4th Sunday of Lent 2021
2 Chronicles 36: 14-16, 19-23; Psalm 136 (137); Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21
Believe it or not, in the late spring/early summer of this year, it will be forty three years since Boney M topped the popular music charts with their version of today’s psalm, “By the rivers of Babylon”. So if you remember that, I am afraid that you can no longer claim to be in the first flush of youth.
This psalm is Israel’s lament during the Babylonian exile, which is described in the passage from the Second Book of Chronicles. Jerusalem was destroyed, the country was laid waste, and in a series of expulsions, the population was taken to exile by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, an exile which lasted for seventy years. Finally, in 538BC, Babylon was itself conquered by the Persians, and Cyrus the Persian king allowed the people of Israel/Judah to return home and to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple.
For the Jewish people, this was an overwhelmingly powerful illustration of God’s love for them, a new Exodus, almost equal in scope to the original Exodus from Egypt. Later, Christians would see it as a foretaste and promise of the even greater liberation of the human race from sin and death by the grace of God who “loved the world so much that He gave His only Son”.
These are words which we need to ponder: “God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son”. Take those words away with you, and let them soak into you. Then add to them the words which come later in today’s Gospel “For God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but so that, through Him, the world might be saved”.
How often do you or I reflect on those words, or on those which we have heard from the Letter to the Ephesians: “God loved us with so much love”? Throughout history, Gold has repeatedly shown His love, forming a people, rescuing them from slavery, settling them in the Land of Promise, bringing them home from exile, and finally sending His Son to redeem the whole world.
Notice that in particular: “God so loved THE WORLD”—not certain people or groups of people, but “THE WORLD”. Certainly, He has chosen and formed a people to be His Body on earth, but His love encompasses all people, who are linked to His Body in various ways, as the Second Vatican Council reminded us. Hence, Pope Francis in Iraq, like his predecessors Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI at Assisi, prayed with Jews, Muslims, and even non-Abrahamic people, inhabitants of a world which God “loved (and loves) so much”.
So, I ask again, do we take those words seriously, do we use them as a guiding star in our lives, or do we forget that Christ came “not to condemn the world”? Do we sometimes view life as an obstacle race, bobbing and weaving to avoid enough sins to save ourselves from condemnation, forgetting that we have been saved by Christ?
Another question strikes me. Jesus the Son of God redeemed the world by being lifted up on the Cross, and He tells us today that He “must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert”. This, as you may be aware, is a reference to an incident during the Exodus, when the people, not for the only time, grumbled against Moses and against God. We are told that, as a punishment, God sent fiery serpents among the people, and their bite was fatal, but He also gave a remedy. Moses was to make a bronze serpent and hold it up on a pole: whoever looked at the bronze serpent would live.
My question therefore is this: have you been bitten by a serpent recently? There are many serpents about: the serpent of rage, the serpent of malice, the serpent of bitter words, the serpent of greed, the serpent of self-centredness, and that serpent which is said to be the most deadly of all, the serpent of discouragement.
Have any of those serpents bitten you? And, more importantly, have you looked for healing to Him whom Moses’ bronze serpent foreshadowed, Jesus lifted up on the Cross? Remember: He was sent to us because God loved the world so much.
