John 3 and the Jesus Message (Lent 4B/John 3:14-21

Darrel Bock (430-433) combines John 3:1-21 into one section, titled “What Do the Signs Show?  Jesus and Nicodemus”.

John’s next account is of an evening visit by a leader of Judaism.  Here, outside the tensions of a public confrontation, in the quiet of table talk, the two eras meet, one old and the other emerging. …

I find the word “emerging” in those circumstances as kind of interesting, though I doubt Bock meant by it what I tend to hear.  Very often we don’t understand just how revolutionary Jesus was in his impact.  Even those who think he meant nothing more than a bit of reform of Judaism must admit that his followers went on into some very revolutionary changes, probably less acceptable than those “emerging” leaders plan for Christianity today.

We look at the changes Jesus brought, and we would like those to be the last changes, the ones that bring us to precisely where we should be.  But Jesus is more radical than we give him credit for.  God is not as tame as we would like him to be.  The whole new birth thing, while it is rooted in various ideas that would have been familiar to Nicodemus, is revolutionary in its results.  We always focus on the way in which Nicodemus misunderstands the who new birth/birth from above part.  But I suspect what he was trying to avoid was this idea of the person led by the Spirit who could not be completely comprehended.

Didn’t God bring people out of bondage in order to get them to live righteous lives according to a set of instructions, instructions that God himself had given?  Was not that the essence of righteousness?  But here Jesus sounds so much like any instruction set along the was perhaps part of the way out, and not the destination.

Having set the scene, we can look at our passage for today.  With Nicodemus in a bit of shock about people led by God’s Spirit being incomprehensible, going like the wind, led by God’s wind (Spirit), Jesus turns to Torah (Numbers 21:4-9), which is something that Nicodemus should understand.  But he picks a very difficult passage and he uses it in a very difficult way.  Whether you hear this section as part of the speech to Nicodemus*, or one to the disciples following, and whether you see the context as the confrontation between a nascent Christianity and Judaism, or more literally set in the ministry of Jesus, I think the two are intended to have a connection.

Jesus, the Spirit-led person goes to the cross.  Moses the Spirit-led person lifted a serpent up on a pole.  In both cases people were required to look up.  In the first, this was to the serpent on the pole.  In the second to Jesus on the cross.  To quote Vincent Taylor as cited in Leon Morris, “There could be no vainer controversy than the disupte whether in those passages (i.e. John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32) the crucifixion of the exaltation is meant.  The death is the exaltation” (p. 200n67).

But was this all?  In the case of the bronze serpent they were to look to God who provided the sign.  One has to ask whether God understood the potential difficulties of this situation, even though one knows the answer.  With the serpent as an object of veneration but also of terror, there was every chance that the people would worship it, and indeed that eventually happened (2 Kings 18:4).

But John’s upward look includes everything there is about Jesus.  He’s lifted up on the cross, out of the grave, to the right hand of the Father, and when his Spirit lifts the believers from their fear, lethargy, even apathy and into their mission.  When one looks at the cross one should see both death, the death of sin (2 Corinthians 5:21) and life, the life of one whom death cannot keep, the life of one who is willing to face death so that the world can be saved.  To quote Vincent Taylor as cited in Leon Morris, “There could be no vainer controversy than the disupte whether in those passages (i.e. John 3:14; 8:28; 12:32) the crucifixion of the exaltation is meant.  The death is the exaltation” (p. 200n67).

If you tie the “born from above” of John 3:1-13 to the “lifted up” and the place to which the Israelites are called to look, I think you will get some more of this idea.  In very broad strokes, as long as we look to this world, we cannot be redeemed from it.  Even the good things of this world are failures.  We have to look to something “lifted up,” something that is beyond this world in order to be redeemed from it.

All of our human plans of salvation that involve earning God’s favor are a failure.  The Israelites demonstrate this level of missing the point when the worship Nehushtan, the serpent (2 Kings 18:4), by burning incense to it.  They’re trying to gain the serpent’s favor; God is saying to look up and out.

John 3:16 is called a very simple summary of the gospel, and it is.  At the same time it is part of one of the most theologically deep statements of the gospel.  You can run through this passage time after time, follow the symbolism, and come back to something simple, but if you go back and let the words of Jesus work on you some more, you’ll find some more “simple” lessons, that put together show the depth of the gospel as well.  That’s the genius of John’s gospel, but more importantly, of the Word made Flesh.

*Let me note one more thing.  It is likely that the division of the passage comes between verses 15 and 16, so that the reference to the serpent is made to Nicodemus, while v. 16ff is a reflection on the passage.