Stop, Look Up and Live

Impatience. Impatience quickly devolves into anxiety, which in turn devolves into anger and a kind of lashing out at everything and everyone around us. Think of traffic slow-downs when you need to be somewhere at a particular time. Or, some of us may recall when it took several minutes for a computer to boot-up. As processors became faster, the boot-up times became shorter, until now if starting up takes a little longer than usual due to updates being loaded, or a processor trying to make sense of an improper shut down, we become impatient, restless, anxious. And who knows what we will say or do as we allow our impatience to get the best of us.

Impatience seems to be related to a kind of amnesia – we forget how things used to be. It used to take longer to get from point A to point B; it used to take longer to get a computer up and running. Or, like the people of God in the wilderness [Numbers 21:4-9] who forget what it was like to be slaves in Egypt, who forget that God is providing daily bread, become impatient and complain. God seemingly becomes impatient with their impatience and sends poisonous or firey snakes to nip them on the heel, killing some. Talk about impatience! Yet, as with the flood incident, God repents and directs Moses to erect a pole and place a bronze serpent on the pole so that when the people are snake-bitten they can look up to the bronze serpent and live. That is, God provides a solution to the problems that had resulted from so much impatience.

This strikes us as odd, primitive and even somewhat perverse. Yet, the prescribed action – stop, look up and live – is meant as a sort of intervention for our impatience. The intervention helps us to become patient – able or willing to bear some momentary or even extended discomfort, opposition, difficulty or adversity – to control oneself when provoked. Note, that this intervention depends upon our trusting the instructions to look up and live. Such trust is what the Bible means when it speaks of belief – belief in anything ultimately depends upon trust. And such trust comes from our experience that such trust is justified.

All this, impatience, intervention, trust, belief, is in play as Jesus meets with a respected leader of the community, Nicodemus, who visits Jesus at night to find out more about this person who has been baptized by John, turned water into wine, and created quite a stir outside the Temple claiming to be the New Temple, as the place where God’s name and God’s presence now dwells. Nick is knowledgeable in many things, and he knows that one who does these things must be of God [John 3]. Jesus replies in language and metaphors that demand Nick’s and our careful attention.

At the heart of it all, Jesus asserts that to fully grasp what is going on one needs to be born anothen – which can mean “again,” but in the overall context of chapter 3 more likely means “from above.” There are many words in English that have more than one meaning: a plant can be vegetation, or it can be a factory; meal might be a time to eat, or, can be grain that has been milled or ground. Nick begins to question how he might climb back into his mother’s womb to be born again, while Jesus is speaking of being born from above, born of God’s Spirit, which comes from we know not where and carries us we know not where. Jesus seems to offer an invitation to re-boot or re-start one’s life to be lived in and by the Spirit Wind or Breath of God. It is an invitation to always begin again; to abandon the settled arrangements and understanding of things and venture into a whole new way of doing things.

Understandably, Nick blurts out, “How can these things be?” still not catching on to the aboveness of anothen. Here Jesus demonstrates utmost patience in the face of Nick’s impatience and says, “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just 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.” At this point John the Storyteller leaves Nick behind. And Jesus uses another word that has two meanings: hypso-o – which can mean ‘lifted up’, but also means ‘exalted.’ Here it literally means both things – like the serpent in the wilderness, Jesus will be lifted up on the Cross, which will be the moment of his becoming exalted. He who has come down from above will be lifted up and can be, like the serpent, the One you can look up to, the One who can be trusted, and you can be healed of all your impatience and misunderstandings.  

Then, no longer speaking to Nicodemus but to all of us, the whole world, the entire kosmos, comes the line that has been made famous in so many stadium end-zones and behind home-plate, the one and only “John 3:16”: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” This tells us several important things about God: God loves and God gives. Created in the image of God, then, we are meant to be those creatures who Love and Give. What God gives is God’s whole self – nothing less. Further, the object of God’s love and generosity is not just me or you, it is “the world.” We are to Love the World and Give so that we and the world might have “eternal life.” Eternal Life.  Which is not only life after death. It is meant to be life lived in the presence of the  God of Love and Giving here and now. Or, as Gail R. O’Day puts it so well in her commentary [John, Westminster Bible Companion:2006, p. 45]:  “ ‘Eternal Life’ does not speak of immortality or a future life in heaven, but is a metaphor for living now in the unending presence of God. ‘Eternal Life’ is John’s way of talking about the ‘Kingdom of God’: life lived according to God’s categories. Jesus’ offer of his own life through being lifted up on the cross makes eternal life possible for those who believe [trust]. This is the new life Jesus promised Nicodemus…because it is only when the crucifixion is fully in view that one can begin to understand what Jesus means by new life [from above].”

Like those in the wilderness some 2,300 years ago, we are an impatient lot. The paradox of technological advances only makes us more impatient with the world about us until we are tempted, encouraged really, to retreat from the world about us and all that makes us impatient into some form of electronic screens – which in the end only serve to make us more impatient, more anxious and often more angry.

To what or to whom do we look up? That’s really what is at stake in this story John tells in chapter 3. The Buddha, some 600 years or so before all this, had a teaching called Finger Pointing Toward the Moon. The Buddha knew that his followers might spend all their time looking at the finger rather than to that to which it points. Jesus, like the Buddha before him, knows that we often get so caught up in the teachings and traditions that we lose sight of what and where all of this means to point us. All that is asked in this teaching is that the world embrace the Love and Generosity God offers in the gift of his Son. O’Day concludes, “If one enters into that Love, one enters into Eternal Life. [ibid, 46]” Life lived here and now in the presence of God. As always, we are free to choose to look elsewhere. We can spend all of life just staring at the ‘finger’ and never see past our impatience. Or, we can stop, look up, and live.