Eternal Living

Text: John 3:14-21
Other texts: Numbers 21:4-9

Horrible food. And such small portions.

Why have you brought us out of the land of Egypt? complain the Israelites. Talk about ungrateful. They had been in Egypt because they had been slaves. Moses with God’s help freed them from slavery. Now, in the desert, the old days in Egypt perhaps don’t look so bad. They have turned their gaze to the past, to the familiar. The present is uncomfortable, and the future is uncertain. As they turn their eyes back, they see a past that was never there.

The Israelites are perishing. When you are perishing, you don’t know where to look. Every option looks the same. One as good as another. Or as bad.

Who knows what they were expecting? There was no itinerary. There was no ETA. No one knew for certain where they were going. They had fled a bad situation. When you are in deep trouble, it is hard to think about anything besides “let me out of here!” “Anything is better than this thing.” But that is not always true.

Far from home, wandering in the desert, confused and anxious. To top it all off, poisonous serpents—which we imagine to be snakes—appear among them and start biting them. And the people die from these bites. After all this disappointment, then comes despair.

Perishing is like that. It is a long, drawn out, process. Not quick and sharp, but slow and dull. One thing after another, until you cannot stand one more thing. And then one more thing happens, and it turns out you can stand it, just barely.

The word means to be destroyed and means to be lost. When we are perishing our lives feel lost and small. It is a kind of spiritual claustrophobia. A severe narrowing of what is possible. A feeling that there is no point in doing anything, hoping for anything. When we are perishing our world has become tiny, gray, and without purpose. A relentless downward slope. The power and beauty of the world dwindles and decays.

Some are perishing now. And others fear it in these scary times. Scary not only because of the economy but because of war and torture in the world, because of food and water shortages, because of greed, selfishness, and cowardice. I wonder whether our outrage—an overused and scary word in itself—is not a mask for our fear of everything falling apart. The world and maybe our own lives. Too many snakes this time for us to handle.

This is not how it is meant to be. Perishing, that is. Though it has been so for at least as long as we have history. We are not meant to be fed a life of thin broth. But instead a fat feast. The Lord will prepare a feast of rich food, Isaiah once said. We are created to have abundant life.

Which is another way to say eternal life. “Life of the age” is its literal translation. John the Gospel writer likes things that are opposite—dualisms as the scholars say. Light and dark, choice and destiny, now and forever, hidden and revealed. And perishing and eternal life. For God so loved the world that God gave us Jesus, so that we may not perish but have eternal life. Look, God says, you can have eternal life.

As perishing is not a synonym for death, so eternal life is not a synonym for everlasting life. Though death is a kind of perishing; though everlasting life is a corollary of eternal life. For John, eternal life is life without limits, even the limit of death, but not only that limit. Maybe it is better to say “eternal living.” Eternal life is living so abundantly that it is like the kind of living God does. Eternal life does not mean unending life but life lived in the unending presence of God. Abundant does not mean excessive or profligate, but what used to be called “good.” Good life. Not everyone wants to live forever (many do, for sure), but I bet that everyone wants to live abundantly, live a good life.

We like to talk about all this stuff in words. Lutherans especially do. Luther was a wordy kind of guy. Though I’m sure his thoughts began in his heart, what he gave us were tons and tons of words. Words about how God was, how God worked, what Jesus was, what salvation meant. Luther, for all his self-professed disdain for theology, for all his earthiness, was a theologian. He liked to figure things out. And after and as he figured things out, he really liked to tell everyone about it.

Theology is said to be “faith seeking understanding.” But it is important to see that this starts with faith. All too often, we act as if it were the opposite: that understanding figures out faith. Understanding can help, but sometimes theology leads us into weird dark alleys and an emphasis on the fine points. Or into battle.

When the Israelite are perishing in the desert, God asks very little of them. God doesn’t ask to be obeyed. God doesn’t reiterate all the things he said to them before. God doesn’t yell at them for being ungrateful jerks. God doesn’t ask them to figure things out. God doesn’t ask them to believe, or to believe in anything in particular. God doesn’t ask them to trust in God. God doesn’t ask them to be religious, to be theologians, to do or say anything special. God doesn’t ask them to repent, or promise, or work hard. All God asks is that they look.

John tells us: Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved. The word condemn here means to separate (as a judge might separate who is right and wrong). The word saved means to heal. God did not send Jesus to break things apart but rather to mend them. To fix the wounds, and relieve the pain. To put an end to perishing.

When you are perishing, you don’t know where to look. Every option looks the same. What God asks for is that the Israelites redirect their gaze. That they turn away from their longing for the good old days in Egypt and instead look at what God has given. What changes for the Israelites is their point of view. They attend to what is God’s. They become mindful of God.

When we say we believe in Jesus, another way to say that, one way to think about that, is that we are mindful of him. That it is not a question of thinking things through and coming to a smart conclusion, but to attending to Jesus. It is as much how we look<,> as it is how we see things. As much who we look at<,> as it is what we see.

Just as Moses held up the snakes, John says, just in this way God held up Jesus. God loves the world. The snakes still bit the Israelites, and the snakes bite us. But their power is gone. We can turn our gaze, our minds, to God in Christ. We are not meant to perish. We have eternal life.