“Fiery Serpents & Eyes of Faith" Mount Olive Lutheran Church Season of Lent Sunday Sermon March 10th 2024 – John 3:14–21 & Numbers 21:4–9

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday March 10th 2024: Season of Lent / John 3:14–21 & Numbers 21:4–9 “Fiery Serpents & Eyes of Faith"

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends. That phrase, “the hair of the dog that bit you” associated with curing a hangover by having a drink of what got you hung-over in the first place apparently came from a folk remedy for rabid dog bites where hair from the dog would be rubbed into the bite wounds made by the dog. Doctors don’t use this as a treatment for dog bites and they don’t recommend drinking more alcohol as a way of curing a hangover ... and the reason they don’t is because these folk remedies don’t actually work. But what if there was something like this that did work? Not for dog bites or hangovers but for sin? This is what we find first in our Old Testament reading today with Moses and the hand crafted bronze serpent on the pole, the meaning of which is then made abundantly clear in our Gospel Reading in the Gospel of Saint John where Jesus teaches us saying, “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life,” prophetically referring to His, at that point, yet to come crucifixion Jesus makes a connection between these two things. And if Jesus makes a connection between His personal Good Friday crucifixion and what happened with the children of Israel in the wilderness with Moses and the hand crafted bronze serpent on the pole following their exodus from Egypt, then we should also take that seriously, and consider what this means for each of us.   

The Book of Numbers recounts the ungrateful hearts of the people who sinned against the LORD complaining about their rescue from captivity in Egypt and the miraculous food that God gave to them in the manna and quail, daily sent for their nourishment in the wilderness, when they called out to Moses saying, “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.”[1] These complainers then received something to really complain about, not a head splitting hangover or a bite from a ravenous dog, but rather a bite from fiery serpents sent by the LORD among the people. In a nutshell, this is teaching us that, there will be times when ingratitude will be tested with trials and hardships to encourage gratitude and gratefulness to spring up in us: to encourage repentance when other calls to repentance fall on deaf ears. Times of danger or illness often become opportunities for people to snap out of their self centred concerns, especially when they realise they are in over their heads and truly need help. Then the prayers ascend, then the eyes turn to the LORD for help, then the heart begins to burn with need for the gifts the good LORD has for us—sometimes these gifts are like the gifts of the manna and quail in the wilderness—gifts that are already extended to you but for your reasons that are your own you’ve brushed off as “worthless.”

In our modern context as Christians, in the world we live in now, this can come when someone brushes off the promises found in their baptism, when they grow to despise God’s Word and the hearing of it the Divine Service and in preaching, when they consider the Body and Blood of Jesus’ real presence in the Meal of the Lord’s Supper to be worthless or worth less than other folks confess it to be. The advice to remember their baptism daily, to make it their goal to attended the Divine Service on Sunday weekly, to gladly hear and learn from God’s Word and to receive the Sacrament of the Altar faithfully will sound as foolish to some as the advice to “make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.”... ‘Oh Moses don’t you have some ointment, some medicine, an injection or something else to give me? This remedy you say is from the Lord seems foolish. The fiery serpent put its fangs in me! How can simply looking at a bronze sculpture of it do what you say? I’ll need stronger medicine than that!’ Yet we are told from Scripture that when Moses made the bronze serpent and set it on a pole if a serpent bit anyone, they would look at the bronze serpent and live.

This boils down to faith. If you refused to look because you thought it was a foolish solution to a snake bite you died. Now if a Black Mamba or a King Cobra or an Inland Taipan snake bites you basically you’re dead as soon as it’s venom is in your system, that is if you don’t receive anti-venom quickly. The venom of sin is not always as fast acting but without anti-venom you’re already dead, as Saint Paul teaches “the wages of sin is death,”[2] If the Children of Israel, bitten by the fiery serpents, didn’t believe that God could save them they were essentially dead already regarding their faith and no amount of convincing even with miracles, which they’d witnessed during the exodus, could save them. What does Jesus teach, “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” So those who look to Jesus, those with faith in Him are the ones who have their promised salvation. Are you seeing the connection between what happened with Moses and the fiery serpents and what Jesus is saying when He says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him may have eternal life,” are you seeing the connection?

Jesus at the cross, crucified there for you is your anti-venom when it comes to sin. That image of death is the death of death. Jesus dead upon the cross is a promise of life, the victory over the serpent Satan who deceived the whole world through Adam and Eve into death.[3] The one who hangs there dead on the cross is the one who says, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”[4] This is why Saint Paul who begins by saying “the wages of sin is death,” concludes by saying “but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[5] Hopefully this helps frame that famous John 3:16 verse “For God loved the world in this way, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” That passage is not about some abstract notion of love, that passage is framed with words pointing to Jesus’ crucifixion and death at the cross, that’s the way God loved us through His Son. Jesus innocently takes the “bites” of the “fiery serpents,” and in so doing becomes the anti-venom you so desperately need. And just as the Children of Israel in the exodus were given their faith by God and were called to set their eyes on the promise of His salvation we like they now need to stand firm in that faith with our eyes on Jesus “the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him,” the Book of Hebrews says, “endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”[6]

This all reinforces what we heard in our Epistle last week from Saint Paul, “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”[7]

Here’s something to contemplate. Moses didn’t only preach a sermon to the people, as directed he crafted the bronze serpent and put it on the pole for the people to look at in faith. God through the prophets didn’t only make promises through words concerning the coming Saviour; Jesus came in the flesh and was nailed to the wood of the cross and lifted up for the people to look at in faith. In Colossians Saint Paul describes Jesus saying “He is the image of the invisible God,”[8] and in his letter to the Galatians Saint Paul asks, “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified.”[9] And in 2nd Corinthians Paul exclaims how “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”[10] The prohibitions about making images of God go by the wayside when the Second Person of the Holy Trinity comes in the flesh and is made man.

