Moses
fashioned a bronze serpent which he put on a standard, and if anyone
was bitten by a serpent, he looked at the bronze serpent and lived.
Num 21
God
raised Him high and gave Him the name which is above all names. Phil
2
…
the Son of Man must be lifted
up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness... Jn 3
In our lessons this
evening, there is a lot of coming down and going up – how does that
have any bearing on our celebration of the Triumph of the Holy Cross?
During the Exodus, as
the divine appointed leader of the Israelites, Moses bore the brunt
of all their complaints against God. Whenever I read the Exodus
story I always feel sorry for Moses. He didn't ask to lead the
people into the desert, He was just obedient to God. Yet it seems he
has to hear all their complaining.
Moses isn't the only
leader to experience this. It is probably a universal experience of
leaders, that the people they lead complain from time to time.
This time it was
because they were bored with their food. All they were getting was
this boring bread from heaven; every day! They are so busy about
complaining, it seems, that they do not notice the serpents.
Not only is this part
of the account of the Exodus, but it is a lesson for us all. The
story of the Exodus is full of lessons in this way. I suspect we all
complain from time to time. I suspect we all feel bored from time to
time. And in the church, like the Israelites, we forget the wonder
and the gift of our deliverance from slavery. And those of us who
have made an Exodus from the Church of England into full communion
with the See of Peter, the Catholic Church, I expect we all have been
tempted to complain along the lines of the Israelites. Why did we
leave our lovely, comfortable churches, where we could do our own
thing, when we liked? Now we have to worship in unfamiliar places
and we have to do as we are told! As we are tempted with those sorts
of thoughts, we need to remember that the serpents are close to our
heels – or should we say the serpent!
The
people of Israel have fallen into sin, and need to be lifted up and
healed. And we do too. We fall into sin, and we need lifting up.
Moses made a bronze serpent, put it on a pole as the Lord commanded,
and when they looked on it they were healed of the serpent's venom.
We too need to be healed of the venom of our fall, by facing it with
faith in God. We cannot be healed without facing up to our sin and
naming it as such before God.
And
this movement of falling and being lifted up for our healing, is the
movement of the biggest story of all – the story of the human race.
In the origins of the human race we fell from grace and innocence.
And we all inherit from our ancestors this propensity towards sin,
which means death. And we need lifting up from this original sin and
all our sins. And the story of our salvation, is another movement of
descending and ascending, as St Paul puts so beautifully in his
Philippian hymn. God descends and becomes Man, that we might ascend
from our fallen state, and enjoy everlasting life in bliss.
That
sounds good until we realise the price of the descending. For the
healing to happen Christ must enter obediently into the heart of our
problem. The only perfect, good man must submit Himself to become the
victim of injustice, hatred, untruth, disobedience and evil – the
whole gamut of our fallen nature – that He might enter even into
death itself. By facing death in obedience, in truth, in
righteousness, in total goodness and in perfect love, He is able to
conquer death; to conquer evil; to conquer our falleness; to conquer
sin. And so we rejoice this day in the Triumph of the Cross of our
Saviour Jesus Christ. We glory in His victory, yes bought at such an
awful price, yet a wondrous and glorious and entirely complete
triumph over sin, death and evil. Our Enemy is defeated and we
rejoice! Amen. Alleluia!
IH
14th
September 2011 St Austell, St Augustine
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