Lifted Up

Lifted Up (March 26, 2006)

“And just 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.” John 3:14

Two months ago after my friend Tracy Early died I went to his Manhattan apartment and picked out a number of his books. They are all filled with Tracy’s underlines and notes, and as I read I see Tracy in new ways. In this passage we have just read from John we have a similar feeling about Jesus. This strange incident in the book of Numbers about Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness, almost gory in its detail, and hard to interpret, to say the least, is the passage which comes to Jesus’ mind as he explains his mission to Nicodemus. How often, one wonders, did Jesus think about that incident, how much did he ruminate on it? But it said exactly what Jesus needed to say about his death and the Roman punishment he would suffer, and that his death would bring life.

Later in the same gospel Jesus says, “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” And John adds he said this to show by what death he should die.

The truth is that it is really not by Jesus’ teachings nor by his miracles but by being lifted up upon that cross that He has attracted more followers to him than all the other world faiths, affected more lives, and led more people to believe that goodness will triumph over evil. Who would have thought that a means of execution would become the most powerful religious symbol the world has ever known – again, as you remember C. S. Lewis said, Christianity is not a religion anyone could have guessed -- the subject of countless hymns, worn around the neck by more people, and cherished as no other symbol, all because one man was lifted up upon it to die an ignominious death?

Two weeks ago we saw that the Cross of Christ is the world’s most profound paradox. Jesus told Peter that those who would save their lives will lose them and those who give their lives for Christ’s sake will find them. St. Francis spoke of that paradox when he wrote: “it is in giving that we receive”. We know this paradox is one of the great truths in life, and it is what the cross itself is all about. One of the basic reasons for the great attraction of the cross is that it speaks to the truth that sacrifice for others is part of the warp and woof of life itself and is the greatest reflection of the meaning of love. Jesus said that except the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die it cannot produce fruit.

And last week we said that the cross was a “scandal”, which is the word in Greek for “stumbling block”, and is still a stumbling block for people who prefer something more glamorous– the popularity of the Da Vinci code comes to mind – but that it is nonetheless the basic gospel message: Christ died for our sins. Either we want something more flattering to our intelligence and imagination, or we don’t want to be told we are sinners in need of redeeming. Nonetheless, “we preach Christ crucified,” St. Paul wrote.

The great Scottish theologian Donald Baillie wrote: “The crucifixion of Jesus set men thinking more than anything else that has ever happened in the life of the human race. And the most remarkable fact in the whole history of religious thought is this: that when the early Christians looked back and pondered on the dreadful thing that had happened, it made them think of the redeeming love of God. Not simply the love of Jesus, but of the love of God. In discoursing of the love that was shown in the cross of Christ the New Testament is never able to stop short of tracing it upstream to the eternal love of God dealing sacrificially with the sins of the world.”

Jesus said, “for this cause I came unto this hour.” In other words, instead of seeing this as a great miscarriage of justice, because after all he was innocent and unjustly condemned, the early Church saw Christ’s being lifted up as a sign of victory, victory over sin and the forces of darkness, victory in so bearing our sins and iniquities that through faith in him we are re-united with the Father, for as Dr. Baillie said, the early Church saw clearly that God was working in and through the entire event: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,” wrote Paul. As Isaiah said, “Upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.”

Not only was Jesus lifted up on the cross, but the message of the cross has done more to lift up humanity than any other message in the history of the world. It has told every person who has heard it and appropriated it into their lives that they count, they are of inestimable worth. Paul wrote, “Call no person worthless for whom Christ died.” That is one of the most revolutionary sentences every written. It is true the Church and broader society has not always heard or practice that message – Gandhi, who loved the gospels, said he would have become a Christian if it weren’t for the Christians -- but when the true import of the message sunk in it has done more to break the chains of slavery and oppression than any other message the world has known.

William Wilberforce was an evangelical Christian who believed that slavery as then practiced in the British empire was an evil and a disgrace to mankind. He labored tirelessly until, almost single-handedly, he had it abolished by Parliament throughout the colonies. When he was buried in Westminster Abbey in London one peer said, “The wonder is that a short period in the short life of one man is, well and wisely directed, sufficient to remedy the miseries of millions for ages.” That, of course, was decades before Lincoln did the same in America. But it was 19 centuries after the New Testament made crystal clear, as the Book of Acts says, that “God shows no partiality.” And the reason is the cross.

Some of you will remember that a few weeks ago Dr. Oscar McCloud, the current moderator, paid us a surprise visit. I looked up and there he was. Yesterday he told the presbytery about his visit here, the warm welcome he received from everyone, and the fact, as he said, that there is no racial group in the majority in the congregation and he counted at least 10 different nationalities represented, adding he knows there are many more. Well, what is the reason for this?

It is basically that generations ago Christian missionaries went throughout the world proclaiming in word and deed the message of the cross of Christ, that Christ died for our sins, that in Christ we are all equal before Almighty God, that there is no love anywhere like that of God known concretely in the cross. That is the world transforming message. We here in Forest Hills are simply the fortunate beneficiaries of this great Christian movement, and it is up to us to keep it on as well, to enter into the labors others have given before us.

No message has done more to lift people out of the cycle of vengeance and bitterness into the bright light of forgiveness than the cross. Archeologists have discovered ancient first century crosses in the catacombs of Rome and on them are the words “eis aphesis hamartion”, for the forgiveness of sins. This is preeminently what the message of the cross stood for and it has done more to lift people out of the cycles of bitterness and anger and antipathy than anything else.

In 1963 Vivian Malone Jones became the first African-American to be enrolled at the University of Alabama. She needed a cordon of federal agents and the deputy attorney general of the United States, who faced off against the governor of Alabama. George Wallace had stood in the doorway proclaiming “segregation now and segregation forever.” But she enrolled and she finished four years later. Her strongest memory was that when she smiled at white students they never smiled back. But in 1996 Governor Wallace presented her with an award for courage named after his wife and he told her he had made a mistake 33 years earlier and they talked about forgiveness.

We may not be called upon to do the dramatic things Vivian Malone Jones did, but we are definitely all called to make sure that we do our part to “lift up” the world around us. This salvation is not our own doing, St. Paul made that very clear in our reading from Ephesians, it is entirely the gift of God, but we must show forth the effects of that gift in how we live our lives, in love and charity with our neighbors, and walking before God in all humility, doing the good works for which we are created in Christ Jesus, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.