Facing it All
The abba was asked why some people said they gazed at the faces of the angels. The abba replied, “It is better to look at your own sins.”
— Sayings of the Desert Fathers
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
— John 3:16, NRSV
For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.
— John 3:16, NLT
A New Twist on an Old Pattern
As we enter the last few Sundays of Lent, the lectionary gives us one of the most famous passages in modern Christianity, John 3:16. When we think of John 3:16, we probably think of sports fans, bumper stickers, and license plates. But what we forget is that the whole passage around John 3:16 includes a reference to a weird and much less well-known Old Testament story, which happens to be one of my favorites, the biblical story of Nehushtan, the bronze serpent installed by Moses.
Many Christians love John 3:16 because it is practically the whole gospel in a single verse, but most of us are not thinking about bronze serpents as part of that. So what’s the connection?
In John 3:14-15, Jesus tells the Pharisee named Nicodemus in the secrecy of the night, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” Clearly, that part got cut off the bumper sticker. What gives?
In Numbers 21, Moses lifts up this bronze serpent Nehushtan as a healing memorial in a new twist on an old pattern. The old pattern is that once again the Israelites are complaining and rebelling on their desert pilgrimage, forgetting all God had done. In fact, this would be the very last time the Israelites rebelled in their trek in the Torah. Why?
This rebellion seems to have a two-fold difference from their earlier complaints: the intensity and the manner of their rebellion. Intensity-wise, it is their most extreme rebuke of God. But also in its manner, this rebuke is uniquely anti-God among their rebellions. In Exodus, their complaints are only against Moses and not directly against God at all. In the book of Numbers, their rebellions grow and culminate in the Israelites attacking God:
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 and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”
Numbers 21:5
The distance of language and estrangement from its theological center may make this seem not so bad. But if this is seen as a full rejection of the Almighty by humanity, a rejection we might know ourselves, it might be heard through an anthropocentric twist on John 3:16: “For God’s people so hated God, they slandered his motives and stared at his gifts of life with contempt.”
In response, God judges swiftly and harshly. He sends deadly consequences for this rebellion in the form of a horde of snakes. This, perhaps rightly, strikes us in modern times as God going overboard into brutality. To some, it is worse, an example of an insecure and immature God, the kind of story that makes Judaism and Christianity backward, the kind of story that fueled Gnostic Christian conspiracies that the Lord of the Old Testament was actually evil.
But before we get to that, let’s go back to the narrative on its own terms and look at another difference of this final rebellion. One reason it is different, and perhaps why it’s their last, is the Israelites truly own and face their role in evil. In doing so, they start to fully see God’s gift of life for what it is. The result is healing:
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, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
Numbers 21:7-9
God’s solution of Nehushtan is showing how our disease and God’s cure become the same. As Fr. Aaron and Melissa Burt point out, the manner of our death becomes the source of life. This is also the way of the cross.
And so here and in John 3:16 we discover why the snake and the Son are lifted up. If the intensity and manner of the Israelite’s last rebellion is unique, so is the intensity and the manner of God’s love.
God’s Love and the Weather: “How” and “How Much”
When we hear, “For God so loved the world...” We usually think of that as “God’s love for the world was SO great, he gave his only Son.” That meaning isn’t wrong. But there’s another simultaneous meaning of the Greek that can go along with it—“For this is how God loved the world.”1 And this is how: arriving as a human being, looking like one of us sinners, and dying on the cross. This is the manner in which God loved the world—that which brought death has been bent to create life.
Knowing the measure, the intensity of God’s love for us is important. But it’s also very important to know how God’s love is, and why God came not just in the image of God, but in the appearance of one of us sinners. And it’s important to know that part of that “how” God loves us is by lifting up our sin, holding up the death that he has faced and defeated, and asking us to look upon our role in evil.
And how we love God back is important, too. For what happens when we only look to feel good about ourselves before God and ignore our darkness which God’s light shines upon? What happens when we look to Jesus purely as a healer and not as a savior from ourselves? What happens when we divorce the cross from the memory of our role in evil? We get more clues from the second biblical act of Nehushtan.
In Numbers, the Israelites look upon the memory of the serpent as tied to the memory of their confession. They were facing it all, knowing that they couldn’t just blame God, but their sin played a part. But then, it seems, they forget. By the time we get to 2 Kings 18 and the reign of King Hezekiah, one of the few righteous kings of Judah, it is centuries and centuries since the Israelites had their desert snakebites. Nehushtan had become an idol they burned incense to. And so even though God had built the dang thing, God saw it fitting for Hezekiah to smash that snake.
I’ve used this example many times in my writing about psychedelics because it keeps striking me as potent and relevant. But it is relevant and potent beyond that world, too, and it happens anytime we make the notion of “God is love” into an idol of how we understand love. The love of God on the cross should often render us uncomfortable because it is a love that also brings light into our darkness.
And so while this is one of those Old Testament stories that can make some Christians uncomfortable, it’s important to show us another dimension to the “how” of God’s love; a different season of the same weather at a different part of the story in time. Here in Vermont, we just had a fake warm spring followed by a huge dumping of snow (and it’s still going as I type). But it’s still the weather. Summertime and winter, mud season, melty, and all other sub-seasons…it’s all still the weather; it’s all still Craftsbury.
Likewise, God has a variety of ways in which his love appears different across different times and places here. But it’s the same God, and the same how, and the same love. But every time we study God’s Word, we can discover (or rediscover) a little bit more of that “how.”
The Untamed God of Love
If God seems harsh in the arc of Nehushtan, it’s because he’s fighting nothing less than existential death. Those are the stakes.
On X/Twitter last week, user CurziRose wrote a remarkable thread about the role of “sheepdogs” in protecting communities against bad actors, and why too much empathy—often our conflict-avoidant preference—can destroy a community while thinking it’s promoting unity and love. While we should examine these roles with much caution, humility, and nuance ourselves, reading Scripture not for self-justification but repentance, we can know that if the God of the Hebrew Bible is harsh, it’s like how a beloved guard dog is harsh. Not a yappy dog who barks at a car driving by, but a dog who smells the root of evil better than we do. We want to domesticate God into a dog fit for our convenience, sometimes saying it isn’t even the same God: “That’s Old Testament God” (a concept spawning many anti-Jewish perceptions from Christians). As the logic continues, if Jesus came into the world not to condemn, then God is not a judgmental God at all. Taken to its extreme, God would have no preferences in anything we do.
But this robs the cross of its power by robbing our evil of its evil. Instead, to insist that God is judgmental of our evil but that God is still coming to save us does not mean God is not a God of love. For as
pointed out, whenever God passes judgment, he always gives a chance at redemption. With Nehushtan, he makes the means of death—and the Israelites remembering their part in evil, and facing it—something that becomes a source of their healing. As written by Steve Garnaas-Holmes:You have to look your evil in the face to be healed.
The snakes that plagued the Hebrews in the desert
were their betrayal come back to bite them,
their being Eden's serpent.
The cure was to gaze at their sin.
So we gaze upon the Crucified One, our victim,
and look our awfulness in the eye
and only there grasp forgiveness,
and only then become truly alive.
We, in polite Christianity, shortchange ourselves and the world if we only hold onto one part of the paradox of the cross. If we just come to the cross purely for healing, and we don’t come to face it all — face all of our sin — we will be missing something of both the intensity and the manner in which God loves us. We will miss the “how” and “the how much.”
That which we do not face cannot be healed, and part of what we face is how we are part of our own demise, we invite our own spiritual death.
Again, folks, God’s fighting nothing less than humanity’s freakin’ death. That’s the stakes! Jesus didn’t come to be nice to death, Jesus came to fight death. Now, the way he fights death is through deep, kind, love and compassion…and sometimes a whip of cords in the Temple…and peace…and rebuke…and forgiveness…and “woe to you”…and “blessed are you”...none of us will never learn all the seasons of the weather of God’s love. None of us will ever know the full how. But we know it is as one of us: with us. Emmanuel.
Facing it All
God’s mercy triumphs over Judgment (James 2:12-13), but God’s mercy is only meaningful because God judges our evil and loves us anyway. For this is how God loves us — by facing all of it.
For this is how God loves us: by lifting up the means of our love of death and killing it, so that we might witness the death of death. By asking us to face it with him, knowing and trusting that on the other side is mercy.
For that is how we love God — by facing all of it. And our evil is part of that all, but not All in All.
For God loves the world so much that this is how God loved the world: he became one of us to be intimate with our struggle, to be intimate with our death, and indeed to give us life through making death itself die for those who can believe it. For his love cannot be tamed.
