Trinity Sunday as Healing Sunday (or Serpent Sunday)

Trinity Sunday, 2024

John 3:1-15

Today is Trinity Sunday, that interesting Sunday when we so often focus on finding ways to describe the interrelationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; between Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer; between Lover, Beloved, and Love. Rather than pursue such theological gymnastics, my heart was led this year to explore how we experience the living and healing presence of the Creator, the Living Force that permeates all our life and binds us together. So, this is a different sort of Trinity Sunday sermon

Sometimes with a story, it is important to know what was said just before what was said was said. We become so familiar with the stretch of the river we live on, it helps to actually go upstream a bit to see where the water came from before it flowed to where we are standing. In that way we might experience a deeper healing from the Triune God who holds all life.

That is how I feel with today’s Gospel reading from John 3. If you asked someone what they know of this chapter, chances are they would focus on John 3:16. Everyone knows John 3:16. It is standard Bible School curriculum for memorization. But can we really understand John 3:16 without exploring the earlier fifteen verses? 

John 3 opens with the powerful story of Nicodemus coming to meet Jesus at night. Immediately, the setting tells us something very important. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a leader of the Jews. He is a member of the establishment, if you will, someone who lives within the religious institution. And he comes to find Jesus at night, when it is harder for anyone to see him doing so. He is sneaking toward the holy.

He acknowledges Jesus’ teachings, and then Jesus invites him into a dynamic spiritual teaching of transformation. Notice that Nicodemus begins with questions of authority and Jesus immediately issues him into a metaphorical space around meaning and transformation, of being born again. Jesus never allows the conversation to stay merely on the level of the approved religious institution. When Nicodemus responds with questions that show his literal way of thinking, Jesus takes it a step further by telling him:

What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is Spirit. 

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

Each time Nicodemus asks a question that is grounded in a literal, institutional way of thinking, Jesus invites him deeper and deeper into the very mystery of God’s own dynamic being. 

Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. 

Jesus isn’t speaking theoretically; he is telling what he knows, who he is. Their encounter truly is an initiation for Nicodemus. And there, right on the cusp of our well-known verse sixteen, Jesus makes a reference that is easy to overlook in our pursuit to get to the verse we feel we know so well: 

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.

Maybe if we spent more time on John 3:15 we might actually understand John 3:16, but verse fifteen invites us into deep and vulnerable waters of reflection and transformation–and we often don’t go into those waters preemptively. 

You may remember that this verse references the fascinating story of Moses and the Israelites in Numbers 21. In that account, the people became impatient, and the text says that God allowed poisonous snakes to come into the camp to bite them. The people repent of their complaining and lack of gratitude, and God tells Moses to create a bronze serpent and put it on a pole. When anyone is bitten, they are to look at that bronze serpent and they will live.

This is the original story that verse fifteen is based on, and Jesus uses this story to teach Nicodemus, saying 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. What in the world does this mean?

First, we should know that serpents are powerful symbols and are found across cultures and religions in artwork and stories. They are usually symbols that help us make meaning of the underworld, of that mysterious place where life changes and rebirth or transformation takes place. Ancient statues of the Minoan snake goddess from Crete show women lifting serpents high above their heads. The single snake on a pole was carried forward with the Greek god Asclepius, the god of healing, as his symbol. We need only look to the rear window of ambulances to see it still. We see intertwined snakes in the symbol of the god Hermes or Mercury. Dionysus was often depicted with snakes, as was the Celtic deity of the wild, Cernunnos. This is how archetypal symbols work: they travel through time, arising in stories and encounters to emphasize a key aspect of life–in the case of snakes, transformation and healing.

I have always been a bit wary of snakes, since my cousin David threw a garter snake at me once. He had tried to kill it, but then he picked up the snake, threw it, and it wrapped around my neck. My grandmother helped catch me as I took off across the yard, and she was none too pleased with my cousin as she helped unwind the snake from around my neck. An experience like that will make a person wary of snakes, I would say. 

But more than just not liking them, I have always felt that snakes were powerful creatures. There is something mysterious about them. Reading the story about Moses and the Israelite people hooks us, and perhaps we can feel an association or meaning on a deeper level.

Here’s something to notice about the story with the bronze serpent: God tells Moses to make a statue of the very thing that is causing harm to the people, and when they seek healing, they must look upon the very image of the thing that has harmed them, as it were. In this case, the snakes were the consequence of their lack of gratitude, remember.

There is no easy out from suffering here, and healing for the Israelite people entails, in a powerful way, facing the hardships of their lives in order that they can be transformed through that encounter. 

Now, if Jesus tells Nicodemus that this event, this pattern, this moment, somehow prefigures the Son of Man being lifted up, Jesus’s words challenge us to consider how we view our own healing and transformation–how we understand Jesus’s own life, death, and resurrection and our participation in it. 

Too often, in our culture, we hear from some Christian schools that belief in Jesus or trust in Jesus will somehow mean that Jesus will take away all our problems, all our hardships. Such a so-called prosperity gospel can lead us to think that there is a sort of quid pro quo involved in our faith. Practicing our faith comes to mean that we expect a blessing when we worship God, and the blessing that we expect becomes narrowed to a struggle-free life. When we inevitably face hardships, we feel we need to pray harder so we can convince God to remove all the struggle we face, or we lose faith all together because we no longer believe in a god that would take away all our problems–which is actually a god that we constructed and which failed to meet our expectations.

We encounter something deeper and more dynamic in Jesus’s own words to Nicodemus here, holding this experience of the Israelite people looking upon the bronze serpent as a prefigurement of the Son of Man being lifted up. The Israelite people didn’t just have their struggles removed from them. There wasn’t some kind of escape there. 

No, they had to face what they were struggling in order to nurture a transformation in their lives, in order to experience healing. Healing came not from escaping it but from going through it. 

I don’t know about you, but when I face something pretty severe, a pain that is emotional, spiritual, or physical, my impulse is so often to pray that God will somehow remove the pain. How could we not ask this? Jesus wants us to be whole, to be healed. 

My struggle with my impulse is that, if I am honest, I pray that God will remove my pain because I want to get back to living my life the way I want to live my life. I want to get back to my agenda, to my schedule, to my plans. The pain has gotten in the way of the way I see my life.

But God wants us to be healed and transformed, and challenging stories like this with Moses and Jesus and Nicodemus, with this image of having to look upon the bronze serpent to be healed challenge my own desires around healing. There is a much deeper dynamic at work here, isn’t there?

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. 

We could read it this way: just as Moses lifted up the truth of their lives before them so they could look upon it and face themselves and find healing, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that we may look upon him and face ourselves and the truth of our existence. And when we face this truth, we find that God is already present within it, and we can place our trust in this Presence and experience wholeness, the deep meaning of eternal life. That, my friend, is a wisdom that connects with the deep teachings of our faith. 

Having said this, now my dream is that kids in Bible School might spend as much time memorizing John 3:15 as they do John 3:16. Imagine how the world might be different if we nurtured this deep teaching of how healing comes through facing difficult truths. And having said all this, how do you now hear these words differently: 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.