March 14, 2021 “Snakes” – John 3:14-21

John 3:14-21
“Snakes”
March 14, 2021 – Fourth Sunday of Lent

In this time of worship, we are enjoying Celtic hymns and songs for the Sunday near St. Patrick’s day. As you listened to our Gospel reading just now, it began with Jesus comparing Himself to a snake. Perhaps you remember the legend that St. Patrick drove all the snakes from Ireland. It’s probably not true. Every indication is there never were any snakes in Ireland. But the story goes that serpents attacked him while he was on a forty-day fast. He drove them all into the ocean. I too can get pretty grumpy when I’m fasting.

St. Patrick’s story is indicative of the fact that we typically regard snakes negatively. It’s the same in most of the Bible. Satan tempted Adam and Eve in the form of a snake. Verses in Job and Proverbs and Isaiah, among others, warn about the bite and venom of snakes. In Acts, Paul is bit by a snake and everyone expects him to die. Generally, when snakes appear at all in a positive context in Scripture, it is only to say how God can protect people from them.

That protection is what we find in the story to which Jesus refers at the beginning of our text. It’s from Numbers 21. Along their way in the wilderness, the children of Israel started grumbling. So God sent them poisonous snakes, literally “fiery serpents.” They were fiery because they were probably saw-scaled vipers, carpet vipers. Those snakes are reddish in color and they rub their scales to produce a “sizzling” warning sound before they bite. Their venom produces a burning pain.

Bitten by the fiery serpents, rebellious Israelites began to die. Moses prayed and God gave him an answer: Make a snake out of bronze and put it up on a pole. All the snake-bitten who turned and looked at the bronze serpent were healed. In verse 14 of John 3, Jesus compared Himself to that fiery serpent made out of reddish metal, and alluded to the fact that He would be nailed up on the Cross like that molded snake was put up on a pole.

Jesus deliberately connected that strange picture from the Old Testament with the salvation He came to offer. Numbers 21 verse 8 is God telling Moses to set the snake up on that pole, and then “everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” In verse 15 here, Jesus says about Himself being “lifted up,” in words very much like that verse from Numbers, “that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

For a long time, I thought that is why the symbol of the American Medical Association was a snake. I’d see that snake wrapped around a rod and think of that story I learned in Sunday School. The snake was a biblical sign of healing, of life.

But a snake was already a symbol of healing hundreds of years before Jesus compared His death on the Cross with Moses raising up the bronze serpent. The AMA symbol is from the Greek god Asclepius, who supposedly learned medicine from a snake. Years ago our family visited Epidauros in Greece and saw a statue of Asclepius with his snake. The church father Justin Martyr taught that God let the ancient Greeks have the snake as a symbol of healing so they would be ready to hear what Jesus said, comparing His own death and resurrection to a serpent raised on high to bring life.

Jesus moved from God’s saving of life through Moses’ bronze snake to God’s saving of the world through Himself. Many of us would choose verse 16 that comes next as the best in the Bible. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Some of you learned it as children. Others are very glad to have heard it as adults.

It begins “God so loved the world.” That’s the heart of the story. As Covenant Church people, we believe that the Cross of Jesus Christ is about the love of God, not about the wrath of God. God can be angry. We saw Jesus get angry in the Temple last week. But God is only angry because He loves us so much. His love is where the story of salvation begins, not His wrath.

We heard that love in Psalm 107 today, the great steadfast love of God which rescues people from all sorts of danger. We heard that love in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians chapter 2, “But God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even though we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” That little phrase we pass over so quickly, that God “so loved the world” is meant to put the emphasis right there. God’s love is the beginning and source of everything we believe.

That story of fiery serpents in the wilderness starts with wrathful judgment, but if you back up to the real beginning, to God’s deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt, it’s all love. The wrath of God arrives when the love of God has been rejected. That’s what the verses which follow the most famous verse in the Bible teach.

