The larvae of the cross.

Numbers 21:4-9  Ephesians 2:1-10 John 3:14-21

The Old Testament reading brings before us a thread which runs through the whole of the Bible and it is well known that Martin Luther lay great weight upon it in all his teachings. For him it was no less a principal rule of all human knowledge of God.

It is this, that when we speak and hear about God, we are not concerned with the naked majesty of God but with a veil or covering. (velamen) At other times he speaks of a mask or (larvae) from which we get the English word lava by which is meant the embryonic form of an insect in which is hidden its fully developed form.

According to Luther we must not run away from the masks or larvae with which God clothes himself in God’s relationship with us for if we do we risk not only losing God but of finding a hostile God, the Devil. We must be thankful for these masks because if we are to know God, we must seek Him where He has sought us behind the veils and the masks which are signs of His majesty. According to Luther, apart from these veils or hiddenness of God, God is not to be found.

We can hardly understand this morning’s Old Testament reading as nothing less than a confirmation of Luther’s rule. The people of Israel are on their journey from captivity in Egypt. They had been freed by the events celebrated in the Passover. They had been preserved by God in their crossing of the Sea. As they journeyed, they became tired and weary of the seeming purposeless of their wandering. They forget that God has preserved them as his people through all the events associated with God’s actions on their behalf as they escaped from their bondage in Egypt. They begin to grumble against God and 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 loathe this worthless food.”

How in their circumstance can they know that God is with them; that they are part of God’s gracious purpose in calling them His own? Seemingly to magnify their discomfort they are set upon by a plague of poisonous snakes whose bite proves fatal to many of the people. They come to Moses and plead their case: admitting they had ceased to believe in God’s gracious purpose for them and pleading with Moses to ask God to have have mercy on His unbelieving people. There follows Moses fashioning the bronze image of a snake and putting on a pole, telling the people if anyone is bitten by a snake to look at the serpent on the pole and they will be healed. The symbol of the people’s death by snake bite becomes a life-giving sign. God fulfills his promised faithfulness to His people by being amongst them as the life giver through the sign of their death. The sign or mask of God’s presence is hidden under its opposite as to with the Cross of Christ in the NT.

As Luther points out when commenting on another biblical verse:-

Accordingly, God humbles those who are His to exalt them; He kills them to make them alive; He confounds them to glorify them; This is the art of arts and science of sciences which is not usually learned or discovered except with great toil and by a few; but it is nevertheless sure and certain, as this example shows, for what is stated in Ps. 105:21 is true: “The Lord appointed Joseph king of Egypt and lord and savior of many.” How? By having him sold, cast off, killed. These works of God are not understood unless they are fulfilled and completed. In the meantime, however, while they are being carried out, they cannot be grasped except by faith alone.

We see in this incident something of the basic configuration of the relationship between God and Israel and, representatively in and through Israel, between the church, the new Israel of God and its Lord, Jesus Christ. We now come to the NT reading with all this in mind.

St John:16; is perhaps one of the most well-known sayings written in the New Testament. It appears in isolation to be an exposition in itself and therefore has an obvious meaning; yet the reverse is true. But the verse occurs and is to be understood within a definite context. It is to be understood in terms of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus regarding the new birth – which is anything but easy to understand.

The conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus brings together some of the ideas which are characteristic of St John’s vision of the mystery of the person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of His presence in the world: ideas which we have already met in God’s revelation to Moses, of how the hidden God of grace of the Old Testament is, at one and the same time, the revealed grace of God. So too is the truth of God’s revelation in the New Testament.

Jesus says to Nicodemus that it is necessary that one should be born “from above” in order to see the Kingdom of God, God’s rule on earth. To be “born from above” is to see God’s divinity, God’s Godness, in Jesus, BUT this contradicts or hides our natural understanding of the divine. To be “born from above” is to rivet our attention on that which is below. For God’s being “above” is God’s being “below” in the depths. God’s exaltation his highness is God’s humiliation. His lowness. His being lifted up of which Jesus speaks is His exaltation as the Son of God. But His exaltation, his being lifted up, (on the cross as the serpent in the wilderness) is in the form of His deepest humiliation, His nakedness and His abandonment, above all by God, on the cross.

