Lifted up

I find Jesus a bit hard to understand in this passage from John - it almost sounds like he is playing with his audience, a sort of strange game of hide and seek, where I am going you will not find me. This leads to confusion and questions about what he means. But this is the way John often writes - he is coming from that assumption right at the beginning of the Gospel that Jesus is incarnate Word and that this fact should colour every piece of listening that we do.
There is an obvious parallel between Moses lifting up his staff in the desert for healing and between Jesus being lifted up on the cross. However, when his opponents thought it through they would have been furious. It is bad enough that Jesus should compare any aspect of himself to Moses, a father of the faith, but what he is actually offering them is a much bigger picture - he will not life himself up - they will, they and their old way of doing things, they and the Mosaic covenant which they have fractured by their lack of love and compassion. Moses lifts his rod to protect against poisonous snakes, that those who are bitten may have life. Jesus is lifted up by the descendants of Moses that those who are afraid and imprisoned by the death of the serpents of the law - those who are stuck in a world of sin - can be given life in Him. Jesus is not, in this story, simply an agent of Divine power like Moses was, he is that Divine power, he is the power to heal and save the world.
But in being lifted up Jesus is humanity exposed. He will return to his Father, he is the one from the beginning and John says all of this. There is an almost frightening aspect to what Jesus is saying, in order to be He who saves Jesus must become He who is completely visible, completely on display and, therefore, completely vulnerable. Somehow the power in this seems to have convinced many of his hearers but it also demolishes those who are still relying on the old rules and regulations.
Vulnerability is something which we try to cover up in our society. We seek to protect those who are vulnerable but also to try to ensure that we ourselves are ensured and safely tucked into our lives as well as we can be. Our help and calls for justice are often moderated by our own need for safety and self-protection. I wonder how we would have reacted to Jesus himself - I wonder whether his call for radical thinking would have made us furious as we stood part of the establishment, part of the haves in the world and were told that we were going to lift up this man, we were going to act as Moses, but with new and devastating consequences for our own comfortable existence.
Perhaps as we stand in Passiontide we are not being asked for something so different. We will shout "Crucify" because we all turn away, we all fall into where we are most comfortable, but we also turn and come to the Jesus who is lifted up for healing and salvation. Perhaps it would be easier if this Gospel proposition of radical salvation was not quite true, perhaps it would be more comfortable if we remain, if we settle in, if we do not move.
But Jesus call to us is for a more vulnerable humanity - it is for a humanity which enters into those places which need healing and recovery without thought for our own safety and status - and this is a hard path which most of us only aspire to.
There is a prayer which I have been thinking a lot about recently
Almighty God, pour your grace into our hearts
That we, to whom the incarnation of your son was made known by the message of an angel
may, by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection
through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
Christ incarnate, Christ lifted up and Christ risen - this is the model for our own humanity - not as those who quietly stand by, but as those who offer ourselves, our whole selves, to service.