Holy Cross | Numbers 21:4b-9; John 3:13-17 | Christopher Miner
I did not know that today (September 14) was a special day in the liturgical calendar until I started writing this. Unless you are someone in a tradition that observes the liturgical calendar closely, you probably did not know it was special either. Today is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, or just Holy Cross Day if you prefer. Unlike Good Friday or Passion Week, which focuses on the whole process and meaning of Jesus' crucifixion, Holy Cross Day is meant to focus singularly on the cross itself - an ancient method of state torture, execution, and humiliation that Jesus transformed into the means of our rescue from death and destruction.
The passage in John, aside from containing the most memorized verse in the whole Bible, references the Son of Man (ie Jesus) being lifted like Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, a reference to the story in Numbers. Jesus original hearer (Nicodemus in John 3) would have immediately called up the reference in their mind. We often fail to grasp just how accessible the Hebrew scriptures were to Jesus' audience. These people were saturated by the stories and interpretations of Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy) from an early age. They easily linked pieces together and saw the connections between their current lives and the lives of those who God had spoken to in the past, all the way back to Eden, the beginning. Understandably, we are not trained to do that. But we can, with some help, begin to uncover these links, which allows us to more fully understand what Jesus was saying originally, and how that may apply now. (There are lots of good resources out there for this - I recommend The Bible Project as a starting point. It is free and has been really powerful for me.)
In John 3, Jesus spells out the link he is making by directly referencing it. In Numbers, Moses is leading the Israelites through the wilderness and they start whining. "I'm hot! I'm thirsty! This food is gross! Waaahhhh!" (This is my interpretation of Numbers 21:5, by the way - I just imagine toddlers in the backseat of a car on a road trip.) God was so impressed by this that he sends poisonous snakes among them to kill a few off. (How come I never thought of that with my kids?!?) The Israelites get the point and ask Moses to help. He asks God, and instead of telling him what lecture to give the Israelites on being grateful ("Don't you know there are starving kids in Mesopotamia who would love to eat manna?!?) he tells Moses to put a snake statue on a stick and hold it up. Then if anyone is bitten, they can look at the snake and live. (To this day, if you look at symbols on the side of ambulances, they often have a snake wrapped around a stick in reference to this.) It is an admittedly weird image but the story was well known among the Jewish people - another example of Israel's sin and God's work to save them.
Jesus, then, puts himself in the position of the snake statue. Just like the snake was raised up on a stick for people to look on and be healed, the Son of Man (code for Jesus) must be raised up on a stick for the rescue of the people. And not just any stick, but a Roman cross, about the worst possible stick a first century Jew could imagine. Crosses lined the roads into and out of most major Roman cities, very often with the dead and dying still on them. It was an execution style used not only to punish enemies with a slow, agonizing death, but to send a public, blunt, and brutal message to the rest the population. Rome kept the peace by force, and crosses were a reminder that they were the ones who controlled this force.
It is also important to remember that, during this time, many Jewish people in Roman Palestine were itching for a fight with Rome. This was their ancestral, sacred land. And while they had returned to it from exile, they had returned under the rule of another power - first the Persians, and now the Romans. Jews dreamed of a return to the days of David and Solomon, when their kingdom was independent, strong, and prosperous. And while the Jewish authorities made deals with Roman officials to keep the peace, an undercurrent of anger and dissent was growing. Jesus actually warned about giving in to violence against Rome when he said the temple would be destroyed. It all came to a head in 72 AD, when Rome put down a Jewish rebellion in Jerusalem and destroyed the temple once and for all.
In the midst of this, here is Jesus, saying that salvation for Israel was coming via the Son of Man being raised up on a stick like Moses' serpent statue. I doubt Nicodemus thought of a cross when Jesus said this - I suspect he made the connection when Jesus was later crucified. No one at the time saw the cross as a symbol of anything but Jesus utter ruin. Jewish authorities were glad to be rid of another rabble-rouser in their efforts to keep the peace; revolutionaries probably saw Jesus as just another failed false prophet, and went back to their plans for rebellion. But in the twist of all twists, Jesus used the torture device of the ruling empire to show what power really looked like. The cross did not defeat Jesus - by absorbing the shame and pain of the cross, he took on the shame and pain of us all. He took on the ultimate punishment Earthly powers could dole out - death - and said, essentially, "That's all you got? Watch this."
The reversal of the cross - from an instrument of death and pain to an instrument of salvation and life - matches the message and life of Jesus. Power is service, enemies deserve love, loss is gain, last is first... Jesus' Kingdom reverses many concepts we take for granted and calls us to live in a wholly new way, which happens to be the way God created us to live in the first place! The cross, then, may be the ultimate example of Jesus Kingdom come on earth - taking the means of death, and redeeming it into the means of life.
Comments