Meditation for the Sunday Before the Exaltation of the Cross. John 3:13-17
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up”
Here Christ points to an event in the Old Testament that foreshadowed what would happen to the Lord Jesus in the New. When the Jewish people grumbled, ungrateful for God’s kindness and love, serpents appeared in the wilderness and killed many with their bites and venom. But when God took pity on his people, he told Moses to lift up (on a pole) a bronze serpent in the form of those serpents, and everyone who looked at it was healed of the venomous bites.
This foreshadowed the crucifixion of Christ. Christ was lifted up bearing our form and our very flesh, but without the venom of sin. And everyone who had been bitten by the venom of this flesh looked to the one who became incarnate and was crucified for us, and was healed.
In fact, most of us confuse sin with its causes. We often put the blame for sin on the body. For example, we justify theft by the body’s hunger, or neglect by tiredness… and all our sins we put down to the pressure of the body’s needs and pleasures… We misunderstand Paul’s words, “the flesh is against the spirit”, as if the body carried the drives of sin in itself.
Jesus bore our flesh, but he did not sin. He bore our very passions, the blameless ones such as hunger, thirst, pain and tiredness… but he did not allow the blameworthy passions to make the body carry the venom of sin.
Lifting up the bronze serpent foreshadowed the lifting up of Christ the man. That serpent looked like the venomous serpents, and the Lord looked like human beings; there, the serpent carried no venom, and here, the Crucified carried no sin; there, everyone bitten by the serpents’ venom looked at it and was healed; and here, what happens?
Jesus’ being lifted up on the wood foreshadows our own lifting up, we his disciples. When a disciple of Jesus looks at his crucified Master, he is baptized with him in the likeness of his death and resurrection. When a brave soldier sees his commander wounded in battle, he throws himself into the fight all the more fiercely.
Jesus’ being lifted up on the wood for us wounds our pride, and his wound makes our love bleed. To change from ordinary people into apostles of divine love and preachers of self-giving and generosity, starting with ourselves, is in fact to be healed of the venom of selfishness.
Jesus’ call does not come to us as an obligation or duty; it comes to us from his example. Jesus’ being lifted up lifts us up: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” was his prophecy. Let us ask everyone who has loved and practised virtue: was it love of the world that made them do it, or love of the Crucified?
Let us ask monks and hermits and those living in the world why they commit themselves to fasting, prayer, service, self-giving and sacrifice. All this out of love for whom? It is the cross of Christ that wounded our love and lifted us up as he was lifted up on it.
Lifting ourselves up freely, this choice to be like the Crucified, martyrs of love and martyrs of everything lofty in the face of the venom of earthly serpents, is the sweetest thing in life. The presence of evil in the world, pain, disease and moral evils, turns earthly things into the ground of a serpent that crawls on its belly, and makes the wood of the cross a place, a heaven, for the disciples of divine love, who know how to open their arms wide and embrace every form of pain in the world and refuse to accept the face of evil. A true Christian cannot rest while his Master is wounded.
The reality of love present at the heart of the reality of pain accepts no policy but the witness of the cross. That is why in today’s Epistle Paul says: “Far be it from me to glory” in any advantage, glory, money or anything from this world below, “except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”
Lifting up the serpent foreshadowed lifting up Christ; and the crucifixion (the lifting up) of Christ foreshadows our lifting up and the crucifixion of all who love him. Our life comes only from opening our arms in witness to divine love and in martyrdom for human pain. Love knows no standstill; love is a dynamism that never stops. Love is life. And love is in love with the cross.
“For as Jesus was lifted up at Golgotha outside the city, so must every son of man be lifted up, that the world may not perish but have eternal life.” Amen.
Fr. Gerard Abi Saab
