The Gospel passage for today alludes to an account in The Book of Numbers (21:4-9) where God punishes the Israelites for their sins by sending seraph serpents among them to bite them. After they repent, God instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent and to lift it up among the people. As long as they gaze upon the serpent, they are healed from the snake bites. They can escape the consequence of their sin by accepting the healing grace of God, given to them in the form of the bronze image.
God is love and he created us out of love to share his love with us. In order for us to be able to experience his love in a meaningful way, God has given us free-will, so we can freely choose his love, which is our only source of true fulfillment. Sin is the abuse of our free-will. Sin is idolatry, putting something in the place of God. Sin is self-destructive, because it cuts us off from the love of God.
But God's love for us is so great that he takes upon himself the consequence of our sin, of the abuse of our free-will. Today's Gospel passage includes John 3:15, the most famous verse from the Bible in American culture: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life." Given the Trinitarian unity of God's divinity, the passage describes God's self-sacrifice for us through the Incarnation and the Crucifixion.
In the case of the Israelites, all they had to do was gaze upon the bronze serpent and they would be healed. Today, all we have to do is accept the sacrifice of Christ in love and return his love with our complete self-gift of love.
But the question is whether or not we really want to be free from our sin. Sin has an addictive character. It is also just easier to stay with what we know than to accept change. But the question we need to ask ourselves is the question Dr. Phil has been asking: How's that working for you?
Are we really happy? Are we really fulfilled by our sinful behavior? Do we really want to be stuck in that self-destructive rut? Yes, change can be hard. But we need to accept the discomfort of change in order to get to a new state of being.
Let us embrace the healing change that Christ offers us. Let us embrace the freedom from our own self-destructive prison that he wants to give us. Let us gaze upon Christ hanging on the the Cross for us. Let us look upon him with love, acceptance, and self-giving - and thereby find true joy.
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The readings for the Fourth Suday of Lent, Cycle B, are:
2 Chr 36:14-16, 19-23
Psalm 137:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6
Eph 2:4-10
Jn 3:14-21
The full text can be found at the USCCB website.
Photo Credit: Representation of the Bronze Serpent of Moses on Mount Nebo in Jordan by Zoltan Abraham (c) 2016.