Lent 4 – 2021
John 3:14-21
Marian Free
In the name of God who gives us victory over death. Amen.
I am one of those people for whom vaccines of some sort have always been a part of my life. Apparently, I received a polio vaccine before I was six weeks old so that my mother could accompany my father to Nigeria and not face the trip alone with a newborn baby. I can still remember lining up at the City Hall to receive a free jab for something or other and the nurses who came to the school to inoculate us against something else – probably tetanus. In retrospect, my generation had a lot of needles. Still, unlike my children, I was not vaccinated against measles, chicken pox and rubella so I caught the first two though not the third. The parents of my generation had their own system of immunisation. If someone in the neighbourhood had measles, instead of being kept away we were encouraged to visit – the idea being that it was much better have these illnesses when we were young and to develop an immunity to them than to risk having them when we were adults when the disease might make us seriously unwell.
At last, the vaccine for COVID is being rolled out. President Biden has claimed that most Americans will have received their shots by Independence Day. In the UK my friends and family have all had at least one shot and even if the roll out is slower than anticipated, Australians are receiving their first does of the vaccine.
Vaccination is counter intuitive. In order to be protected against disease, we are injected with that very disease. It all began smallpox. Smallpox was incredibly infectious and out of every ten people infected with the disease three people died. Those who survived were often badly scarred. In 1796 Dr Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had had cowpox did not subsequently become ill when exposed to smallpox. He experimented by taking a sample from a cow pox sore and inoculating it into the arm of the son of his gardener – James Phipps. After some time, he exposed James (on several occasions) to the smallpox virus, but James did not get ill with the disease. Dr Jenner’s methods might appal us today and they certainly would not pass the medical ethics test, but his discovery has helped us to almost eradicate polio, smallpox, measles, mumps and chicken pox. Diseases that used to strike fear into the hearts of parents are, so long as we are vigilant, a thing of the past.
We have become much more sophisticated and more ethical than Dr Jenner. When it comes to COVID for example, we are not actually injected with the virus but, as I understand it, we are inoculated with components of the virus which enable our body to recognise it and to fight it[1]. When it comes to fighting disease then, very often like cures like, the virus in effect fights against itself.
Today’s readings are complex, and sadly we don’t have time to explore why God sends snakes, or why, instead of providing the cure, God didn’t simply stop the snakes. Whatever lay behind God’s actions, the idea of the image of a snake being the cure for a snake bite is almost contemporary. It resonates with the modern science of a virus being used to cure a virus. Just as the snakes did not disappear, but that looking at the snake stopped people dying, so, while the virus will not disappear, we, once vaccinated, should not die from it.
So much for the snakes in the desert – but what about Jesus? As part of his discussion with Nicodemus, Jesus compares himself to the bronze serpent lifted up by Moses. “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” he says. It is a difficult image to grasp. In what way do Jesus’ contemporaries resemble the Israelites in the desert, and how does Jesus’ being lifted up on the cross bear any similarity to a bronze serpent on a pole? Jesus and a serpent have nothing in common.
To understand Jesus’ imagery, we have to first of all understand that according to the author of John’s gospel, it is on the cross that Jesus’ victory over death occurs. The cross is the key to eternal life, to Jesus’ being recognised and to Jesus’ drawing all people to himself. (3:14, 8:28 and 12:32). In the fourth gospel the cross does not represent defeat, but triumph. It is Jesus’ willingness to die that allows him to conquer death. The resurrection is important, but there can be no resurrection, no life after death, unless Jesus dies – really dies. Jesus experiences death in order to overcome death. Jesus’ death is the cure for our death, just as the bronze serpent was the cure for the Israelite’s snake bite. Jesus’ death not only inoculates him against death, but his victory over death inoculates each one of us against eternal death.
Jesus has been lifted up. He was displayed on the cross – so that all could see him and seeing him, believe and believing, have eternal life. Death has not been entirely vanquished, but it no longer has dominion over us, it is no longer something to be feared because we know that death is not the end of the story.
Jesus has been lifted up – just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness – to show us that death will not have the last word. Jesus has conquered death and so long as we hold his death before us, we can be sure that we will share in his victory over death.
[1] For an explanation go to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention
Tags: cure, Jesus' lifted up, like cures like, snakes, vaccination, virus
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