Often even the simplest word or phrase is not what it seems, because they are sometimes packed with multiple meanings or various shades of meaning. Take the phrase “lifted up.” To lift up something is to raise it, to give it prominence, to emphasize its importance, perhaps even to exalt it and thus to glorify it. To be lifted up may mean simply to draw attention to something. Some things are lifted up, however, in order that they can be derided, made fun of, made an example for all to see.

According to John, the evangelist, for Jesus to be lifted up on the cross, implied all these at once. John compares the cross to the story of the bronze serpent that Moses lifted up in the desert at God’s command. Poisonous snakes were sent among the people as a punishment for their sin of ungratefulness, spitefulness and lack of faith during their perilous journey through the wilderness after their miraculous escape from Egypt and before their entry into the land of Canaan. Any of those were being punished, however, and who had been bitten by a poisonous snake, and who looked on the bronze serpent that Moses was told to place on a pole and lift up before them, would live. Similarly, sinners who look to the One lifted up on the cross obtain forgiveness and new life.

In John’s gospel, the fact that Jesus was lifted up on the cross is both his shame and his glory. We could even say that, according to John, Jesus’ shame is his glory. It is on the shameful, ugly, and humiliating cross on which Jesus was lifted up that Jesus is glorified: his shame is his glory. Jesus being lifted up on the cross also means salvation and gives hope. We who are sinful and mortal but who think we will live forever, can discover God’s gift of life only on the tree of humiliation and death. When Christ was lifted up—lifted up on the cross, lifted up from death to life, lifted up to reign at the right hand of God the Father—God came into his glory in a supreme act of loving-kindness for a sinful and fallen world.

We know this from John’s gospel where it is said that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” The only Son of the Father was “given” up to death, “in order that the world might be saved through him.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s not skim past the sentence that announces, God so loved the world. We should pause and ask, “What does it mean to say that God so loved the world”? Now we must not be too hasty, as if we knew already what it means to say that God loves the world. As the well-known 20th century Swiss Reformed theologian, Karl Barth, once wrote in connection with our reading from John’s gospel: “God does not owe it to the world to love it….there can be no question of any claim of the cosmos to be loved.” It is not necessary that God loves the world. God does not owe the world, or us, his love. We assume too readily that God owes us his love. The corollary to this is the common assumption that God could not possibly or legitimately exercise his judgment on us. No, the tradition has been clear about this: God loves freely, as an act of will, not from compulsion or necessity, as if God somehow has to love the world. God’s love for the world, therefore, though true, is never something we can take for granted.

We cannot take God’s love for the world for granted, because the world is the arena of sin and death. Thus Paul writes to the Ephesians today in our second reading, “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world.” But then he continues, revealing to us the genuine source of God’s free act of unmerited and unconditional love: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” And as Jesus’ says in John’s gospel, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

So God loves the world not from necessity, but as an act of sheer grace. God does not love the world because that’s the way things are supposed to be, or because it is the natural thing for God to do, but rather because of God’s love for Israel, his chosen, and because of Jesus, Israel’s crucified Messiah and the only-begotten Son of the Father. God’s love for the world came at a huge cost--to God. God loves the world, therefore, because he chose to redeem it through the cross of Israel’s Christ. As Luther says in the Large Catechism, “For this very purpose he created us, so that he might redeem us and make us holy, and, moreover, having granted and bestowed upon us everything in heaven and on earth, he has also given us his Son and his Holy Spirit, through whom he brings us to himself.” We were created, so Luther says, so that God could redeem us and make us holy in Christ. God loves the world in and through and because of Christ. God’s love, in other words, is God’s free decision and choice: in his election of Israel, and in his redemption of the world through the pain, suffering, and shame of the cross. Thus our entire existence from cradle to grave, and our hope for the future all rest on God’s decision to love Israel, and through her and her Christ, the world.

As Christ was lifted up on Golgotha, lifted up as a sacrifice for the life of the world, so too are we lifted up before the world so that we can give up our lives for others in his name, so that we can be living signs of a sacrificial love that knows no bounds or barriers, that makes holy all that is ordinary, that strives against death and the devil and emerges victorious out of the depths of hell to make all things new. That we are lifted up in this way as we daily die and rise with Christ, means that we stand out and stand apart from the world, a world that, if left to its own devices, would be filled with nothing but sin, terror, pain, and death. In this respect John is clear that those who follow Christ, while they are certainly in the world, are definitely not of it. We who are in Christ are not of the world, because we participate in the transforming work of God, bringing his grace, peace, mercy and justice to bear in a world that knows nothing about them. Our task is not to bless the world as it is, but to weep for it, and to help transform it into the kingdom Jesus proclaimed was breaking in and was coming into the world through him.

God’s love for the world is transformative: It destroys and it plants, it tears down and it builds up, it kills and it makes alive. God’s grace, therefore, is not like those top executives we read about, who when firm makes lots of money get bonuses, and when the company has a lackluster performance get bonuses, and when the company loses a pile of money and the company is into the ground get bonuses. Grace destroys and makes new—and so it can transform an all-too prevalent culture of greed, apathy and arrogance into a new culture of compassion, responsibility, and sacrifice.

But transformation, the kind of transformation that is life-changing and life-giving, comes only through sacrifice, namely, through the sacrifice of him who was lifted up and thus glorified in his self-offering for the life of the world. All who turn from their former way of life, who sacrifice all that they are and have, and instead turn toward him who is the source of all life and blessing, toward him who died for our trespasses and was raised for our justification, shall live.

-Amen-