Grace in Action (Lent 4B)

The passages are Numbers 21:4-9, Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10 and John 3:14-21.  These passages center around the story of the serpent that Moses put on a pole in the wilderness.  The omission of verses 4-16 maintains that emphasis even in Psalm 107, though I would recommend reading the entire passage.  I am not always happy with the omissions in the lectionary readings, and this is no exception.

There are three points that I think may be gleaned from these passages:

1. Grace is grace.  It is something freely given even in circumstances under which the recipients might be said to have made their own bed.
2. The offer of grace often appears in strange or unexpected ways.
3. Grace rescues, but it also puts us at risk.

One of the problems we have with grace, I believe, is that it takes us out of control of the situation.  Let’s suppose I am out of work, and someone offers me a job.  Let’s also assume that I really have no hope of getting a job doing something I like or think I would be good at.  This offer of a job comes to me as grace.  I do not have the qualifications.  I couldn’t claim the job in a process of submitting resumes and doing interviews.  The job will be difficult and I’m not certain I can do it, but my potential employer says he’ll provide the training necessary.

Taking this job is a risk.  I risk:

1. My control. I can’t go to my employer, remind him of my great value, and persuade him to keep me.  At least in the short term I’m not a positive asset.  He claims he will make me into an asset, but that hasn’t happened yet.  It would be hard for me to threaten to quit.  He knows I have no other job available and would be going back onto the street.
2. My pride. I must go to work every day knowing that I didn’t earn this job.
3. Failure.  While my employer believes he can make me into a good worker in this new job, I don’t know that myself.  It looks like a long hard road.  Will I be successful?
4. My past. I have great experiences in other fields.  When I go into this new job I’m putting aside everything I’ve done in my past.  Must I feel like a failure because I am now in a different field?
5. My future. If I was down and out before, what would happen if I lost this new job, my one and only opportunity?  Who would employ me then?
6. My relationship with the giver. If I fail or quit, it is not just a job that’s at stake, it’s a relationship.

The principles involved are best illustrated from Numbers 21:4-9.  The Israelites complain about food and water, even though their need has been supplied time after time.  Why do they complain first, rather than ask first?  After they complain and are in trouble, they are not asking for their wages or something they have earned.  They are asking for special relief.  Grace is grace.  It isn’t payday.

When God offers grace he often does so in ways we don’t expect.  I wrote a devotional for my wife’s list titled Rescued to the Wilderness.  My point there was that if we had our choice, grace would come in the form of rescue from Egypt directly into the promised land.  What happened to Israel is more like the case of a climber who gets stuck at the bottom of a canyon.  He’s discouraged and just wants to get out of there.  Someone drops him new ropes and the tools needed to climb out.  He’s rescued, but he has to climb out.  He might prefer to have a backet dangling from a helicopter that would pull him out instantly.

In the wilderness case, however, the action was simple.  It just wasn’t fully logical, at least to our modern minds.  Why put a snake up on a pole and look at it in order to be healed?  The NISB reminded me in a note that the snake was an equivocal symbol in the ancient near east (p. 221 on Numbers 21:4-9).  On the one hand it represented death, but on the other it represented life and fertility.  Imagine the conflict of a person asked to gaze on an image of the thing that had threatened one’s life.  But “God made him who knew no sin to be sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21) and put him up on a cross for us to gaze upon.

We often don’t see how that symbol is filled with conflict from our human point of view.  That’s why, as we read last week in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, it is foolishness to those who are perishing.  Why look at some dead guy to save me from dying?  It doesn’t make sense!  This isn’t grace, it’s silly!  But it is precisely the way in which grace is presented.  Jesus is lifted up as the serpent was in the wilderness.  I don’t think it is an accident that while John 3:14-15 gives the same message as John 3:16, we memorize the latter much more frequently than the former.

Finally, accepting grace is risky, as I showed in my illustration.  I think God’s grace is much more like the person who offers a job or the one who drops ropes and other equipment to the climber than it is like the parent who presents a child with a new, fully-paid car on his or her 16th birthday.  The 16 year old can get in and drive.  The recipient of God’s grace has begun a journey, one which will be difficult at times, but which will also be thoroughly soaked in God’s grace, again and again.