Look Up to the Cross

Intro

We are in the season of lent. It is a season of preparation for the good news and the great season of Easter, where we celebrate Jesus conquering death. But it’s during lent that we follow Jesus to the cross, because that’s where he goes before his resurrection and where he goes we follow.

So we have been exploring what it means to follow Jesus to the cross during lent. And this morning that subject feels even more appropriate than usual because of the events that took place here in our neighborhood on Monday.

The unspeakeable tragedy of the death of 2 children in the middle of the afternoon. At an intersection many of us cross, many of us cross with our kids time and time again. I know many of you are mourning and grieving this and trying to make sense of it. And you can’t. None of us can. It is a tragedy that has devastated the families of these two kids, their immediate church family, Trinity Grace, and this neighborhood.

So I want to ask as I know many of you have to continue to pray for them, grieve with them, take up your cross and follow them in the grief, pain and sorrow.

But what they are doing and what we do now is come with our sorrow and confusion, our anger and grief, and we lament, we pray, we hope, and we listen. Because we have a God who speaks, we have a God who hears, in Jesus we have a God who suffers, we have a God who loves, and we have a hope that death does not have the final word.

This is the journey we take every week, and we take this journey with Christians in Park Slope and around the world to the cross of Jesus. And the passages this week encourage us to cast our gaze upon the cross, and we are going to explore what it is we are to see when we look at the cross. But first let’s read the gospel lesson.

Read

Two weeks ago the NY Times published and article that implored New Yorkers to look up because time was running out. It was an article about a photographer, Ben Pizzikoff, who has documented the fading advertisements painted on the side of some of the older buildings in New York City. They are called “ghost signs”.

“As the great city of New York moves, changes, and evolves every day, the few remnants of its past go unnoticed. New York City’s “ghost signs” —advertisements painted across the facades of buildings that date back to the 19th century—are often invisible to the busy New Yorker, but are defiantly conspicuous if only we turn our eyes and look upwards.”

I’m fascinated by this kind of stuff anything that captures the history of NYC. And since that article I’ve been looking and searching for these faded signs myself, looking up. Paying more attention. Almost like tourist, looking for ghost signs.

Something similar is happening in these passages we have read. All of them in their own way call us to look up and set our gaze upon the cross. To let it guide and direct us. This is the one of the primary themes of lent. It is a call to look up and let the cross of Jesus become defiantly conspicuous, completely unavoidable in the center of our lives and in the center of the world.

Now it’s one thing to look up for faded signs as some sort of historical relic of day gone by. But the cross…It seems a bit an odd thing to want to focus on. It was the method of grizzly execution by the Roman Empire in the 1st century. It was the symbol of death. But now for Christians it has become the symbol of life and hope.

So my hope this morning, no matter where you might find yourself, sorrowing and grieving, bored, uninterested skeptical, joyful…we would find the cross defiantly conspicuous and unavoidable and that it would change us and transform.

And I want to suggest to you 2 ways that happens from our reading this morning. The cross exposes the darkness of the world and it reveals the light of God’s love for the world.

The cross exposes the darkness of the world

In our gospel passage in of which verse 16 is no doubt familiar to the point of losing it’s impact which we’ll get to, Jesus makes this curious allusion to the incident in .

Israel has been wandering in the desert after having been delivered from Egypt. The Hebrews grew impatient, got upset and tired and frustrated with all the wandering. They cry out to God why have you brought us out to the wilderness, just to die. We don’t want your manna anymore.

And God responds by sending serpents to bite some of the Isrealites which then leads them to repentance. So they go to Moses and ask Moses to ask God to deliver them from these fiery serpents.

Now here is the curious thing about this passage. Moses is commanded to make an image of the serpent. To lift up this statue so that when they look at the image of the serpent they will be rescued. Isn’t that strange? What was the very thing that brought death is now the remedy that will save them.

But part of the remedy for the Israelites was that as they looked at this serpent they would remember their grumbling, the darkness in their own hearts and lives they would remember how often they wanted to go their own way, have another god or be their own God. Because for them before the serpent became a symbol of healing and hope it was a sign of darkness and death. And that is part of what they saw as they set their gaze upon this fiery serpent on a stick.

It is the serpent who, in the 3rd chapter of Genesis, tempts Adam and Eve to disobey God. But this wasn’t just a single solitary act that could be isolated in the garden. says their eyes were opened, and they knew they were naked” (). Instead of living with the light of God’s presence in the garden Adam and Eve are sent out of the garden, and into the darkness. It is the darkness of sin and separation from the one for whom they were meant to have life.

And so throughout the story of the world, throughout the Scriptures the serpent becomes this symbol of human rebellion against and rejection of God. It is the symbol of darkness and death.

