three sixteen

The Gospel reading that we had from Sunday had essentially the most well-known Bible passage of them all in it: John 3:16.  People have called it 'The Bible summed up in a verse,' and you know, it does do the job okay, doesn't it?  For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. It's a great verse, and has been effectively marked through and through, to the point that just saying 3:16 will conjure the verse up in most people's minds.  Only a few things can do that.  "The machine" used to refer to a specific machine, "the pill" to a specific pill, "the bomb" to a specific bomb.  And 3:16, even though there are a lot of books from the Bible that have that chapter and verse in them, people aren't going to assume you're talking about James 3:16.

Now, I want you to think about that conciseness through another lens.  You probably didn't need me to tell you what John 3:16 was, you know it so well.  I want you to think about another shorthand for an entire class of things, and that is instead of "the pill" or "the bomb," I want you to think about "the Book".  Because that's what the word "Bible" literally means.  When we say 'the Bible,' we are saying that this is THE BOOK.  There are a lot of books out there, but this one is the book.  And for the people of Israel, especially the Pharisees, this was the book that you had to know, learn, and be aware of.  You had to be knowledgeable about the ins and outs of this book, it would be read to you all the time, it moulded the seasons of the year as well as the seasons of your life. That is, it was the book for you, and the Pharisees behaved accordingly.

Literary critic Northrop Frye called it 'the great code,' and insisted that the impact the Holy Scriptures have had on our culture are so great that you can't really understand anything else unless you understand them.  If you have no knowledge of the Bible, you won't really understand anything else that we have as a culture, because the Bible will function as a rosetta stone for understanding everything else as well.  It's not just a book alongside many others, it is the book through which the rest of the book are understood.  Believe Northrop or not, his ideas are at least worth considering, the idea that there exists a massively important, influential document that underpins all of the rest of the literature and culture that we are immersed in.  And you can see in the Gospel reading how powerfully it works because when Jesus brings up a reading from the Old Testament, Nicodemus knows exactly what he's talking about.  Jesus doesn't have to bring up chapter and verse, he can reference the source material, and Nicodemus is right on board.

 

What is Jesus referencing?  Only the boringest book of the Bible, that of the book of Numbers.  And you probably don't much care for the book of Numbers, do you? The reason you don't much care for the book of Numbers is because it has in it not one, but two censuses.  That is, there is a census at the beginning, and one at the end.  And nobody wants to read it, because it's chock full of people's names and numbers and lists and all that stuff.  And none of us are all that into it.  But if you stop reading Numbers there, then you'll miss out on the reference that Jesus of Nazareth makes about the bronze serpent on the pole.  That's found in Numbers 21, see what you miss if you don't stay alert?  And when Jesus makes this allusion to something that happened a long time ago, he is telling Nicodemus, who had heard these stories his whole life, something important.  That the scripture has been fulfilled in Nicodemus' hearing. The story of the serpent lifted up in the wilderness is the story of Christ. Sure, the initial hearers of these words, those who lived through it, would have understood that the Israelites in the wilderness would have grumbled against God, and God would have punished them.  That all makes sense.  Nicodemus would have heard this story for his whole life, growing up this would have been a Torah portion year in and year out.  But did Nicodemus know where it was pointing?  That it was pointing towards Christ?  Possibly not.

But Nicodemus was at least part of a people who would have been set apart for this reason.  He was one of the people who were called from the point of Abraham onwards to be set apart from all the nations, all the gentiles around them . The people of Israel were to be set apart in food and clothing, in custom and in communication . Abram was called to journey to a promised land not because God just likes giving land to people arbitrarily, but rather because God wanted Abram and his family, and his descendants to be a blessing to the whole world.  But to do so, they  were going to have to be set apart.

They were going to be set apart in order that they knew and had drilled into them for thousands of years that there was only one God.  This was done so that when Jesus finally appeared on earth, he would be recognized as God in the flesh.  Had Jesus appeared in any other part of the world, North America or Egypt, Brazil or Japan, Jesus would have been identified as a God, not The God.  If Jesus is in Israel, and he commands the sick to be well, the dead to be raised or the seas to be stilled, he is showing his authority and power over all the things of creation.  He is showing and exhibiting lordship over the world, over the things that only God has control and authority over.  And when he does this, the people of Israel notice.

It is for this reason that Jesus came to Israel and not anywhere else.  It is for this reason that the Lord arrived in Israel, and came to teach those people, because he was able to point an entire nation to the stories that they'd known their whole lives, and to teach them that those stories were about him, and him fulfilling them.  Anywhere else, and that doesn't work.

So the story of Abraham isn't the story of God being in the real estate business, nor is it a story of God choosing one family, or one people, and blessing them over and above all the other nations of the world.  Rather, it's a story of God working out a way to bless all the nations of the world through a group of people set aside to listen to God's word, to hear it over the course of their lives, and to take it to heart, that they might believe that these words applied to the one and only God that there could possibly be.  And if there was a people somewhere who weren't polytheists, who believed in only one God, and who had heard stories about him for centuries, then you would also have a people who would know about the suffering servant from Isaiah, the psalms of forgiveness, the need for sacrifice and yet knowledge that those sacrifices would ultimately be insufficient.  And they would know that in the story of Abraham, when Isaac asks Abraham where the sacrifice is, Abraham replies by saying that God himself would provide the sacrifice.

The better you know these stories, the better you can understand the point that Jesus was trying to make to Nicodemus.  That God's plan for salvation was in the works from the beginning, that the stories that had been told for thousands of years were told for a reason - so that when Jesus, the Word made flesh came into the world, they might know him and have faith in him, not as a god, or a demigod, but as GOD.