On the Sunday before the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the Church sets a night-time conversation before us at the Liturgy. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, comes to Jesus by night and receives an answer that goes far beyond what he had come to learn. At the heart of that answer stand the words for which this reading was appointed just before the feast of the Cross:
And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
(John 3:13-17)
The man who came in the dark
Nicodemus was a Pharisee and a ruler of the Jews, and in the same conversation the Lord Himself calls him a teacher of Israel (John 3:10). Such a man came in secret.
Saint John Chrysostom says why: he came by night because he was afraid to come by day. He was still bound to the weakness of those around him, and he thought of Christ as less than He was, as of a prophet, without seeing anything great in the miracles he himself acknowledged. The Evangelist does not list these things, Chrysostom adds, but gathers them all into a single word: night. Elsewhere the same Gospel shows plainly how that fear worked: many of the rulers had believed in Him, yet did not confess Him, lest they be put out of the synagogue (John 12:42).
Here we see how the Lord deals with the weak. He did not rebuke him for the hour he had chosen, nor send him away. Chrysostom recalls at this point the prophetic word about the bruised reed, which the meek One does not break, and says that the merciful God did not reject Nicodemus, but spoke to him with much kindness and disclosed to him lofty teachings, still veiled in words that had to be unfolded (Homilies on the Gospel of John, XXIV).
Saint Cyril of Alexandria describes the same condition when, later on, Nicodemus defends the Lord before the council: he was neither wholly unbelieving nor did he vie with the folly of the others; he had already been touched, yet his love for Christ was not yet free, being held back by shame before the great ones.
The birth from above and the Cross
The reading begins at verse 13, that is, after the best-known part of the conversation. The Lord had told Nicodemus that no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born from above. The Pharisee understood the word of the body and asked how a man can be born when he is old, whether he can enter a second time into his mother’s womb (John 3:3-4). The Lord answered that this birth is of water and of the Spirit (John 3:5), speaking thus of Baptism.
The Greek word here can mean both “from above” and “again”, and English translations divide between the two. Nicodemus heard only the second sense, and from this came his bewilderment.
Saint John Chrysostom joins the two halves of the conversation: after speaking of the great benefit given to man through Baptism, the Lord passes to another benefit, no lesser than the first and the cause of it — the benefit given through the Cross. The birth from above is granted in the water of Baptism because the Son of Man was lifted up on the wood. Through Baptism we are buried with Christ in His death and share in His Resurrection, that we may walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3-5).
Who speaks with Nicodemus
The reading opens with a weighty word: no man has ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven. This is not a man who travelled to heaven and returned from there with a new teaching.
Saint John Chrysostom shows that with these words the Lord corrects the very opening of the conversation. Nicodemus had called Him a teacher come from God, and the Lord shows him that he must not think of Him as a teacher like the prophets, who were men of the earth. And when He says “who is in heaven”, Chrysostom adds, He says it according to the measure of the hearer, for the Son is not in heaven only, but everywhere, and fills all things.
The one who speaks with Nicodemus is therefore the Son who became man without being separated from the Father. This is He who was to be lifted up on the wood.
The serpent lifted up in the wilderness
The Lord does not speak to Nicodemus of the crucifixion by its name. He sends him to an event from Scripture known to any teacher of Israel. Having come out of Egypt and grown weary of the road, the sons of Israel murmured against God and against Moses; then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and many died of their bite. The people confessed their sin and asked for the prayer of Moses. The Lord commanded Moses to make a serpent of brass and to set it on a pole, and the one who had been bitten remained alive when he looked at it (Numbers 21:4-9).
The healing did not flow from that brass. The book of the Wisdom of Solomon calls the serpent raised by Moses a sign of salvation, given to the people to put them in remembrance of the commandment of the law, and says plainly where its power came from: “For he that turned himself toward it was not saved by the thing that he saw, but by thee, that art the Saviour of all” (Wisdom of Solomon 16:6-7).
Saint Cyril of Alexandria sees in this event an image of the whole mystery of the Incarnation. The serpent stands for bitter and deadly sin, which bit the soul of man and poured into it the venom of wickedness, and from that bondage there was no escape except by the help that comes from heaven. The Word of God was made in the likeness of sinful flesh, that He might condemn sin in the flesh. And the fact that the serpent was set on a high pole shows, he says, that Christ would be made visible to all through His passion on the Cross (Commentary on the Gospel of John, II, 1).
The serpent of brass is therefore no likeness chosen at random, but one of the figures through which God announced the mystery of the Cross beforehand. For Saint Gregory Palamas, the power of the Cross was already at work, in a hidden way, in those who were reconciled to God before it was manifested on Golgotha; its mystery had been proclaimed and prefigured from the generations of old, and no one was ever reconciled to God except through its power.
The figure and its fulfilment
Saint John Chrysostom sets the figure and the fulfilment side by side and shows how far the second surpasses the first.
There the Jews escaped the death of the body; here those who believe escape eternal death. There the hanging serpent healed the bites of serpents; here Jesus crucified heals the wounds made by the unseen dragon. There the one who looked with the eyes of the body was healed; here the one who looks with the eyes of the understanding lays aside his sins. There hung brass wrought in the form of a serpent; here hung the very Body of the Lord.
The deepest difference lies in the venom. The serpent that killed had venom; the one raised for healing had none. In the same way, the death that killed us carried sin within it, while the death of the Lord was clean of all sin.
