Fourth Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday)
March 14, 2021
I was standing outside Sutherlands IGA stoah one morning when I heard a flivver approaching down the street toward me.
Which way to Millinocket?
Well, you can go west at the next intersection, get on to the Turnpike, go north through the toll gate at Augusta, ‘til you come to that intersection… Well, no. You could keep right on this tah road — it changes to dirt now and again — just keep the river on your left. You’ll come to the crossroads and… Let me see… Then again you can take that scenic coastal route that the tourists choose, and after you get to Bucksport… Well let me see now. Millinocket. Come to think of it, you can’t get there from here.
“Which way to Millinocket” from Bert and I by Robert Bryan and Marshall Dodge.
You can’t get there from here…That’s the story of our lives sometimes, isn’t it? If you think of where you wanted to go when you were twenty compared with where you are today…perhaps I’ve made my point.
There’s an old saying from Thomas à Kempis about that: mankind proposes, God disposes.[1] Our ultimate goals as individuals and as a society always turn out to be unreachable. There may be many successes along the way: a healthy family, a college degree, a prestigious job, a boot print on the moon, but, in the end, we never end up quite where we expected to be.
I talked about this subject last Wednesday night. Ego makes sure that our limitations always trump our will—not only our physical, mental, and emotional limitations, but our spiritual limitations. Our ego-based choices come back to haunt us. All the good intentions in the world and all our hard work always leave us short. When that happens, our wounded pride wants us to explain our shortcomings away. “It’s not my fault!” it cries. “It was the woman!” “It was the woman you put here with me that made me fail![2] But in our quieter, more honest moments, we know deep down that we were the responsible ones, after all.
That is original sin. It’s “original” in that it lies at the origins of all our goals and plans. In Hebrew, there are three different words for what we call “sin.” One of them is ḥaṭa’ (ח ט א). It means to “miss the mark,” the way an archer would miss the target. That’s our experience, after all. “For what I want to do, I do not do; but what I hate, I do.”[3] If we want a successful, happy life, we can’t do it on our own, by our own skills and intelligence. We need help—God’s help. And that’s what we mean by “grace.” Grace is the goodness and power of God poured out in us. That’s what Paul is telling us in today’s second reading: “By grace we have been saved.” He goes on to explain, “…and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.” He even says, “When we were dead…God…brought us to life with Christ.”
“With Christ!” That’s the operative phrase. We’ve been taught that all that Jesus did, he did for us. That’s not perfectly accurate. The Letter to the Hebrews calls Jesus “our Pioneer,”[4] the one who goes ahead of those who will follow. Jesus shows us the way but setting out on it is up to us.
Now, let’s turn to today’s gospel. “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.” First, some context. While the Jewish people were wandering in the desert after the exodus from Egypt, they became impatient. Things weren’t going according to their expectations. Sound familiar? They complained against Moses and against God. They were thirsty and afraid they’d die in the desert. They were making plans to turn around and head back to Egypt. At least there, their masters would be looking out for them. They didn’t have to face the uncertainty of this journey. It’s always simpler when someone else is calling the shots. If you’re unhappy, you can always blame them!
So, God had Moses strike a rock and water flowed out for the people to drink. God’s compassion doesn’t depend on human goodness. The people got what they wanted, but they wound up paying a price for their infidelity. They were stricken with a plague of poisonous snakes, so that many of them were bitten and died.
Once again, Moses stepped into the breach for them and prayed to God for help. God had him mount a bronze serpent on a pole. Whenever someone was bitten and looked at the bronze serpent, they would live.
Why a serpent? From the dawn of history, serpents had been revered as immortal gods. The ancients thought that, by shedding their skins, serpents were continually rejuvenated and, therefore, immortal. It’s not by mistake that the sign of Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, was a snake wrapped around a pole. So, the bronze serpent in the desert was the symbol of new life after a spiritual misstep—a ḥaṭa’—a missed target.
In John’s gospel, the image of Jesus being “lifted up” like the serpent in the desert is deliberately ambiguous. John wrote his gospel after living through the whole Christian experience, so he was able to see very clearly both meanings of Jesus’s prophetic message. The word in Greek for being “lifted up” can also be translated “raised up.” Jesus would be raised up on the cross for the faithless people of Israel to see and be healed and he would be raised up on the third day to give them new and everlasting life.
We are to follow Christ, our pioneer. How, then, are we to be “raised up” with Jesus? Once again, the answer is ambiguous. We, too, must be “raised up” by being with Jesus on the road to his suffering and death and beyond. How? Certainly not by indulging in self-hating self-punishment. Pain is not a sign of holiness. It’s a matter of repentance—of metanoia—of changing our minds. We can turn away from our dissatisfactions and complaints and, like Jesus, live in acceptance, trusting our heavenly Father just as Jesus did in Gethsemane: “Your will, not mine, be done.” And, like Jesus on Calvary, we can learn to surrender—to cease fighting anybody and anything. “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Acceptance of life on life’s terms and surrender to the will of God make up the road to the resurrection—to being “raised up”—not only in the hereafter, but here, in this life, as well.
Finally, once we have been raised up with Jesus through our acceptance and surrender and have been raised up to a new life of peace, serenity, and yes, even joy, we have no other choice but to live in gratitude. For, as long as we live fully in gratitude, we will have been vaccinated against the disease of discontent. And should we discover anything in our lives for which we are not entirely grateful, all we need to do is to raise it up in acceptance and surrender and the grace of our loving God will take care of the rest.
[1] The phrase “Man proposes, but God disposes” is a translation of the Latin phrase “Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit” from Book I, chapter 19, of The Imitation of Christ, a 15th-century book by the German cleric Thomas à Kempis.
[2] Cf. Genesis 3:12.
[4] Hebrews 12:2