When we put the baby Jesus in the manger in a crèche at Advent and Christmas, when we put Him in paintings and drawings in books or on the wall or on a screen this is no different from when He is shown on the cross in a crucifix. A crucifix, a nativity set, a picture of our Lord Jesus all operate for us as the bronze serpent on the pole did in the Old Testament. What God directed Moses to make pointed forward to Jesus’ and His crucifixion for us, what we have today are works of art that point back to what Jesus did for us in His incarnation, birth, death, resurrection and ascension to His Father’s right hand. These things for us must be true to what Scripture teaches, they must be useful for teaching, and must act as a memorial of what happened, and they must be secondary to the Word of God publicly proclaimed and preached and to the Sacraments of the Church. The danger in any work of art is that the work of art itself can overtake what it’s pointing to and become an object of worship in and of itself. For over six hundred years, long after the fiery serpents had departed the people and those who’d at first lookup upon the bronze serpent crafted by Moses had gone to their rest, the Children of Israel kept the object with them giving it a place of honour as a memorial witness to what the LORD did for them, that is until it stopped being a secondary memorial witness useful for teaching the faith and became an object of worship in and of itself. That’s when King Hezekiah destroyed it.[11]

Yesterday I was talking with a member of the congregation who was asking about crucifixes. They were wondering why a person would have a cross with Jesus on it or why we would have one at the church. This got us into a conversation about when these things are useful and when they’ve gone too far veering off into idolatry. I told them about a trip I took to the Holy Land and how while I was in the Old City of Jerusalem I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher marking a spot which used to be outside the city walls, the location where Jesus was crucified, buried and risen. Years after the events of Holy Week and Jesus’ Easter Sunday resurrection people built this church over these locations and part way between mount Golgotha and the place that marks the tomb[12] they’d put a slab of stone on the floor to memorialise the moment after Jesus’ dead body had been taken down from the cross and prepared for burial before being laid in the tomb. You see this as soon as you walk in the doors. And what did I see as I walked in the door? Three or four Orthodox ladies deep into their eighties and early nineties on their hands and knees rolling candles on the stone like rolling pins. Why were they doing this? They were doing this because they believed some of the mojo from the spot would rub off on the candles. This is idolatry. For them it’s no longer operating as a memorial alone, no longer something useful for teaching the Scriptures, for them it’s become an object of superstition. It would be like if you had a particular crucifix and you believed that if you said the right prayer and kissed that particular crucifix just right you’d be cured of cancer. That is idolatry. Idolatry attempts to rob worship from God, to bypass Him. As Christians we worship the Creator not the creature and not things fashioned by the hands of men. We don’t want to boast in anyone but Christ Jesus for our salvation or help, we don’t want to hold up a person or object as having power that it doesn’t have. So a crucifix is good providing it’s not worshiped in and of itself as something over and above the one it is meant honour.        

That said, as Lutherans we are free to have both crosses and crucifixes and other works of art depicting Jesus;[13] when they point us to Jesus, to remind us of Him, when they help us learn about Him and to bear witness to Him.[14] We are called to look at them with eyes of faith where the world looks away from these things in blindness, or when they see them they only see them as foolish, because to them what stands behind them, the person of Jesus and His sacrifice for them, is considered foolish. However be careful of misplaced faith, be careful a faith turned in on itself, be careful of turning your eyes away from Jesus, and be careful of putting your faith in anything other than Him: that is idolatry. For His part Jesus never took His eyes off of His heavenly Father, He never took His eyes of the prize of winning salvation for you. The way in which it was accomplished was gruesome and bloody, it involved shame and humiliation and death, the world may not want to see it, as Christian we are called to see it for what it is regarding this Jesus, the working out of our salvation in Him. Yes, as we heard in our Epistle, “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— [yes by the power of Christ Jesus as the anti-venom and antidote to our sin and death, God] raised us up with [our Lord Jesus] and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the coming ages [God the Father] might show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.[15] Amen.    

Let us pray: Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Numbers 21:5
[2] Romans 6:23a
[3] Genesis 3
[4] John 16:33
[5] Romans 6:23b
[6] Hebrews 12:2
[7] 1 Corinthians 1:21–25
[8] Colossians 1:15a
[9] Galatians 3:1
[10] 2 Corinthians 4:4
[11] 2 Kings 18:4     
[12] The Aedicule, a structure built over the location of Jesus' tomb housed inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the Old City of Jerusalem in Israel. 
[13] Pr. Ted Giese, “Three Principles of Ecclesiastical Art Production from the Writings of Luther” from logia.org
[14] Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and crucifixes FAQ answer. 
[15] Ephesians 2:4–7

Photo Credit: Main photo detail of small crucifix in hand from pxhere.