Verse 17 tells us again that the purpose of Jesus coming was not one of wrath, of condemnation, but of love. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” Jesus did not come to condemn. He came to save. He came to save everyone. He didn’t get in trouble with the religious authorities of His time so much because He condemned them or anyone else, though on occasion He did condemn. But Jesus mostly got in trouble because He showed love and offered eternal life to folks they thought didn’t deserve it, people like prostitutes and swindlers and those who didn’t do the religious things they were supposed to do.

Remember Asclepius, that healing god with a snake? The Greeks said something like that happened to him. Asclepius was too good at healing people. He even raised a few from the dead. Hades, the god of the underworld, the realm of the dead, felt like he was being put out of business, like Asclepius was stealing his clients. So Hades complained to Zeus and Zeus tossed a thunderbolt at the healer and killed him.

Part of what put Jesus on the Cross was a similar sort of resentment. Religious authorities expected God to just love nice people like themselves, not go around healing or raising or saving just anyone and everyone. But Jesus came along and did just that. So they tried to stop Him, tried to stop that indiscriminate love of God, and in the process fell out of that love themselves.

Everyone is loved, but not everyone is saved. Verse 18 begins by affirming again that those who accept God’s love are in the clear. “Those who believe in him are not condemned.” Accept God’s love in Jesus and, just as Paul says in Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. But the second half of verse 18 says, “whoever does not believe stands condemned already because that person has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” There is wrath, there is a condemnation, but its root and source is a self-condemnation, a failure to believe in and accept the love of God in Jesus.

If we look at the way God made the world and deals out His judgment, it’s almost always that way. So much of judgment is just the natural consequences for sin which God built into the world, into the order of things. As I thought about those fiery snakes in the wilderness, I thought about rattlesnakes, with which I’m more familiar. As I read about them I came upon these lines in a Wikipedia article,

Rattlesnakes rarely bite unless they feel threatened or provoked. A majority of victims (about 72%) are males, often young and intoxicated. Around half of bites occur in cases where the victim saw the snake, yet made no effort to move away.

That’s God’s judgment and wrath come down upon human beings. God gives us every opportunity to get out of its way, just like He put rattles on the tails of rattlesnakes and made those vipers in the Mideast sizzle a warning before they bite. Yet in our foolishness and pride we keep ignoring the route to safety in His love and treading close to the dangers lurking in our own sinful wills.

Verse 19 switches the image again, mixes the metaphor. “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” God loves the world. God gave the world the very best He had to give, let the light of His love shine for everyone in Jesus. All they needed to do was come into that light and receive the life, the eternal life in His love. But some people despised the light of that love and turned away from it.

Verses 19 and 20 are saying that Jesus brings a self-imposed judgment into the world, which comes when we hide from the light, when we imagine that who we are and what we do is better kept in the dark. When we refuse to come into that light which is God’s love, but run to hide in the shadows, we condemn ourselves.

You know the news is full these days of stories about people whose wrong and foolish words and deeds are exposed. Harry and Meghan sat down with Oprah and opened a can of worms, if not of snakes, by telling about some things said and done in the secret shadows of the royal family of England. Evangelical Christians have been devastated to learn, not long after his death, about the hidden sins of Ravi Zacharias. His whole ministry organization for defending the faith is collapsing around those ugly revelations which he kept hidden in the dark for so long.

Light shows our work for what it is and the spiritual light of God’s love in Jesus shows our lives for what they are. That is why Jesus says in verse 20, “All those who do evil hate the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” The light of Christ does not make anyone a sinner, does not condemn anyone. It only shows us that we are sinners, and the condemnation follows naturally.

Put it another way, and Jesus coming and comparing Himself to that snake icon which God directed Moses to create is a way of reminding us that, ultimately, we’re all snakes, you and I, because we are all sinners who would prefer to keep our sins hidden. Like snakes often do, we’d like to stay safe in the burrows and holes we find to cover up everything bad about ourselves. Jesus tells us here that His light is going to uncover and expose it all and that those who will remain condemned are those who keep on hating that light.