It is this that is the primary offence to Nicodemus whose view of God is such as to exclude self abasement, humiliation and weakness. His God is the God where high is high and low is low, God and human beings live out their respective lives according to the natural view of how things are between God and the world. Thus, his view of being born from above can only be understood in terms of the natural processes of human generation. Whereas for St John, birth from above is grounded in the new humanity which comes to light in the exaltation of our humanity in the humiliation of God on the cross. His being “lifted up.”

This is the first aspect of God’s hiddenness to which St. John points – the humiliation of God is in fact God’s exaltation and those who are given to believe this truth as the source of their life before God see the contours of that life in the divinity of the Son of God present in the world in the depths of our human condition, alienated as it is, from God.

This aspect of God’s hiddenness is taken up and verified in the words concerning Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness, as likewise so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. The lifting up of Jesus here not only refers to His being lifted up on the cross. But that in His lifting up we are to see the exaltation of God; God’s highness, His being “above”, His being the transcendent, is made possible by being the God who is so free in His grace toward us as to be God in the depths of His humiliation.

We see this truth through the veil of the cross. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness in the midst of the people stricken and dying by its malignant sting, that which was the symbol of the death, the destroyer, the enemy, the serpent, becomes the symbol of their healing and health. As it is still today a symbol of medical professions healing. So too Jesus, the Son of God, reveals His divinity, His exulted nature, as He shares to the limit God’s abandonment of the creature in death and the grave. This place of abandonment, the place of God’s enemies, becomes the place where the Son of God resides. Our godforsakenness is made His own. As St Paul unhesitatingly concludes Jesus is made to be sin that we may become the righteousness of God in Him. (2.Cor.5:21.)

Those who are born from above are those to whom it is given to acknowledge the divinity of the Son of God present in the world in His exaltation as the humiliated God for our sake. It is only in this context that we can begin to understand the verse which is so well known. For God so loved the world…………

This verse repeats what we have already been told. For ‘God so loved’ refers back to the reality which those who are born from above confess; God’s love is not some abstract other worldly quality but the specific action of God in which God’s exaltation is revealed in the lifting up of Jesus in His humiliation on the cross. God so loved the world – it is the world which is the object, and in Jesus, the subject of God’s love. For St John the “world” the kosmos, is not some neutral concept but is the world understood in active organised opposition to God, the world as God’s enemy is what God loves.

The manner of God’s loving brings out the inner meaning of God’s hiddenness which St John emphasises; the fact that God’s exaltation is God’s humiliation. God loves the world so much that God surrenders up God’s own Son. It is this divine self offering which is the ground swell of the earthly form of Jesus exaltation in His humiliation on the cross. In this way God exposes or hazards, risks God’s own existence as God for the sake of the stricken and benighted creature.

The Christian message is the word about this act of extravagant love of God in which God pledges God’s own self on behalf of the weak and threatened creature. To receive this as good news is to see the Kingdom of God amongst us. There is no way of understanding God’s action and our participation in it as those who believe, or who “see” the kingdom of God, from the point of view of our humanity rising up to God, of achieving unity with the divine either by an inward or outward spiritual journey which we undertake into the depths of our souls or by transcending our creatureliness.

This impossibility is equivalent to Nicodemus’ proposition that a grown person should enter a second time their mother’s womb and be born. For new birth is not accomplished by us it is accomplished for us. In the humanity of the Son of God our humanity is both judged and made anew by the humiliation of the Son of God. In Him is revealed the mystery that the humiliation of God is the exaltation of the creature. It is in Him and Him alone that we are born again. In acknowledging this, in believing this, we ‘see’ the Kingdom of God. We are born again.

God the Father is no longer veiled or hidden; His glory is revealed in the glory of His Son Jesus who in unity with the Father’s will goes to the depths of the godforsakeness of the world’s alienation from God in the cross to redeem us all.  To know and believe this is to be born again. Amen
Dr. Gordon Watson.