The Judgment

A Sermon on John 3:14-21
Delivered at St. Bartholomew’s Church, 
New York City, March 10, 2024

         So, when I first wrote this sermon, I decided we didn’t need the reading from Numbers 21: 4-9. Well, as I finished proclaiming the Gospel, and began to preach, I realized that without at least some discussion of the reading from Numbers, the Gospel doesn’t make sense on its own. Because Jesus in this Gospel reading explicitly refers to this passage of Numbers [21: 4-9]. In other words, your deacon cut the readings a bit too tightly.

         Some of the problem is that in Christianity we have a slightly (if not more) sideways understanding of the Hebrew Bible, and some portions of it can have a dark humor that we Episcopalians aren’t exactly known for embracing. Though I sometimes do.

Here the problem is we are well on our way with the Israelites toward the Promised Land, but they are restless, and questioning God and Moses. To the point that, after God hicks them out of bondage, drags them through a large chunk of the Middle East, and they’re finally making a left turn at Edom, the Israelites go further and speak against God and Moses, complaining “Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

I mean, at this point, I’m tempted to throw in the line, “and the portions are too small.”  So how does God react to his sullen people. He does what we’d expect, right? Wrong.—he sends poisonous serpents to bite the Israelites and remind them of their manners as they begin dying off. This tactic apparently works, because the not-yet bitten Israelites quickly beg Moses to intercede for them; they ask for God’s forgiveness and God sort of gives them what they ask for. He tells Moses to makes a serpent of bronze held up on a staff, and anyone who has been bitten by the snakes, and is still with us, is healed when they see the bronze serpent on the pole. 

You can see why I was thinking of skipping this whole reading today, but besides the absurdist comedy in which the ungrateful Israelites basically lip off to God to the point that he sends snakes to, well, you know, kill them, it also sets up today’s Gospel.  

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus describes Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness and adds that he too—the Son of Man—must must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.  And Jesus uses these words that have been all too often misused: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.”

The Evangelist reaffirms the text, saying quite simply, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.  Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

And this is the judgment: that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.  For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to it so that their deeds may not be exposed.  But those who do what is true come to the light so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.

OK, that’s a lot to try to grasp in one fell swoop.  So let’s look closer.  

In the passage from Ephesians today, Paul reminds us that his Ephesian disciples were dead through trespasses and sins.  He broadens it out and adds that “All of Us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses.  But Paul swiftly turns from that reminder of past sins and errors, and he tells us that God, has always loved us, even at our worst, at our most selfish, our coldest, our least compassionate.  And how are we reconciled with God?

Simply because God loves us so radically, so enthusiastically, that he doesn’t just forgive us—God raises us along with Christ, and seats us with him.  This is the wonder of Grace—a free gift requiring nothing in return.  We only have to accept it.  

There’s a lot of great preaching about Grace, but how do we bring John 3:14 alongside this passage from Ephesians?  

First, we should remember that the judgment Jesus is speaking of is against hiding from the Light of God, from hoping to go unseen, rather than to ask—or accept—the Grace and love (as well as forgiveness) that is offered by God without any limitations.  In other words, Jesus condemns those who hope to avoid any kind of relationship with God at all.

So taking that as a first step, here’s what makes sense to me.  The Anglican writer, apologist and novelist C.S. Lewis reminds us again and again in his works that God wants nothing more from us than for us to open our hearts to God and each other, to those we don’t know yet, and to share the love we have received from God.  In his book The Great Divorce Lewis gives us a parable in which the damned who are in hell get an annual holiday to visit paradise, and, if they choose to stay, they can.  Most don’t—for one thing their own self-obsession, they have become wraiths, so immaterial that a blade of grass in Paradise can cut them. Worse still, they are too set in their ways and their grievances and their anger—and yet some do stay.  The point is that those who choose not to stay are excluding themselves from God’s grace.  Not by a single action, but by an entire life’s course of rejecting the Good, the True, and the beautiful.  

Of course, next year, they may try again, and do better.

Similarly, in The Screwtape Letters, Lewis reminds us that hell is an obsession over ourselves, a refusal to love others in our hearts, and to refuse to embrace those who cross our paths.  In Screwtape, the young Devil Wormwood loses his prey because he cannot understand that his “patient” a young man in the Second World War, realizing that death nears him, and he simply prays.  That’s all. A step toward a deeper relationship with God.  A request for God’s mercy and love in a time of terror.  

Wormwood can’t understand what it is to turn to our creator in love because, like all of Lewis’s devils, he is so bound up in self-importance, that he cannot understand a simple prayer for forgiveness, evoking God’s Grace and love, without expecting a miracle.   

That’s rather like Jesus’s ominous judgment of those who flee from the light when the light of the world is in front of them, because their guilt, their fear, their self-hatred that has curdled into despair—all these human feelings of unworthiness that lead us to hide our secrets from God (as if we could) can cause us to hide from the Light of Christ. 

And I’m not going to pretend that this is some light thing, easily tossed aside.  I’m a member of a fellowship, Alcoholics Anonymous, and have been for almost 27 years.  In that time, I have had to confront my own shadow side, and have had to not hug it to myself.  No, I’ve had to make amends where and when possible, I’ve had to admit my wrongful actions to another human being, to myself, and to God.  And in doing these things, I have found that forgiveness, even when I don’t deserve it.  Even the amend I was most afraid of attempting turned into a reconciliation of sorts—long distance, but very real and warm. It was with my ex-wife. She not only accepted my amend, she shared with me that she was still “my biggest fan” and that she had followed many of my writings. And so I started reading her books, and enjoyed discussing them with her.

When my mother died, just about a year ago, she sent, from her home in England, a beautiful wreath to the funeral.

Have I made all my amends? Not yet, but with God’s help, I hope to.

And here is, I think the judgment Jesus speaks of: it is to allow oneself to be paralyzed by fear, to be so sure that we are beyond forgiveness that we don’t even try to respond to the loving Grace that surrounds us in our community, in our Church, and among each other.     

If Paul, who was complicit in the murder of St. Stephen and who knows how many other early Christians could embrace that grace when it came to him, no guilt, no fear should stand in our way.  Not because he’s so much worse than us—he’s terribly human, very much like us—both at our best and worst; he’s sometimes arrogant, sometimes kind, sometimes oblivious that he’s putting his listeners to sleep, and he can be difficult to like.  But we are like him, in that we too are all of those things, and like Paul, we in this chapel today, are surrounded by Grace, is here among us, only awaiting our yes.