Fourth Sunday in Lent, Sunday, March 10th, 2024
NUMBERS 21:4-9; PSALM 107:1-3, 17-22; EPHESIANS 2:1-10; JOHN 3:14-21
so must the Son of Man be lifted up
Our passage from John includes a verse that is perhaps the best known of all—John 3:16. I memorized it as a kid from the King James version of the Bible: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” We even have it as our website address: StJohn316.com. Not a bad verse to be known by, with its summary of such good things as God’s love, and the life offered to us when we trust and believe in Jesus.
Hidden in this saying, though, is something I’d like to speak on, and that’s the way in which God in Christ is given—something that is made a bit more clear in John 3:14 and 15: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
More specifically, I’d like to say more this morning about this “lifting up.” Because for John’s Gospel, this “lifting up” is not the same as the “raising up” we read of in the rest of the New Testament. For the rest of the New Testament, we read of Jesus being “raised up” in his resurrection; but in John, it’s a “lifting up” that refers instead to the crucifixion.
We see the similarity between the “lifting up” of John’s Gospel, and the “raising up” of much of the rest of the New Testament, here in Ephesians. In Ephesians, we hear that “God … out of the great love with which he loved us … made us alive together with Christ … and raised us up with him.” And so just like in John, there is a gesture of love from God that is not just about Jesus, but a gesture of love that implicates us. The gesture of love that is the resurrection of Jesus in Ephesians is not just about Jesus. Out of love, we are made alive together with Christ, and we are raised up with him.
Ephesians uses the verb that Matthew, Mark, and Luke tend to use—to get up, or to be raised up, a word that speaks of the resurrection, but also about just getting up—often associated with getting up after being healed. When people are healed, and they get up or are helped up, the other gospels speak of this getting up with the same sort of language that is used about resurrection.
And this offers us some connection between the help and healing God offers to us in Christ in everyday life—this help and healing is connected to the resurrection of Jesus, the one who is raised up. There’s a clear implication here that the resurrection of Jesus isn’t just about offering us life after death—the resurrection of Jesus is about offering us life now, in the present, too. The life in Christ we experience now, this is like a little resurrection, or little resurrections; and the life we experience in Christ now, to be raised up now, is also an expression of God’s love.
Listen again to Ephesians, and listen to the ways in which we are reminded of all these things: that the resurrection of Jesus is an act of God’s love towards us; and that this act of love is not simply about the future, but about the present: “God … out of the great love with which he loved us … made us alive together with Christ … and raised us up with him.”
John’s Gospel is equally concerned with the lifting up of Jesus. We hear it in the Gospel today, in the forgotten bit that comes just before John 3:16, where we hear that Jesus must “be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” This too is out of God’s love, as we know from the next verse; this is done because “God so love[s] the world.”
But when John’s Gospel speaks of a lifting up, a different word with a similar meaning is used; and that’s because John’s Gospel, when it speaks of a “lifting up,” refers not to a resurrection that gives life, but a crucifixion that gives life. What we should be hearing as we read John is not, like in Ephesians, of God’s love and offering of life through the resurrection, where we should hear that “God … out of the great love with which he loved us … made us alive together with Christ … and raised us up with him [in his resurrection and then his ascension].” In John, what we should be hearing, is strikingly similar, yet very different: “God so love[s] the world” that Jesus must “be lifted up [and crucified], that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
In a way, it is hard for us to identify with the sort of sacrifices that the ancient world took for granted. So in some ways, it is hard for us to imagine that the sacrifice of the cross could ever be a good thing. And while John’s Gospel gets some bad press for how it can be read in such a way that it can underwrite the antisemitism of the present, there are ways in which John’s Gospel is deeply Jewish. When John the Baptist says of Jesus that he is the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, and when in John’s Gospel Jesus is crucified at the same time as the Passover sacrifices are made, John is making a connection between Jesus and the sacrificial deaths of the Passover lambs in the temple. But like I said—this brings us into a world of religious sacrifice that we are often very uncomfortable with.
We aren’t though as uncomfortable with sacrifice as we might think. Who here hasn’t given something up for the sake of your children? Who here can’t say that your parents didn’t give something up for you? Perhaps you did grow up in a household in which your parents thought of themselves first, and didn’t give you the same opportunity to thrive as others; but I’m pretty sure we would call that bad parenting. You see, I think we are more accustomed to the idea of sacrifice than we might first imagine—we sacrifice something of our own for the sake of the ones we love.
And don’t get me started on the examples of sacrifice in media and culture. Tony Stark does it in Avengers: Endgame; Dumbledore does it in Harry Potter; Gandalf does it in Lord of the Rings; Groot does it in Guardians of the Galaxy; Hodor does it in Game of Thrones; Old Man Logan does it in Logan; Both Billy and Eleven, at different points,
do it in Stranger Things, and just about every good guy in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story does it. Sacrifice might be tragic; but we can see the good in it, too. I think we understand sacrifice.
And it is in Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross—where Jesus dies in our place in order that we might have life—it is around the cross where John’s Gospel would have us see the turning of the life of the world away from death, and towards life. The cross is certainly where Jesus is killed by a state that would rather make an example out of an innocent man than to carry our justice; but this is also no ordinary man, in Christian faith. Jesus is the Son of God, of one being with the Father, given “so that everyone who believes in him,” that everyone who trusts Jesus, “may not perish but may have eternal life.” Jesus is the one who in being lifted up will gather all people, even all things—the cosmos, and every living thing in the cosmos—Jesus, who in being lifted up will gather all of this to himself. For God so loves you; for God so loves me; for God so loves the world.
Ephesians is clear that to be made alive together with Christ—both today, and on the last day—is by grace. “By grace you have been saved,” raised up, resurrected as we are with Christ. But the cross is a matter of grace as well. Because there, something is accomplished for us too—on the cross, God in Christ is given up, and the Holy Spirit is given over; for the sake of the life of the world that God loves, us included.