John 3:16 is quite possibly the most famous verse in
the New Testament, maybe even in the entire Bible. You can find it inscribed on
signs in sports stadiums, Sunday school children frequently commit it to
memory, and—for some bizarre reason—it’s associated with the wrestler Stone
Cold Steve Austin. For most readers of the New Testament, however, the
preceding verses (John 3:14-15) are much less familiar. What is this obscure
reference to Moses lifting up a snake in the wilderness? You might want to dust
off your Pentateuch and take a look at Numbers 21:4-9 for background.
In this peculiar narrative, God sends poisonous snakes
on his people because they have not trusted him and have failed to listen to
his servant Moses. When the snake-bitten Israelites start dying left and right,
they repent and Moses intercedes on their behalf. God then tells Moses to fashion
a snake and put it up on a pole, and as verses 8-9 describe it, “Moses made a
serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone,
that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” What a
strange story! Stranger still is the fact that according 2 Kings 18:4, the
Israelites later worshipped this bronze serpent as an idol. Why would John compare
Jesus to a serpent, especially a serpent that we might consider a graven image?
The answer probably lies in the use of the
verb “lifted up,” which John uniquely adds to the story. (Numbers 21:9 just says
Moses “put it on a pole.”) In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ crucifixion—one of the most
shameful forms of death in the ancient world—becomes a sort of exaltation. Just
as John here describes the crucifixion as the Son of Man’s being “lifted up,” he
elsewhere states that it is through this shameful death that the Son of Man is “glorified”
(John 12:23). Many modern-day Christians, for whom the crucifixion has lost its
offence, miss the irony here, but as Craig Koester, an expert on John’s Gospel,
points out, “If glory defines what the crucifixion is, the crucifixion defines
what glory is. The crucifixion manifests the scope of divine power by
disclosing the depth of divine love.”
Surprisingly, this odd story about a
bronze serpent gets to the heart of John’s Gospel: in Jesus’ death is his
exaltation, not because it brings him earthly glory but because his laying down
his life for others is the perfect expression divine love. |
