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Readings for Today. Listen to our other podcasts.
Just as Moses lifted up the serpent to save the people, so to Jesus is lifted up. But the salvation Jesus offers is forever.
The lifting up of Jesus
We have very powerful parallels that teach us something fundamental to the core of our faith. And the fundamental core is that we need a Savior. We refer to Jesus as our Savior because we need a Savior. And if we need a Savior, there is something from which we must be saved. And that is sin.
I’ve mentioned more than once that sin has fallen out of fashion. But the reality is, it’s at the core of the Christian message. It is absolutely at the heart of what we celebrate every single time we come to Mass. That we are not God. That we need God. That we need God’s grace.
And the Gospel today helps us to see the profound parallel that this has been God’s plan from the beginning. As a matter of fact, the first promise of a Messiah was actually, and is actually, considered to be in the third chapter of Genesis, verse 15. The proto-evangelium, it’s called. The first Gospel.
Why does this matter? Because when we sin, God is just in condemning us. That’s justice. But God’s justice is tempered by His mercy. In other words, even though we sin, God simply loves us so much that He pours out His mercy for us.
Now, such is what we hear when Jesus is making the comparison between what happened in the time of Moses and what ultimately happens during this season of Lent that culminates in our celebration of Good Friday. Moses lifted up a serpent in the desert. Now, the serpent, I have to say I’m not a huge fan of snakes. But this serpent was pretty miraculous indeed. It was a walking serpent. It was a seraph. Its bite was not only deadly, it was painful. And because the people had sinned, they were being bitten by these seraphs. And they cried out for mercy.
And any time we cry out for mercy, God gives us mercy. Any time we desire to change our ways, God is there for us to remind us how much it is that He loves us and cares for us. And so Moses lifts up the serpent. The very sign of their sin becomes the sign of their salvation. And that’s the point that Jesus is making with Nicodemus today. Jesus takes on our sin. He is lifted up like the serpent.
But unlike the serpent, who only heals for a time, Jesus has the power to heal forever. Jesus offers eternal salvation. It was foreshadowed in the book by Moses lifting up the serpent. It is fulfilled in the life-giving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Paschal Mystery.
Just as Jesus is lifted up on the cross, and we can look at the cross and see our sinfulness, but more importantly, the love and mercy of God, then indeed, we are saved. And it is this that we need more than anything else to remember. Jesus came to save us.
God loves us. God does not desire us to be condemned. God does not want us to die. That is why God gives us so many graces and help to live the way of life that leads to eternal salvation. We have the Gospel. We have the Word of God. We have the sacraments. We have God’s presence in our life when we make time for prayer. When we open our hearts and sacrifice a bit so that we can stand even in a small way with those who suffer through no choice of their own.
When we do these things, we look upon the Jesus who died for us and who saves us. Paul reminds us that this is not because we just need to work harder. In fact, our works do nothing to contribute to our salvation. If they did, we would be Pelagians, and that was one of the first heresies condemned by the Church in the 4th century. That somehow we could earn our salvation.
If we just worked hard enough, if we just did enough good things, we could earn our salvation. The popular image of God holding the scales of justice at the end of time, our bad works on one side, our good works on the other, and if our good works weighed more, we were saved. Not true.
We’re saved, says Paul, and he’s absolutely right. And quite frankly, I sound like a good Lutheran here. We are saved only through the grace of God. Paul makes it abundantly clear. God is rich in mercy. Because of the great love he has for us, even when we were dead in our sins, he brings us to life in Christ. By grace, you have been saved. Raise us up with him. For by grace you have been saved through faith, he says a second time in the next paragraph.
And this is not from you. It is the gift of God. It is not from works, so no one may boast. We are the handiwork. If there’s a work to be boasted about, it’s the work that God created in us. It is what God has done for us. It is how God has given us the grace to respond. It’s what God has prepared for us from the beginning of time. But it’s about God.
And for us, it’s about our cooperation with what God wants us to do. Now, we live in a world that is filled with darkness. There’s no two ways about it. And we can work as hard as we want, but the reality is we’ve been working a long time. And we still have many of the same problems we’ve been trying to solve for a long time.
People are still homeless. We don’t really care enough as a society, I mean, to make sure that everybody has a place to live or has enough food to eat. We don’t really seem to care enough about opportunity. We don’t pay enough attention to people on the margins. All this as a society, individually we might do so.
We’ve worked hard at solving some of these problems. But maybe what we haven’t worked hard enough is to help people first see that God loves them. You know, that was the goal of Mother Teresa. She had one goal. She’s known for helping people in their needs. She did all kinds of marvelous works. But was there one goal? That everyone would know, everyone that she encountered would know how much it is that God loves them.
And when we really believe in the power of this love, and we witness to this power by the way we live, I’m convinced that becomes attractive and people want to come and join us. Let us ask the Lord today that we might come to really know and believe that God so loved the world that in the fullness of time he sent his Son to save us. And by our witness to that belief, others might come to know how much it is that God loves them too.
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