Jesus’ Becoming Sin on the Cross, Fifth Tuesday of Lent, April 8, 2014

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent
April 8, 2014
Numbers 21:4-9, Ps 102, Jn 8:21-30

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• We always learn a great deal from the penances God imposes — for example, the silence imposed on Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father — because they’re always primarily medicinal and therefore teach us a great deal about the deeper nature of the sin that elicited the penance. Today in the first reading from the Book of Numbers, we see the sin of the Israelites in the desert. They were complaining against God and against Moses. Taking up their familiar refrain, they wondered aloud whether God had worked all of his miracles freeing them from slavery in Egypt only to have them die in the desert. Even though God had been feeding them daily with manna from heaven in the morning and quails in the evening and quenching their thirst with water from the rock, they still said, “We are disgusted with this wretched food!” Some people can complain even about the menu at the Last Supper!
• So God sent among them saraph serpents who bit them, such that many of them died. It finally brought the people to acknowledge God, to acknowledge their sinful ways and to seek God’s help. They said to Moses,”We have sinned in complaining against the Lord and you. Pray the Lord to take the serpents away from us!” So Moses did. And God gave him what would seem at first glance a strange command in response to their prayers and their predicament. “Make a saraph and mount it on a pole, and whoever looks at it after being bitten will live.” And that’s what he did. The Book of Numbers tells us, “And whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.”
• What was this penance about sin and remedy all about? There was a part of it that looked backward and another that looked forward.
• The retrospective part of it involved the sin. It looked back to the Garden when Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent and sinned against the Lord. By sending serpents among the Israelites, God was reminding them precisely about the presence of the devil and how he was slithering among them to lead them to complain and distrust God. He was out to kill them by poisoning them with his venom and that’s precisely what happened. He had bitten them and infected them even before the saraph serpents appeared. The remedy the Lord proposed, making a bronze serpent, mounting it on a pole and having everyone look at it was a means by which to see precisely what had caused their predicament — their sins, their having been bitten by the serpent represented by the saraph serpents — and to repent of their immoral choices. Anyone who looked upon the bronze serpent would live, but it didn’t say that they would be healed immediately. They would still have some of the poison in them and need to work to get better, but they would be saved. But it began with looking at the bronze serpent. If they refused to look at the remedy God had given, they would die of the poison.
• That remedy is the prospective part of what God asked Moses to do. It pointed forward to Christ’s own saving action to which he alludes in today’s Gospel. Jesus tells the Pharisees that they were infected with a mortal wound. “I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin.” He said that they would be unable to follow him and would die because they would not let go of their earthly ways to follow him where he was going, through self-sacrificial love and death through Calvary to the eternal Jerusalem. “You belong to what is below, I belong to what is above,” he continued. “You belong to this world, but I do not belong to this world. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” Ultimately the great sin is to fail to believe in God and what God has said and done and whom he has sent. And they were refusing to do that and to acknowledge that Jesus’ deeds and witnesses all pointed to his divine origin and mission.
• They were infected with the same diabolical poison with which their ancestors were in the desert. So was everyone else except Jesus’ mother. But Jesus would himself become the bronze serpent to save all of those who had the humility to look at him with faith. Talking about his crucifixion, he said today, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me.” No man, obviously, would choose to be crucified on his own. When he was lifted up on the Cross, that’s when all who would look upon him with faith would grasp that he was the essence of divine love, that he was one not following his own will, but the Father’s saving will, and that he “always do[es] what is pleasing to Him.” This passage links to an even clearer one from earlier in the Gospel when Jesus said, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (Jn 3:14-16). Out of love for us, to save us from the poison we carry within, Jesus allowed himself to become the new and eternal seraph serpent, lifted up on the pole of the Cross.
• Looking at Jesus on the Cross, we are called to recognize two things. First, we are called to see exactly what our sins have done. They crucified the most innocent and loving Person who ever lived. Many times we can be tempted to dismiss our sins as if they’re no big deal, just like the Jews in the desert would have been tempted to minimize their sins of complaining and distrust, but they are a big deal and led to the brutal torture and murder of Jesus. So Jesus on the Cross shows our our sins. But the second thing beholding Jesus lifted up like the serpent in the desert shows us is the type of sin that is killing us, that we have given into the slithering serpent. Jesus, however, mounted the cross in order to suck out all of the deadly venom from within us. St. Paul wrote some very deep theological words in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, “For our sake he made him who did not know sin to be sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). He took on all our sins and was treated like a malefactor, like a criminal deserving capital punishment, where it was we who deserved the death penalty on account of the mortal nature of our sinfulness. But God so loved us that he allowed Jesus to do all of this so that we might not perish but might have eternal life. This is the essence of the Good News! This is Christianity!
• But our cure involves not just glancing at Christ on the Cross but really becoming one with this mystery beginning with our eyes but then penetrating our hearts and all parts of our being so that we may never cease contemplating Christ on the Cross. Pope Francis said in his homily this morning in the Vatican that we can’t allow the Crucifix simply to remain an adornment of piece of jewelry, but it must become one of the fundamental coordinates of all we look to. ““The Cross is not an ornament that we must always put in the churches, there on the altar,” he said. It is not a symbol that distinguishes us from others,” like the Crucifixes that so many people, including movie stars who don’t practice the faith wear. “The Cross is mystery, the mystery of God who humbles himself, he becomes ‘nothing.’ He becomes sin.” When we want to know where our sins are and what their consequence is, we need to look at the Cross. “Where is your sin?,” Pope Francis asks. “Your sin is there, in the Cross. Go and find it there, in the wounds of the Lord and your sins will be healed, your wounds will be healed, your sins will be forgiven. The forgiveness that God gives us is not the same as cancelling a debt that we have with Him, the forgiveness that God gives us are the wounds of his Son on the Cross, raised up on the Cross.” To be healed by him we need to draw near to him.
• Pope Francis also said that spreading the faith begins with looking at Jesus on the Cross, a sign not so much of pain but of the love that makes even the pain of crucifixion bearable and worth it. Citing St. Paul, Pope Francis said that the apostle didn’t boast, didn’t glory, in anything “except the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world is crucified to me and I to the world.” We’re called to glory in God’s crucified love, which is the deepest source of our dignity. And then like St. Paul we’re called to go out into a world that, just like in ancient Corinth, treats the Cross as a “folly” or “scandal” and proclaim it as the “power and wisdom of God.” The Cross is the source of the healing we most need!
• Today Jesus wants to heal us in a deeper way than just having us look upon him on the Cross. He wants us to enter into him on the Cross. That’s why he gives us here the body and blood shed on the Cross so that we might not perish but have eternal life. The Mass is the means by which we become a Bride with him on the Cross, by which we become one Body with him in this great medicine of immortality. Far from “wretched food,” this is the food that heals, makes holy, and brings us to heavenly happiness.

The readings for today’s Mass were: