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Text: John 3:14-21(Ephesians 2:4-10, Numbers 21:4-9)
X Laetare (4th Sunday in
Lent) Lift
High the Cross In the name of him who is our Light
and Salvation, dear friends in Christ:
In his Sermon on the Mount our Lord Jesus remarked, “People do not light
a lamp and then put it under a bowl.
Instead they put its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the
house.” And that’s a fairly
obvious. It doesn’t make a lick of sense
to light a lamp so that you can see and then cover it up so that you’re still
in the dark; but then of course, Jesus wasn’t talking about the fundamentals of
interior lighting and design. He was
talking about putting what it is that shines God’s divine Light on our world’s
darkness where it can have maximum effect.
And to apply the principle directly to his listeners he went on to say,
“In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good
deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” Now, it happens that lot of
Christian people hear that and think, “Ah, what Jesus wants is for us to go
around doing good deeds so that people can see his light shining in us. That will bring glory to his Father.” And so, to fulfill what they’ve been
commanded to do they set out to make a good impression. They understand Christianity as a religion
primarily of doing the will of God and bringing glory to him by doing good
deeds and showing love for neighbors and enemies alike through acts of kindness
and charity. And they understand that
it’s important to make the biggest splash possible and get some publicity while
doing such things so that people can see the good deeds, for if they fail to do
so it would be like putting the light under a bowl. And that seems to make perfect sense, doesn’t
it? I mean, how are people going to see
the light of our good deeds unless we put them on a stand? Isn’t that what Jesus wants us to do? I suspect that most of you have that
funny feeling that tells you I’m about to say, “No, that isn’t what Jesus wants
us to do – it’s not even close”; but if that’s the case, can you tell me
why? Do you know what’s wrong with the
line of reasoning? Well, first things first: let’s establish that it really is wrong. How do we know that for sure? The easiest way is to read a little farther
in the same sermon where Jesus says, “Be careful not to do your acts of
righteousness before men, to be seen by them.
If you do, you will have no reward with your Father in heaven.” He then goes on to command his followers to
keep their acts of charity a secret. “When
giving to the needy”, he said, “don’t even let your left hand know what your
right is doing.” So not only are we to
hide our good deeds from the eyes of other people, we are to hide them from
ourselves. Now, either Jesus has some
kind of attention deficit disorder that causes him to issue completely
conflicting instructions in the course of the same sermon or (and let me
suggest this is a whole lot more likely) there’s a problem with the view of
Christianity I have laid out. What’s the problem? The fallacy is that the light of Christ that’s
supposed to shine forth from you is the good deeds you perform. What he said
was, “Let your Light shine”, that is,
put your Light on the stand, and “then
people will see your good deeds and give glory to the Father.” The deeds themselves are not the light. The light is what makes it possible for them
to be seen. Well, okay, if my good deeds
are not the light, what is? What is it
that’s supposed to shine forth from our lives?
That’s easy: it’s the Light of the
world; the Savior, Jesus Christ. That’s
what – or rather who – the Father wants people to see. That’s what he raises up for all mankind to
see. The light is not what you do for
Christ; it’s what Christ has done for you. This truth is illustrated perfectly
in today’s Old Testament lesson. We’re
back with Moses and the Children of Israel wandering in the desert. They’re actually on the home stretch, just a
few weeks away from entering the Promised Land after 40 years of living in the
wilderness. They’re pretty excited. But something came up so that they had to
take a detour, and they found out the trip was going to take a few more days
than they had planned. That little
disappointment sets them off. God’s
people go into full scale rebellion against him, repeating the same tired old
mantra that helped get them sentenced to 40 years of wandering in the desert in
the first place. “Why did you bring us out here to die? We have no bread! We have no water! And were sick to death of this stinking manna
we’ve been eating for forty years!” It’s
remarkable how short sighted and ungrateful people can be. Forty years of desert wandering, and in all
that time not a single person has died of either thirst or starvation. The Lord has graciously ensured that they
have had life’s necessities every day – without, I might add, having to do any
real work themselves except for picking it up off the ground where the Lord
served it to them. And though I suppose
that it makes sense that they were growing weary of the manna, it is the food
that’s kept them alive all these years.
