Triumph of the Cross
See Commentary on John 3:13-17 in John 3:1-15 & John 3:16-21
Homily 1 - 2014
Looking at a bronze serpent raised up on a standard! St John’s Gospel refers to it no less than three times, and after Jesus’ crucifixion, adds a comment from the prophet Zachariah, “They will look on the one whom they have pierced”- all by way of cryptically hinting at how Jesus’ death saved the world. It teases us, like a parable in 3-D!
The Hebrew slaves in the Sinai Desert had been on a high with the euphoria of their escape from Egypt. But they soon realised that liberation had a price. Even bread from heaven and water from a rock got boring after a while. They began to lose the vision; morale dropped. And they looked around for someone to blame – Moses! Anyone but themselves. And then panic! The oasis where they had arrived was infested with highly venomous snakes. The story has it that God told Moses to cast a bronze replica of a snake and raise it on a pole. Intriguingly, those who gazed on it long enough were cured. Magic? Or could it be that gazing long enough at the source of their pain, holding that pain, allowed God somehow to touch them? More importantly, could it be that their gazing allowed them to recognise that the source of their real malaise lay in themselves? They had let themselves lose their original vision and motivation. Those who gazed at the bronze snake recovered that vision and no more was heard of their grumbling.
Today is Child Protection Sunday – an opportunity, perhaps, to gaze at ourselves as Church. Looking back, some of us remember how the 50s and 60s were years of euphoric optimism. Then, over the next thirty years, Church attendances dropped dramatically; society began to reject values that we took as crucial. In our dismay we looked around for something to blame – secularism, materialism, consumerism. We felt vaguely angry with those Catholics who no longer attended, blaming them, too. Then came the 90s and the humiliating disclosure of the scandal of abuse. Spontaneously we blamed the press, the lawyers, even the victims for speaking out.
Interestingly, it took the encounter with the venomous snakes to spark the conversion process for the escaping Hebrews. The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse might be the equivalent trigger for us as Church to look not only at ensuring that children are safer but at the Church’s own culture. Where do we start? We might begin by noticing our humiliation, our anger, confusion and bewilderment. Like the Hebrews in the desert, as individuals and as Church, we need to gaze at our pain and, more importantly, at its source.
As we do this, we might gaze, not at any bronze serpent, but, taking our lead from St John on this feast of the Triumph of the Cross, “look on the one whom they have pierced”. Gospel means Good News. The Cross is Good News – but familiarity can rob it of its newness and of its power to enlighten and inspire us. We need to gaze at it until its newness strikes us once more, not as a finger pointing at us accusingly, but as a promise of deeper insight and renewed assurance of love. We begin to see our world, and to see ourselves and the lives we lead, through the eyes of the crucified and risen Jesus. We waste no time looking around for others to blame. We can quietly ask ourselves what it was that blinded genuine, religious and thoughtful people to the terrible injustice of which we as Church have been guilty. Confident of Christ’s mercy, we can peacefully search out how we personally might have been complicit in that blindness.
Humbled, yet at the same time enlightened and enlivened, we move forward on the ever-beckoning pilgrim way of conversion.