Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 22, 2009

Numbers 21:5-8

The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food & no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, & set it on a pole; &everyone who is bitten shall look at it & live.”

The people of Israel have become impatient with God & Moses, saying that they would rather had never been freed from Egypt & forced to undergo such a terrible journey.  Their most recent occasion for “murmuring” is the rather benign complaint about what provisions have been given them.  They were merely grumbling about the food: manna yesterday, manna today & more manna tomorrow.  God is angered by their attitude & sends a plague of poisonous serpents to visit them.
Commenting on this story, even the ancient rabbis noted the irony. From the very beginning of creation, the rabbis commented, the snake has eaten only dust, & did so without a word of complaint.  Therefore: “Let the serpent which does not murmur concerning its food come & rule over the people which has murmured concerning their food.” Targum Neofiti
Repentant, the people come to Moses asking him to intercede with Yahweh.  Yahweh relents, but God doesn’t cancel the plague of snakes.  God tells Moses to make a serpent out of bronze and raise it on a rod; anyone who is bitten & looks at the bronze serpent will be healed.
The real problem is the solution itself: one glance at a snake on a stick & all is restored.  That sounds like  the primitive magic of a talisman.
But at least for the followers of Asclepius, the ancient Greek god of healing, who used snakes as part of healing ceremonies, the snake may have  had more than symbolic value.  It has been suggested that snakes tied to a stick (the caduceus of medical art) may have been a way of inoculating patients with nonlethal does of snake venom – a primitive hypodermic injection.
But for the ancient rabbis it’s not the snake, but rather what looking at the ‘raised’ snake causes us to do: “Rather whenever Israel looked upward and submitted their heart to their Father in heaven, they were healed”. Mishnah Rosh Hashanah
Looking upward, we discover the source of our healing.  As the Evangelist John has it, the Son of Man is lifted up on a cross so that we might behold the healing love of God.

Third Sunday in Lent, March 15, 2009

John 2:13-22

Giotto, Explusion of Money Changers 1306

Normally, the animal markets & the exchange agents set up their tables outside the Temple precincts. Whatever the reason for the change, it resulted in allowing rival competing merchants to set up their animal stalls & money changers to set up their exchange tables in the Temple confines.
Now, guess where in the Temple all of this took place?  Right there in the Court of the Gentiles-in the only place where those who were defined as needing God the most had that chance taken away.  The Gentiles were displaced by pigeons.  And Jesus becomes infuriated.
Nowhere else in all of the New Testament do we meet Jesus quite on these terms.  His outburst in the Temple seems to be out of character.  Through our image of a Jesus meek and mild, a tender, soft-spoken Galilean, comes this specter of wrath and rebuke, anger and indignation.
For the evangelist John, Jesus not only momentarily shakes up the Temple practices, Jesus does away with the whole sacrificial system.  It’s not merely misguided, it’s bankrupt.
No longer do we need to sacrifice those on the outside, replacing people with pigeons, because they just might not be pure enough – or look, think and dress like us.  With Jesus, there’s another way.
No longer do we need to sacrifice one another in order to find a scapegoat to blame.  So that we come off unblemished with clean hands and purged consciences.  With Jesus, there’s another way.
The Temple with its sacrificial system has been destroyed.  A permanent sacrifice has been made for us and for our salvation upon Calvary’s cross, and on the third day a new temple was raised.  He is, as John the Baptist testified, “The Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”.

Second Sunday in Lent, March 8, 2009

Mark 8:31-38

Caesarea Philippi

“Who do people say that I am?” The disciples respond by reporting the gossip picked up on the waterfront, in the synagogue courtyards, & among the crowds at the market place.  The suggestions roll off their lips for it is always easier to talk about what others think about Jesus.

“Who do you say that I am?” Peter’s hand is the first to go up.  “You are the Christ!” He looks at Jesus & sees the Messiah – the Anointed One – presumably on His way to take control of Jerusalem, & to claim His crown in glory, honor, & power.

But then, the words of Jesus.  He “begins to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer… and be rejected… and be killed”.

“God forbid it Lord!” Peter was horrified, not only because Jesus announced that He was going to suffer on a cross, but because that made a demand upon him to take up the cross as a servant like Christ.
What kind of Christ you have determines what kind of disciple you’ll be.  That is, what you think of Jesus, will show in how you put you faith into practice. If you’re going to have a Christ who is a suffering servant, then that means that your discipleship will need to take the same form.

Jesus turns & rebukes, not Peter, but Peter’s understanding of discipleship: “Get behind me, Satan!  For you are not on the side of God, but of man” (8:33).

We prefer the Jesus that is meek & mild, the projection of our human sentimentality;  the Jesus who very easily meets our every desire, but lays little demands on us. Our portrait of Him is beautiful, but unscarred by thorns.  His hands are gentle, but bear no marks of nails.  He can sympathize, but not save.  For this Jesus – the Jesus as we would have Him be – would never cause us to abandon Him, and nobody would be likely to crucify Him.
Right in the middle of the Gospel of Mark, indeed, right in the middle of our lives, Jesus turns to you & wants to know, “Who do you say that I am?  What place do I have in your life?”  “What kind of disciple are you anyway?”