4th Sunday of Lent B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2009

Today's reading from St John's Gospel started off with a reference to an enigmatic story in Israel's early history. The Hebrew slaves had managed to escape from Egypt. But crossing the Sinai desert and then conquering the current occupants of the Holy Land presented formidable problems. They were blocked in for years, there in the Sinai peninsula. In their frustration and impatience they complained bitterly. They even said they would have been better off to stay enslaved in Egypt - at least there they were fed. They weren't prepared to pay the price of freedom. 

Apparently, after one of these episodes of complaining and moaning, they camped near an oasis that was infested with snakes. A lot of them were bitten, and many of them died. The story says that God told Moses to cast a bronze model of a snake and to display it high on a pole. According to the story, those who looked at the bronze snake recovered. Jesus used the episode to say that he, too, would be lifted up on a pole, and everyone who believed in him would more than recover from snake bite - they would in fact have eternal life.  

What's going on? Perhaps,  with the Israelites in the desert, the real problem was not  the snakes, but their own complaining, their own failure to appreciate their freedom, and their failure to trust Moses, and, effectively, to trust God. But, without the snakes, they may never have faced their real problem, and may never have admitted that their real problem lay with themselves. It was  too easy just to blame their bad luck, to blame the snakes. By casting the bronze serpent, and getting them to look at, and reflect on, the consequences of their lack of co-operation with their liberating God, they slowly came to see the reality of their own sin, and to repent. 

What about Jesus, lifted up? What bedevils our world is, among other things, our hostility to each other, our radical competitiveness, our instinctively judgmental assessments of each other - as individuals and as communities. When things go wrong, we instinctively blame the other. We are not good at recognising our own faults. We will look for every possible excuse to avoid our own guilt. 

We need the stark image of the crucified Jesus to recognise the extent to which we will go to scapegoat the other, rather than to reform ourselves. Jesus is the one totally innocent human being. He is the one totally and consistently loving human being. And we degraded him, dehumanised him, called him the sinner, and killed him - because it looked the most responsible thing to do to preserve the status quo. The enormity of our action, if only we will look at the crucified one, shocks us, and confronts us with our entrenched sinfulness. If we look at the crucified one, our unrecognised, habitual, taken for granted sinful attitudes are revealed. 

We are the ones with the problem. We don't need scapegoats, to blame everyone, or everything, else for the state of our world. Recognising and admitting our sin is the beginning of salvation. The risen Jesus forgave his killers, and all those complicit in one way or another in his death - and that is all of us. We are all caught up in the pervasive sin of the world. To open to his forgiveness, to be saved, all we need is to be guilty, and to recognise it, and to let him forgive us – unconditionally. But, we'll do anything to avoid confronting our own guilt. 

At the moment, the world-wide financial meltdown is in full swing. Whom can we blame? the bankers, the CEOs.? Perhaps, but is that all? Who went along with things before the bubble burst? Might we all be guilty, in our different ways, complicit in greed, in thoughtless consumerism, in instant gratification, in exhausting the world's limited resources to sustainor to improve our wasteful standard of living? 

The bronze serpent invited the Israelites to see themselves as the problem. The crucified Christ invites us to see ourselves as the problem. Once we own our problem, certain forgiveness can empower us to change. We just have to believe Jesus' unconditional love and forgiveness of the guilty, and let it be, and let it change us - and we begin to experience eternal life, and our world begins to change for the better, and to be saved.