“Light on the Horizon”

March 22, 2009

Numbers 21:4-9

John 3:14-2

Paintings of Jesus meeting with Nicodemus are usually studies in contrast. We see Nicodemus standing in the nighttime shadows. Our gaze is drawn toward Jesus, however, who seems to radiate light.

The paintings are clear: in this Jesus, the light of God has come into the world for all the world to see. In this human being God shows love to us in a unique way. Jesus is love with a human face. Love with skin on. Love incarnate.

Those well-known words from the Gospel of John: “God so loved the world,” tell us that God’s involvement with the universe and with this world did not end with creation—as though one big bang to get things rolling was all that was needed. Through prophets and leaders like Moses and Miriam God guided the Hebrew people, showing love in judgment and healing.

In Jesus Christ God shows love, not just for you or for me or our small circle of friends. The love of God is shown for the whole world.

Now, think about that for a moment, because people usually don’t.

It’s easier, isn’t it, to limit God’s love to those we think are “deserving,” those who are the “right people,” those who are “like us.”

So listen carefully to those words. Let them resonate in your heart: “For God so loved the world . . .” There’s something unexpected here. Something good.

When our love fails, God’s love endures.

When we can give no more, because we have no more love to give, God comes to us in Jesus, the Word incarnate.

When we would draw the line, because we do not want to love, God  crosses the line and draws near.

In other words, even when the cost goes way beyond anything anyone would be willing to pay, God hangs in there for the sake of all creation.

The One who created us and gave us life wants that life to be abundant and whole. Is it possible to get that through our thick heads and even thicker souls? God desires the best for all people.

Which is just the point of all that talk about eternal life.

Eternal life is as much about the quality of life as it is about the quantity of life. One person put it this way: “We think of Eternal Life as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins.”

As John tells the good news, forgiveness of sins was not the main reason God came among us in Jesus of Nazareth. God was in Christ that the whole world and each one of us might have life.

The love of God—God’s desire for our life—is made visible in the radiant life of Jesus Christ.

Of course, this light is also a judgment, a light from which we turn away.

There’s a paradox involved here.

It seems like a paradox to say that the light of Christ is both life and judgment. Yet many shrink away from light and life, finding both too strong.

Let’s be honest. There are parts of each one of us—perhaps big chunks of our lives—that recoil from the light of Christ, parts that prefer life in the shadows.

With the early change to Daylight Savings Time many of us are up long before daylight. You know how it is. You flip on a light—and how the brightness hurts. You close your eyes. And you have to make a decision. Do you go with the light or stay in the darkness?

God's love creates a crisis in our lives.

“This is the judgment,” Jesus says, “The light has come into the world but the people preferred darkness to light.”

The Greek word for judgment is krisis. And rather than meaning condemnation, krisis suggests a time of choosing, of deciding.

"Two roads diverged in the middle of a wood," the poet says. This is a time of crisis, a time to chose, and in that sense, to judge which way to go. God's actions in our favor—forgiveness, the offer of new life—create a crisis—a time of choice for each one of us.

“This is the judgment. . .” Jesus says. But the judgment, the crisis, is ours, not God's.

We need to be clear about this. God loves the world. Jesus came not to judge but to save. The crisis asks us if we will respond to the light or retreat into the familiar darkness.

Maybe this is where we need to go back to the snakes in the desert.

Jesus talks with Nicodemus and reminds him of the story of Moses that we heard this morning. Yes, like much of the Bible it seems strange and foreign to us. But Nicodemus, a good religious man, would have known about the grumbling in the wilderness, about the serpents that were a judgment and the bronze serpent that was salvation.

This is a story about horizons.

The wilderness brought freedom from the Egyptians, but it was a perilous freedom for the Hebrew people. They passed down stories of this time in the wilderness that told not how good and faithful they were, but how God held to the covenant commitment.

When there was no water, they complained—and God gave the people water.

When there was no food, they complained—and God gave the people food.

Another time they complained, and, God being God, met their complaints with poisonous serpents. There is judgment here. Certainly a warning not to mess with the Holy One. God can take our anger, our rejection. But there seems to be a risk involved here as well, a risk that we tend to ignore in our easy talk about God’s forgiving love.

Several snakebites later, the people came to their senses and turned in a new direction, repented. And they did just what you and I would do. They asked that the snakes be taken away. Enough with the punishment!

Well, God told Moses to make a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Whoever was bitten and would look at the serpent would live.

The poisonous snakes were still there. But there was also healing and life.

Strange.

Yet doesn’t it sound familiar? We’re surrounded by serpents, yet wholeness is still offered.

The Jewish people long ago knew what we Christians picked up on. Our sin is met by the unmerited grace—the abundant life—of God. It’s been said before, but can’t be repeated often enough. One God is revealed throughout the scriptures—one God of overwhelming love. There is no “wrathful” God of the Old Testament replaced by the “loving” God of the New Testament. There is One God who gives life and life eternal.

So the Gospel of John speaks of the Son lifted up—lifted up on a cross, lifted up in glory—and reminds us of what was known long before: God who created us wants our lives to be whole and healthy, wants us to have “eternal life,” to be “saved” from all that would make us less than fully human.

The serpents are kind of a symbol of the crisis that is involved with God's love. The Hebrew people were set free and cared for by God. That was a given.

The choice was to accept that care and freedom or not. They weren't going to get it by obeying commandments—God’s forgiving freedom came before the law. They weren't going to get it by being good people. They would get that freedom and care simply by accepting it.

Still today we want to earn God's love when it can't be earned. It can only be accepted.

The serpents of life are most visible when we lower our sights and look down instead of keeping our eyes on the horizon—the future of life that God brings as a gift.

The faith that leads to life is our response to the love of God that is always there for each of us. Faith grows out of the crises of our lives, the choices that we make both when life is difficult and when life offers great joy.

Always we can choose the distant horizon, life in Christ that gives us strength and courage to face the serpents of the present time.

Where is your horizon? How far ahead can you see?

Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, raising the sightlines of the people to see a new future. So, too, Jesus says, he must be lifted up--on a cross which will set our eyes on death, but also lifted up from the tomb, giving us a new horizon of for life. In Christ the horizon grows. Life itself is pushed to its limits.

When we envision a horizon that holds the hope of life, we are free to act without fear, free to act in truth and love today because those very qualities seem to shape our own destiny.

When confronted with Christ we can look up and see something beyond death. Beyond every death, large and small, there is resurrection, new life. Life comes out of death; light comes into our darkness. And that changes everything. In Christ, the horizon of our life expands.

Open your eyes—and look toward the light. Beyond judgment is the love of God, greater than we could imagine.

Open your eyes and look. Look at Jesus lifted up.

On the cross is the light of the world.

The light is everything.

The light is our life.