John 3:1-17

Lent 2 – Year A

John 3:1-17

Hearken back to Genesis 3 with a tempting serpent and Numbers 21 with poisonous serpents and a "fiery"/bronze serpent. Let your imagination flow to see how Jesus takes his baptismal creation as a Beloved and his temptation by "a snake by any other name" and how he finds a redeeming image of his experience as a recapitulation of an adam/eve story through Moses.

In using Moses' experience with a fiery/seraph/bronze serpent (note the change in the charge given to Moses and the way in which he carried it out) Jesus images himself as a wounded healer or icon of sympathetic magic.

Given your life-work of understanding your good creation and ruing your having tossed various parts of it away – sometimes out of a cleverness of entitlement and sometimes to be able to mature to a next level – what image from the wideness and wilderness of your tradition would you hold up to signal redemption?

If you are going to identify with Jesus as a way to draw near to G*D and to transform the world by bringing heaven and earth together, do you identify with the redemption of the serpent image in Genesis - being recreated, forgiven - and what will be your part in enacting such?

It may be that we need to wrestle with this image to better get at its set-up story of night-time rebirth.

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To come at it another way – consider a little jazz
     "You and the Night and the Music"
          music
          lyrics

Can you hear Nicodemus or Jesus singing this song to the other?