Saint Ephrem the Syrian gathers it all into one sentence: by the serpent of brass, which by its nature cannot suffer, it was shown beforehand that He who by His nature cannot die would suffer on the Cross. Christ truly suffered and died according to the human nature He took from the Virgin, while His divinity remained beyond suffering and beyond death. This is why Chrysostom calls the Cross a fountain of life, a thing the mind alone receives with difficulty and faith holds with ease.
“Must be lifted up”
The Lord does not say “I shall be hanged”, but “must be lifted up”. Saint John Chrysostom observes that He chose the gentler word, fitting also to the figure in the wilderness, where the serpent had been raised on a pole.
This “must” does not come from any constraint imposed from without. The Son had come down from heaven for that very hour, and in the same Gospel He binds His being lifted up from the earth to the drawing of all men to Himself (John 12:32). The wood that the world reckoned the lowest shame became the height from which the love of God is shown.
The measure of love
The word “so” in “God so loved the world” points us to the gift by which God showed His love: His only begotten Son.
Chrysostom weighs first the distance between the One who loves and those who are loved: He without beginning and immortal, of majesty without measure; they dust and ashes, full of countless sins, who had grieved Him without ceasing. These He loved. Then he weighs the gift: He did not send a servant, nor even an angel, but gave His only begotten Son, and no man bears for his own child the care that God bore for His ungrateful servants. And whence did God so love the world? From nothing other than His own goodness.
Light and judgment
“For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world.” This coming is for salvation, and the one who draws near to Christ in repentance meets the One who calls him out of darkness into life.
Judgment, however, is not abolished. The Lord goes on at once: he that believes in Him is not condemned, and he that believes not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God; and He then shows wherein this judgment consists: the Light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the Light (John 3:18-19). By refusing the Light, a man remains even now in the darkness he loves. This condemnation does not abolish the Judgment to come, and until then the call to repentance stands open: He who came to save the world is also He who will judge it.
Nicodemus had come by night, but he had come toward the Light.
Nicodemus, from night to the tomb
The Gospel brings him before us on three occasions. This night is the first.
The second time, when the rulers wanted to condemn Jesus without hearing Him, Nicodemus asked them whether their law judges a man before it hears him and knows what he has done (John 7:50-51). He had spoken little as yet, but he had spoken in the hearing of all.
The third time he comes to the tomb, bringing a great quantity of myrrh and aloes (John 19:39). The man who had heard by night about the lifting up of the Son of Man now came, together with Joseph, to prepare the Body of the Lord for burial and to lay Him in the tomb.
Nicodemus did not remain in that night. The Church numbers him among the saints and commemorates him together with Joseph of Arimathea on the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, for the service he rendered at the burial of the Lord. Tradition holds that after his death he was buried on the estate of Gamaliel, beside Saint Stephen the Archdeacon, and that in the year 415 their graves were discovered after Gamaliel appeared to the priest Lucian. The Righteous Nicodemus, Gamaliel and Abibas are commemorated on 2 August, the same day as the translation of the relics of Saint Stephen.
The Cross lifted up
The feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross took shape in Jerusalem, around the veneration of the wood of the Cross and the consecration of the buildings at the Holy Sepulchre. On 13 September 335 the church of the Resurrection, built upon Golgotha, was consecrated, and the following day came to be associated with the showing and the lifting up of the Cross before the people.
Saint Andrew of Crete explains in his homily for the feast that the lifting up of the Cross adds to it no glory it does not already possess: its glory is Christ crucified upon it. The Cross, once hidden in the place called the Skull, is shown and raised before all so that through it God may be glorified.
At the feast, the Cross is brought out into the middle of the church for veneration, and the faithful draw near and kiss it.
What the Cross asks of us
The looking that is asked of us then is the same as the looking asked in the wilderness. Not a passing glance, but the turning of the whole man toward the One lifted up on the wood for him, with repentance for our sin, which He bore and overcame by the Cross.
Saint Gregory Palamas speaks also of the Cross lived in the inner man. Through the struggle against the passions, through prayer and through the turning of the mind toward God, a man is crucified to the world and the world to him. The mystery of the Cross does not then remain something looked at from outside, but becomes the form of our own repentance. It is the same new life of which the Lord told Nicodemus that it cannot be seen without the birth from above.
Saint John Chrysostom ends his homily on these verses by turning from the love of God to the money of his hearers. God did not spare His Son for us, while we spare our goods to our own loss; we put ornaments on servants and on horses, while the Lord goes naked and hungry at our doors, in the poor, and we look at Him without pity. He says these things, he adds, not so much for the sake of the poor as for the souls of those who hear him.
Here it is seen whether our looking upon the Cross has changed us. Veneration does not end when we rise from the ground; it must be seen also in the mercy with which we draw near to those for whom Christ gave Himself.
Read also
- How We Read Holy Scripture in the Orthodox Church — On reading Scripture in the Church, together with the Holy Fathers.
- “Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?” — On Baptism, a changed life, and love expressed in deeds.
- What Changes at the Transfiguration — On divine light and the vision Christ grants His disciples.
- Saint Cyril of Alexandria: The Seal of the Fathers and the Boundary Between Faith and Error — On Saint Cyril of Alexandria, one of the Fathers cited in this article.