As sinners, we need light. We might think it’s the last thing we want, similar to all those public figures like Prince Charles or Ravi Zacharias or any of the public figures who’ve been caught out on tape or video saying racist or sexist things. We prefer our own bad words and bad actions to stay in the dark. But we need the light.

Snakes need the light. Any of you who have spent time in rattlesnake country know that on a sunny day after a cold night it’s especially important to keep an eye out for snakes. They may curl up much of the time hidden between rocks or in holes to stay safe from predators such as eagles or hawks or coyotes or bobcats, but because they are cold-blooded they eventually need to come out into the sunlight and raise their body temperature. That light means life for them.

As I read about rattlesnakes and sunlight I learned that timber rattlesnakes that live in wooded areas in the east especially need the warmth of sunlight just to breed. A pregnant snake needs a body temperature several degrees higher than normal for gestation. So they seek out places in the forest where the sun penetrates the tree canopy down to the ground. In the wild, sunlight is a necessity for snakes to maintain body temperature and reproduce. Their “basking” in the light is not just for comfort but for survival.

God’s love for us is light and life like sunlight is for snakes. We will not survive without it. That light is only painful, only condemnation when we keep trying to hide from it. In the Orthodox Church they say that even the fire of hell is heated by the light of God’s love. Sunlight is beneficial or harmful for human beings, depending on how you receive it. Sunlight warms your body, gives you Vitamin D, and lifts your mental state. But it can also burn your skin, give you cancer, and make it hard to sleep. The light of God’s love in Jesus is like that. For those who receive it and walk in it, God’s love is eternal life. For those who try to hide from it, who don’t want to be with God, then His love is eternal torment.

As Jesus says in other places, you and I must recognize that we all have things we don’t wish told in public, don’t want hauled out into the piercing light of day. By the grace of God, we may not have sinned as badly or boldly as some of those whose names pop up on news sites or Twitter feeds, but we have sinned and the light hurts. We’re not ready to face that bright sunlight shining down on every crack and blemish in the smooth surface we try to show the world. When it comes down to it, we must admit that we too are snakes. But the good news in all this is that God loves snakes and snakes really do need light.

Some of you have heard me tell the story of the rattlesnake I found at our cabin in Arizona on trip there with our youngest daughter. She and I were getting ready to leave, doing a few chores in the yard. I went to turn off the water supply on the southern wall, in the sunshine, and I suddenly heard that frightening buzz two feet from my nose. We couldn’t just drive away, the water had to be shut off.

I started calling: the Forest Service, humane societies, county animal control. No one could help… until finally a friendly woman told me, “Call this guy.” I heard the phone ring several times and then a young boy’s voice answered. I asked for the name I had been given and heard him call, “Dad! It’s for you.” A friendly voice came on the line. I explained the situation and he replied immediately, “O.K., I’ll come.” I asked when. To my amazement, he said, “in 10 minutes or so.” You have to know that our place is at least that far from the main town of Sedona.

He was as good as his word. In 11 minutes a red Chevy Suburban pulled up, a young man hopped out and took from the back a big cloth bag and a long rod with a gripping device on the end. In five minutes of deft maneuvers the snake was in the bag. Our daughter and I stood there fascinated. He turned to us, held the cloth open a little and said, “Do you want to look?” Our daughter said, “Cool!” and I said, “Uh, O.K.”

As we cautiously peered down into our savior’s sack, he said, “Isn’t she beautiful!” I still don’t know how he knew it was a she, but what I did suddenly realize was that this fellow who rescued us really knew and loved snakes. He didn’t rush out on calls like ours to destroy them. He came to save them, because he loved snakes.

God loves snakes. He made them after all. Even more, though, God loves us. God loves sinners. Jesus said that’s why He was sent. He came so that whoever believes in Him and comes out into the light can be saved. He also taught us that since God loves sinners, we who want to walk in His light must love them too. That’s the good news you and I have to bask in and share with each other and with everyone. It’s the good news of snakes and sinners and the glorious light of the love of God.

Amen.