And so God sends the serpents – not so much as a tisk, tisk to the Hebrews in the desert but as a way of showing the deadly consequences of rejecting Life with him. The deadly consequences of following the darkness rather than the light. The Hebrews are exposed for their desire to chase after the darkness rather than live in the light.

And this is exactly what the cross does as well. It exposes the reality and the results of the darkness of the world and the sin of our hearts. When Jesus says in v. 15 he says as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. He is referring to himself being lifted on the cross. And for the cross to reveal life and love that it absolutely does, it first exposes the darkness.

Just like for the Isrealites and the serpent on the stick the cross exposes what is going on deep within our hearts. The cross exposes the mess that we are in. That we left to ourselves would rather go our own way. We would rather be lord of our own life and kingdom.

But even more, the cross reminds us that there is no way out of the darkness on our own. We can’t reason our way out, technology won’t deliver us, the right political agenda won’t deliver us, more time, more power…it won’t deliver us.

Israel couldn’t rescue themselves they were utterly dependant upon God. And that is Jesus’ point in this conversation with Nicodemus, who is the ruler of the Pharisees. This passage in John comes out of that conversation where Jesus tells him, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus responds how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter his mother’s womb and be born? And then Jesus begins to unpack for him, that it is God by the spirit that gives life and can do this. He is exposing Nicodemus’s inability to save himself it must come from God.

That what Jesus is getting at when he gets to these verses. You must be made anew and only I can do it. And I will do it, but in order for you to be made new and born again, I have to go to the cross.

Jesus is telling Nicodemus, there is nothing you can do. I have to do it for you. And this is truth we find as we look at the cross. We are held and captivated by powers we don’t understand and oftentimes they are powers we have helped to create. Our very best efforts to free ourselves, find life and hope, they run aground, because the darkness we face is far more powerful than we can even fathom.

This is what Paul is getting at in . And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air the spirit that is now at work in sons of disobedience…We were dead cut off from the God of life, slaves to power of darkness and destruction. Paul is letting the reality of the cross expose the darkness in our world. And Jesus, we love the darkness more than the light.

So as we lift our heads up and cast our gaze on the cross we first have to acknowledge the darkness. The reason the cross exists is because we need to be rescued and we cannot rescue ourselves. And we as the church are called to bear witness to this in every aspect of our lives.

It allows us to walk alongside grieving friends and neighbors for whom the reality of the darkness of the world has become all too familiar. It allows us to honest about who we are. That all too often love darkness rather than light as John says. And so when we hurt one another, when we seek our own desires over another, when the reality of our sin comes to bare we need not hide, but can acknowledge it and mourn it.

You see the cross in exposing the darkness allows us to face the darkness. And we do this without despair, without cynicism, and we hold out hope because the cross also reveals the only remedy for the darkness that we face. Because the cross reveals the light of the love of God.

The cross reveals the light of God’s love for the world

And this is exactly what Jesus is telling Nicodemus and us in this passage. V. 14-16 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

So as Moses lifts up the bronze serpent on a pole in the wilderness, so Jesus will be “lifted up”. And just like the Israelites looked to the serpent and lived, so people will look in faith to the crucified Jesus – and live!

And now that which was which was poisoning the people is displayed as a beaten foe for Israel it was the serpent, now in John’s gospel evil (darkness) itself is judged, condemned and defeated on the cross. And that this is why our gaze upon these terrible gallows, this 1st century torture device which sits at the crossroads of history is a gaze that brings life. The very symbol of death now becomes the symbol of life. Because there on the cross is the very son of God for the sake of the world.

The reason the cross reveals the love of God is because here is God the Father giving the world that which he loves and treasures the most… his own Son. The Father gave this gift to the world as a sacrifice so that he would rescue the world from the darkness that is so present and powerful in our lives.

And Jesus wants us to see him lifted up so that we would see the light of God’s love…and believe. This is John’s emphasis in this gospel, here in 3 places: So that everyone who believes … everyone who believes … anyone who believes …This is the faith we are called to. A faith that grasps, and so is healed by, the God-given, love-given solution to the urgent problem of darkness, sin and death.

So this week I want you to look up. Not for ghost signs of NYC, although you can they are pretty cool when you see them. But I want you to look up and see the cross. And this is not natural for us. We look inward for answers, we look to each other for answers or blame, when faced with darkness so often we don’t want to look up.

But when we look up and fix our eyes on the cross we see the first rays of a new dawn breaking out amid the darkness. This is the hope of the reusurrection and it is a gift of grace.

It is a gift from a God of steadfast love who hears our cries and delivers us from our troubles and distress. It is a gift from a God who is rich in mercy as Paul says and makes us alive together in Christ and raises us with Christ. And it is a gift because God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but, though him, to save it. So lift up your heads and look to the cross, and just – as the Israelites saw in the serpent – not only our darkness, but God’s promise of light and Life. Look up and live!