Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Numbers 21:4-9  +  John 8:21-30

“When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM ….”

“When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM ….”  We might wonder:  when Jesus spoke these words, did the Pharisees realize that Jesus was foretelling His being lifted up on the Cross?  It’s possible that the Pharisees had already at this point plotted the death of Jesus in detail, and had Jesus’ crucifixion arranged.

There’s no doubt, however, that the Pharisees were unable to understand what Jesus was in these words proclaiming about Himself.  Twice in today’s Gospel Reading Jesus uses the divine name of “I AM”—thedivine Name that God revealed to Moses at the burning bush—to identify Himself.  But why does Jesus reveal His divine identity?  He does not do this for His own sake.

At the moment of the Annunciation, Jesus took on human nature.  He did this so that through His human nature, He could redeem fallen man.

Given this, we can understand better why the Church chose today’s First Reading as a parallel to the Gospel passage.  In that light, we ought to recall how Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel passage echoes what He had earlier proclaimed, recorded five chapters earlier in John 3:  “‘just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.’”

In these words, Jesus seems to identify Himself with a serpent in the desert.  If this seems an odd comparison, recall St. Paul’s words in the Second Reading on Ash Wednesday:  “For our sake [God the Father] made Him to be sin who did not know sin.”

God the Father making His divine Son to be sin, as incredible as it seems, was done for a divine purpose.  St. John the Evangelist explains this after Jesus makes a connection between His self-sacrifice on the Cross with Moses’ lifting up the serpent:  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” [John 3:16].