Certainly they could endure just a few more days of it. But no, they’ve been disappointed by the
delay and they allow their impatience to overflow into a temper tantrum of
biblical proportions. In response, the
Lord sends them some snakes to help them regain a proper perspective – sort of
like a parent who tells a whiny child to stop complaining “or else I’ll really
give you something to cry about”. That
strategy works quite well, and soon the people are repenting of their sin and
praying for the removal of the snakes.
Now, here’s what’s key: the Lord
doesn’t take away the snakes. Instead,
he gives the people a cure for snakebite.
He has Moses raise up a bronze snake on a
pole. Then whenever someone was bitten
all he had to do was to look up at that bronze snake, and he lived. And two things to highlight here: first that the snake was an object for the
people’s faith. It’s not reasonable that
just looking at a piece of bronze could cure snakebite. And if some bitten person dug in his heels
and said, “This is dumb. I’m not about
to go looking at any stupid snake because there’s no way it can help”, well, that
person died. It took a little faith –
and very little at that – in the word and promise of God to look at that
snake. Even the person who said, “I’m
dying here. I guess it’s at least worth
a try” displayed a tiny mustard seed sized amount of faith; but that was
enough. Looking, he lived. Second, we want to note that the snake was
raised up where it could be seen. It was
like that lamp on a stand Jesus was talking about. It was lifted up above people’s heads so that
it would be a point of focus and so it could be seen at a distance. It’s what God wanted his people to see to be
saved. Now, fast-forward to today’s Gospel in which Jesus says,
“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be
lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” Clearly Jesus is speaking of his work on the
cross for our salvation, the atonement he would make for the sins of the
world. The thing to understand is that
all the same ideas apply. Here we are in
the world, rebels against God, and every one of us is dying of the snakebite of
sin – the end of which is not just death, but eternal death in hell. We cannot cure ourselves. So we cry out to the Lord for deliverance, “Take
these temptations and sins in my life away.”
The Lord responds in mercy; but instead of taking away the problems we
face, he provides a means of salvation that removes the dire consequences of
sin. He sends his Son to suffer those
consequences for us, to be damned and cursed like we and the serpent who
deceived our first parents and who still deceives us deserve. He does this by being raised up on a cross to
be first an object of faith – that anyone who looks and who sees the Savior
suffering and dying and believes “He did that for me” lives eternally. Secondly, he is raised up so that he will be
seen. In raising Christ Jesus on the
cross the God is telling us, “This is what I want you to see. Focus on this and what Christ accomplished
here. This is your Light. This is the Light you are to see yourself and
everyone else by.” So that now, whenever
we feel the bite of the snake, when the venom of guilt is burning and the fear
of death and judgment seize us, all we have to do is look to the cross, and
looking, we live. It seems such a simple concept, the
idea that the Christian Church must first, foremost, and always lift up high
Christ and him crucified as God’s solution to all that ails us. Unfortunately, it’s been the bane of the
church of all ages, and probably even more so today, that Christians will do
just about anything to avoid it. We
really don’t like looking at Jesus on the cross. Though it’s our daily bread that we need to
live, iit soon becomes the tired old manna we’re so
sick of. There are a lot of reasons for
this, but today I’d like to consider what I think to be the two most
threatening for the church of our time.
The first is this: we don’t like
to lift high the cross of Christ because it says “absolutely no” to any part we
have or contribution we might make to our salvation. There’s no room on that cross for me, for my
share, my help, my decision, my anything.
The work is all his. All I can do
is look at what he did. This doesn’t sit well with our prideful hearts that want so
much to have some part to play. I want
God to appreciate me for what I do too.
And one of the more popular ways this is done is to put the idea of my
sinful self in the past tense. I was a sinful person, but I was saved. I came
to Christ. I was baptized. I was confirmed. Whatever. At some point of time in the past, I had to
look at the cross and see what Christ did; but now I’ve moved beyond that. Now it’s my goal to live as a Christian – to
let the light of my works shine, as it were.
