What do you see when you look at the cross? Do you see that God loves you and that in Jesus you have your salvation? Or do you see in the cross a standard of living life that you cannot live up to? Are you like Nicodemus, seeking to find just the right direction for how to live your life? Trying to figure out how you can control things just right to get the life you want?
Lent is a time to look to Jesus and see the beauty of the LORD. The Gradual verse for the season of Lent comes from Hebrews “Come let us fix our eyes on Jesus the author and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross despising the shame and is seated at the right hand of God.”
What is the beauty of the LORD? The beauty is in Jesus’ selfless love toward us. The beauty is seen in the bloody and gory picture of the Son of God humbled to the point of death on the cross. The beauty is not that we as the church are so twisted that we elevate images of blood and gore- but it is what Jesus’ suffering represents that allows us to see him lifted up on the cross, and gaze on the beauty of the LORD.
In our gospel lesson Jesus helps Nicodemus to see that if you want to see God’s kingdom you need to stop looking to yourself and look for what God reveals to you of His mercy.
Nicodemus came to Jesus looking for understanding of what he was seeing from Jesus- he wanted to know how Jesus performed these signs. Jesus catches him off guard by telling him that in order to see the kingdom of God he must be born from above.
Jesus was teaching him about Baptism as a summary of what it means to receive spiritual life by the power of the Holy Spirit. Nicodemus does not get it, he is looking for much more tangible explanations, things he can see. He wants to visualize the need to be born again to where he protests that you cannot re-enter your mother’s womb.
Nicodemus is fixed on those things that humans can accomplish and he struggles to understand the work of the Spirit which you cannot see. In his quest for understanding what Jesus is teaching, Nicodemus does not need to use human reason and logic to learn how to do what sounds impossible.
Instead, all he needs to do is listen to Jesus and let him show how the impossible is made possible. Although Nicodemus cannot picture being born again, he can see Jesus. He can listen as Jesus tells him about how life in the kingdom works, as Jesus proclaims to the world that he is the Son of God.
Jesus references that he must be lifted up- just as Moses was instructed to lift up the serpent in the wilderness. Jesus is talking about the deliverance the Lord offered to the people of Israel after their disobedience. The people of Israel grew impatient along the journey to the promised land. They questioned Moses why they even were there.
“Did you bring us out into the wilderness only to die? We were better off in Egypt in slavery to Pharaoh.” They were ungrateful for the food that the LORD provided for them. After a period of time they began to say of the Manna “We loathe this worthless food.”
You can hear this account as simply part of Israel’s history and part of the background for today’s gospel lesson. But there is more. This narrative account of the history of Israel tells us something important about Nicodemus and about us. As Nicodemus approached Jesus to talk to him at night- looking for answers, and as we approach our life each day- it is of greatest importance how we see things.
In the book of Numbers the people saw only their own complaints and did not see the deliverance that was right before them. In not seeing the promise of deliverance, in ignoring the promise of a Savior the people departed significantly from God’s favor. They were lost in their sin.
We see from the book of Numbers that the punishment for their sin was quick and severe. The LORD sent fiery serpents among the people and the bites were killing the people. This is a terrifying picture of the consequences of sin. The pain and the fear the people experienced was unbearable so that they asked Moses to pray to the LORD to take away the serpents.
There in the wilderness the people could no longer pretend they could save themselves. When they complained to Moses they thought they could make things better for themselves, but now they saw fully how perilous the journey is without the LORD’s help.
The LORD was merciful to them and provided a unique means of deliverance. Moses was commanded to make an image of the very fiery serpent that was killing the people and put it on a pole, and simply looking at this bronze serpent the one who was bit would not die but instead live.
The bronze serpent, the image of the people’s punishment for sin would by God’s grace serve as the people’s deliverance. What looked like a graven image commemorating the destruction of the people was by God’s grace a symbol of their salvation.
This is how the Lord deals with us, his love and faithfulness turns our greatest failures into instances of our salvation.
Jesus on the cross is a visual representation of the price of the sin of the whole world. And looking at Jesus’ death on the cross in faith we live.
At that time from an uninformed earthly perspective Jesus as the Son of God could be seen as someone who has come to be the instrument of our destruction. This would be the punishment you would expect for our sin. If anyone has a reason to destroy us, it would be the Son of God.
Yet God did not come to condemn the world, but God loved the world in this way, that he gave his Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.
As Jesus was raised on the cross, naked, bloodied and humiliated, his suffering was the greatest reason yet to condemn the world. But instead, just like the serpent on the pole, the symbol of man’s disobedience to God became the symbol of God’s salvation for the world.
In faith and trust we look to this symbol in faith- day in and day out, until the time at last when Jesus takes us home. Just as we sang in the hymn Lord Thee I Love with All my Heart. “That these with joy my eyes may see, O Son of God Thy glorious face, my Savior and my fount of grace.”
In the meantime we have our brothers and sisters to care for, and to encourage that they also look at Jesus not as the one who comes in terror as the King of Kings, but kind and good with healing in His wings.
Like Nicodemus we are still prone to look at God’s Work in the world wrongly, to miss seeing Him rightly. Hearing God’s Word, receiving His gifts in worship can become an aspect of life that we undervalue. As if we are just going through the motions.
We need to pray for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters in Christ, that they do not take their eyes of Jesus, or begin to see worship as a chore in the manner in which the people of Israel began to see the manna from heaven.
If faith should become a chore, all of a sudden people are looking to themselves instead of the Lord. All of a sudden decisions in life are made that separate more and more from God.
Think of how many people have grown up and learned God’s Word in this very place, who stopped attending worship, who said no thank you to the Lord’s promises in the gospel, no thank you- I will have a go at it on my own.
What dark and empty paths has Satan led people on who allow church to just be a background part of life, and make life decisions according to what is popular in our culture- who live life as if God’s Word has not changed anything in their life.
As the church we mourn how commonplace it is for people to take their eyes of Jesus and his life giving cross and go after the sorrows of this world. We mourn the heartache and sorrow that comes to our brothers and sisters in Christ as a result of lives devoted to sin and a lost sight of Jesus.
May this mistake not be so common among us. Like Psalm 121 celebrates: “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD who made heaven and earth.” Indeed as we fix our eyes on Him and he will keep us from all evil.