think about it, what I’m going to do for you is going to be —,” dumb way to put it — a game changer. We’re going to move from simple justice to justice and mercy, and the mercy is the part that’s so essential for all of us to understand, because it means that there is nothing that we can do, no attitude we take, no decision we make that is opposed to our very nature that limits God’s love for us. It’s hard for people to understand that, but that’s grace. Grace saves us. If Jesus is telling us that grace is the thing that saves us, grace is best described as the presence in our very heart of the love that God has for us proved to us in the crucifixion of Christ. It changes everything, and it’s just something that is at the heart of these mysteries that we prayed for at the very beginning of this liturgy when we said, “Let us understand fully what it is we’re celebrating so we can celebrate these mysteries that are coming that are so incredibly life-giving: Jesus’ passion, his suffering, his acceptance of the cross, his dying on the cross and his statement. As he felt the evil of the world rejecting him, he said, “Father, don’t punish them. Forgive them. Love them as I love them,” an amazing revelation of the nature of God, who in the Old Testament is not seen as this great lover, but he fully reveals himself in Jesus. That’s the great mystery of Easter.
Father, we are so easily trapped in our misconceptions, our illusions, our lies. They lead to destruction, both to those we love and to ourselves. So bless us with an understanding of the love that you have for us in that state of sinfulness so that we can believe with you in our own goodness that, if we turn to you and trust in you and allow you to open our eyes to see all that is, we will find life. Bless us with this great gift. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.