Richard Bollman, S.J.

4th SUNDAY OF LENT -- B -- 2009 "Christ Lifted Up"

2 Chron 36:14-23; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21

The Book of Chronicles is a piece of Bible history

that tells the whole story once again, by one author.

It starts with Adam,

develops nine chapters of genealogies through to David,

spends a long time detailing the times of David and Solomon,

and then gives an account of the deterioration of the Kingdom,

to its destruction and the exile of the people.

The saga of the Kingdom is familiar to us from the Book of Kings.

It’s a story of continual unfaithfulness to the covenant, ignoring the prophets,

bad leadership, unhealthy alliances, ending with

the destruction of Solomon’s temple.

And after 70 years of exile, Cyrus of Persia sends the Jewish refugees home,

for the sake of rebuilding that culture and the temple.

That was about the 4^th century before Jesus.

That’s the end of the Book of Chronicles, and that’s the part we hear today.

So the good news of in the story is this:

there is no amount of self-destruction and sinfulness

that can overcome God's hopes for people.

In the early days of the Hebrew faith, when people would speak of God's deeds,

they'd say: God led us out of bondage.

But in the later days, the people would say:

God brought us back home when we had been refugees in exile.

The second reading, from Paul's letter to Ephesus,

ruminates on this activity of God,

how God keeps bringing us back

from the burden of our own sinfulness and stupidity.

This is sheer gift, it is grace, "immeasurable kindness,"

and it is done for us with Christ and in Christ,

suggesting a kind of fraternal and even mystical union

between Christ and his brothers and sisters.

John’s Gospel offers a complementary vision of Christ,

as the one who is lifted up for us to see and believe in,

and the one who has been sent for the world, light against the darkness.

So the point of the morning’s scripture is to lift up the reality of Jesus,

renewing, enlightening, saving the assembly of believers.

I’d like to go into this a little, the first words of Jesus quoted today:

"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,

so must the Son of Man be lifted up . . . ."

This looks back to the wilderness years, after the Exodus,

all that travelling, such a hard way to a better land.

Along the way the people complained of the food, or the bitter water.

And in retaliation for the complaining,

they were set upon then by poisonous vipers, deadly snakes.

That’s what happened.

It’s almost as if their own bitterness came up

to bite them in the form of snakes.

You see, theirs was a mean-spirited kind of complaining

because at bottom they were suggesting that God had abandoned them.

It was a failure to trust that was the source of the poison.

So then God told Moses, raise up a serpent on a cross stick,

let them look at it and be cured.

And so it happened: through that stark kind of image, that ‘sign,’

the people were saved, healed.

I think the human psychology here goes something like this:

"look now upon your fear, look upon what has happened to us

in our ignorance and failure to trust Yahweh."

And as we look upon that, as we face it, Yahweh actually saves us.

Jesus takes that old story and puts it up against his own death.

"I will be lifted up, as Moses lifted up the sign in the desert."

This is one of the predictions of the passion to come.

Just as you hear these predictions in Matthew, Mark, and Luke,

now in John’s Gospel, in symbolic language, Jesus looks ahead

"I will one day be lifted up for you to see,

lifted up on a pole, and I will be difficult to look upon."

You will see again the stark sign

of your own offenses and bitterness, there in my death’s agony.

So what we contemplate in the crucifix is our human brother, son of Mary,

suffering the contradictions of human envy and rejection,

how he would be betrayed and feared because of the freedom

that he was called to announce, the gracious kingdom of God.

"I will be lifted up so people can see me and believe

that God has given me a calling, to live the human story right to this impasse,

to live it through without violence or revenge,

and to be raised up, lifted up not only in death but in life."

This is not a sign of fear or accusation.

There is something here about hope in our broken world,

our poisonous world.

We have not been abandoned, even in the famines and violence

that bring down so many thousands of the human family every week.

In all the economic changes and fear, we’re not abandoned.

Suffering is not the end of human life, not the end even of human joy,

it must not stifle hope.

(Setting the processional cross at the front of the platform . . . .)

So here is a place to look during these hard times.

It’s as if our collective pain prompts us to ally with Jesus Christ,

not to praise and glorify death, but really to trust life at last,

to feel it in our own breath and bones,

to start longing always to choose and reach toward life.

Our own wounds and offenses can make us feel guilty and cynical

but looking at Jesus raised up is NOT for the sake

of making us feel guilty.

Sometimes we think this is the idea: to sort out

how we have caused all this suffering.

Rather this image is raised up so that we may find a connection

in our humanity with his humanity, our broken bodies with his.

And the profound question of faith is not

how have I caused this, but rather,

how am I being changed by it, changed and set free.

How, then, do I love people,

how do I invest myself in knowing others and revealing myself,

how am I willing to care what happens in neighborhoods not my own,

in nations I’d rather not think about.

How will I make a difference to my family and city and country.

These are the important commitments for people of faith.

And it is all God’s doing, through our intimate sharing of Christ’s Body.

We look upon Christ raised up, we touch Christ,

we are fed with his body and life’s blood,

and in the graciousness of God

we are changing and yielding to a deeper honesty and holiness,

we are being saved in spite of ourselves.

As Paul wrote to the church this Sunday,

"even when we were dead through our trespasses,

God made us alive with Christ . . . .

And this is not our own doing,

it is the gift of God."

So in our dark times, there is this sign lifted up against the darkness,

in which we hope.

"We are God’s work of art,

created to live this good life as from the beginning

God meant us to live it."

This cross from Salvador shows him

reaching out in the midst of a specific culture and people.

This cross from Africa shows him alone.

But not alone: because we are here able to look upon him.

Or we look upon him in the face of Christ on the cross behind me.

We are called to pay attention, for he suffers deeply

Why this devotion to Jesus in his suffering?

Partly because it is not ended: he suffers very deeply

in the body of the Mystical Christ, and we are part of that.

In the hungry and homeless, as the Gospel says, we touch this Christ.

So many innocent victims across the globe,

it’s easy to want to turn away.

But let yourself stand now and then and take it in.

About all we can do is suffer our own confusion and pay respects,

not yielding to violence, not wanting to turn away.

Not to rush to war, or to death penalties, forcing life to end.

But to stand where you are in your helplessness.

To say, there is something better,

something more is possible.

Let your heart long for that.

That seems to me to be the tone of Jesus’s testimony in the Gospel itself.

There’s an old Catholic prayer I looked up:

Look down upon me, good and gentle Jesus
while before Your face I humbly kneel and,
with burning soul, pray and beseech You to
fix deep in my heart lively sentiments of faith,
hope and charity; true contrition for my sins,
and a firm purpose of amendment. While I contemplate,
with great love and tender pity, Your five most precious
wounds, pondering over them within me and calling to mind
the words which David, Your prophet, said of You, my Jesus:
"They have pierced My hands and My feet, they have numbered all My bones."
(Psalms 22:17-18). Amen.

This simplifies it all for me: the opening of heart

before the struggle of Jesus in this world,

and asking for faith, hope, love,

reform of life. But not working hard: just asking, desiring,

and letting your eyes see what has happened,

on the cross and in Darfur, Gaza, the nearest hospice or shooting ground:

They have pierced my hands and my feet, they have numbered all my bones.