I have not been a faithful blogger by any stretch of the imagination, and I suspect that even those few people who used to read this blog have given up hope of seeing a new post. Adding something like blogging to a full life only comes about by subtracting something else. The subtractions have their own merit, however, and eventually return to crowd out the new. The trick is to keep everyone happy, the old and the new. Sounds like church, doesn’t it?
This week’s OT lesson about Moses and the bronze serpent is one that makes the scientist in me just cringe. It’s sympathetic magic, plain and simple, and no commentary can convince me otherwise. I imagine the average person walking into a church and hearing that and thinking, well, that’s a bunch of malarkey! Why should I think this Jesus stuff is any less a pre-scientific tale than Moses’ serpent? Why, indeed.
It’s clear that the passage from Numbers was chosen because of the reference made to it by Jesus in John’s Gospel. Yet that hardly helps. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness” sounds like “what I’m about to say next has as much validity as that story about Moses.” I know that Jesus transforms the story; it becomes a story about salvation rather than a story about magic. But why isn’t the salvation story magic as well?
Then there’s the claim to exclusivity that runs throughout the Gospel of John. “Those who do not believe [in the Son] are condemned already,” John writes, “because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” This really is counter to contemporary culture. At least I know where to find some help with this one: Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. I suspect that dealing with that issue will help me with the other.
The trick will be figuring out how to explain all of this so a junior high student can understand it. It’s not likely that someone will walk into church off the street on Sunday. But it is likely that there will be youth there who have their own questions about how such antiquated stories can be read in church, and wonder what they can possibly mean to their lives today. That’s the real challenge of preaching.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
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2 comments:
Thanks for this, TotF. Nice to see you back!
"That's the real challenge of preaching." Yeah. It sure is.
This Story that we are part of it true, but in its own crazy way that can be experienced, but not readily explained. Repeatedly, I am knocked flat by phrases of Scripture that I suddenly realize, to the bottom of my soul, are absolutely true in some manner that I had not expected.
I suspect that something akin to this happened to the Evangelists. They had these sayings and deeds of Jesus floating in their heads, words and deeds that the account repeatedly says that they did not understand at the time. They also had OT scriptures in their heads, things that perhaps they thought they understood, certainly things that "the Jews" (as St. John phrases it) were certain they had all pinned down and commented on and safely locked in place. And then, suddenly, it all combined to fit into place in ways that no one could have anticipated. Thus, for example, another passage from later in St. John that links with the passage from chapter 3 that you describe: chapter 12 v. 20 and following. "Certain Greeks. . . [said] 'Sir, we would see Jesus.'" That, somehow, was the trigger. Clear through the Gospel, Jesus has said "my hour has not yet come" (2:4, at Cana, for example). Now, all of a sudden, "the hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified." "Now is the judgment of this world. . . . and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me."
Perhaps Jesus realized that the strange old story of Moses and the bronze serpent was one of the threads that linked his impending "lifting up" to the long OT story of salvation. Or perhaps some of this linkage is in St. John's telling of the story, and his after-the-fact realization of what (maybe) a strange remark by Jesus had meant -- an after-the-fact realization that I would say may have been by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost as St. John was writing, years later.
So, in some sense, Moses and the serpent is a "true" story. The fundamentalists have problems because they would want to insist on its historic truth in a modern, literalistic, scientific manner. I do not think that this is tenable. Perhaps even St. John didn't think the story was "true" until he saw how it fit into the larger Story -- as you said, it becomes a story about salvation.
And, how does one communicate this to a twelve-year-old? Perhaps the only way is an unspoken "trust us. Trust this community of people, living and dead, who have committed their lives to this, questions and all." "There are some stout folk among us," as Sam Gamgee said in a tight spot: Moses, Elijah, St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, J. S. Bach, Richard Hooker. . . . these are "stout" folk intellectually and otherwise, and there are times when I have to tell myself "if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for me."
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