Thank you Jesus for what you did; I’ll take it from here. Such a view overlooks the fact that my sinful
nature and the snakes are all still very much a part of my life. And through our sins we get bitten again and
again each day. We must continue to lift
high the cross because the day I think I can live without looking at it is the
day that my soul dies. A second way we can be tempted to avoid having to lift high
the cross of Christ that’s widely practiced today is to engage in what’s called
Gospel reductionism. What happens is
that we focus our attention on the passages that speak of God’s grace and love
and quickly skip past those verses that speak of his wrath and judgment against
sin. We think, “Because God loves us,
all those passages that speak of judgment have been superceded.” Reinhold Niebuhr,
an influential theologian of the last century once said, "Christians in One of the best examples of how this happens appears in
today’s Gospel lesson which includes what is many people’s favorite verse, John
3:16, which says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that
whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The verse has been called the Bible in a
nutshell. And based on that, a lot of
Christians think, “Well, if that sums it up, what else do I need to know?” It’s a fine case that shows how it is that a
little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
Armed only with this verse – lifted out of its context – people start
spouting trite expressions like, “Smile, God loves you” or what many of you
know to be the one that really gets under my skin, “God hates the sin, but he
loves the sinner”. What’s wrong with those expressions? They are incomplete. They are both a gospel, that is, a kind of “good
news” which do not include Christ and the cross. They are, therefore, not really the true Gospel
at all. The fact is that if you are not
looking at the cross, by which I mean trusting in the one who suffered and died
for you there, then you are outside of God’s grace, mercy, and love. You are instead the object of his eternal
wrath and condemnation. God only loves
you in Christ crucified. God only loves sinners when for Christ’s sake
he doesn’t see them as sinners but rather as the righteous in Christ. If you want to know how God feels about
sinners, look at the cross and see what suffering he inflicted upon Jesus whom
he treated as the sinner for you. Only then
can you see how much God loves you. There’s a show on the Food Network I like to watch called Iron Chef. For
those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a cooking competition. Two skilled chefs square off to prepare the
best dishes they can within one hour.
The winner is determined by a panel of judges who are usually a mix of
celebrities and culinary experts. It’s
actually pretty interesting to see what the chefs come up with in such a short time;
but here’s the catch: all the dishes have
to include and highlight whatever has been chosen to be the theme ingredient
for the day. And it could be
anything: some kind of meat, a certain
vegetable, who knows what. All the
dishes have to have it as the star. And
if a dish doesn’t feature the theme ingredient, it doesn’t matter how delicious
it is; it doesn’t count. Sometimes the
chefs get too creative. I remember one
episode in which the theme ingredient was rainbow trout and one of the chefs
made a dessert, an ice cream to be precise, with the fishes’ eyes. I would have hated to be one of the judges
that day. But I think we can borrow the basic concept and apply it to what
we do here in the church together, as well as to what we do in our individual lives
as Christians. Whatever we do, whatever
we think or say, if it doesn’t include the cross, if it doesn’t lift up Christ
and him crucified, then it doesn’t count. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful,
thoughtful, or glorious something appears.
Without the cross, it’s worse than worthless. This speaks to our worship, our hymns, how we
work and interact with each other, everything in our lives. Only that which is seen in the Light of the
cross will endure. And this leads us back to where we started, with the
question of our good deeds and where they fit in. The answer is that apart from the cross, they
don’t. But when we let our Light shine,
that is, when we show forth our faith in Jesus Christ crucified, when we lift
him up on the cross and he remains our Light and focus, then the good deeds
that Christ works through us will naturally follow – good deeds that we will
largely be unaware of. Our left hands
won’t even know what the rights are doing.
But others will; and it will be seen plainly that what we have done has
been done through God. To him be our
praise and thanks forever through Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord. Amen. Soli Deo Gloria! |
