We are called to travel many paths, some that challenge us, others that inspire us. To trust in God is to trust that whatever path we are now on is the one that will ultimately bring us to the Promised Land.

This is easy to say, especially when one’s path is not meandering through war zones or famine, caught up in the horrors of this world, and it is important not to dismiss the journey itself as insignificant. It is the locus of our life and salvation.

The Israelites on the path to the Promised Land are a microcosm of humanity as they grumble about their travelling conditions. Their complaints are not trivial. They asked Moses: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” While the questions are ordinary and understandable, they are judged for them because “the people spoke against God and against Moses.” They had lost faith in the one who had brought them out of slavery to walk on a new path home. Poisonous snakes were sent to punish them, but they are saved from these snakes by a strange action directed by God. Moses “made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”

In the Gospel of John, Jesus explains this event as a prefigurement of his death to come: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” The Son of Man will be lifted up because “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” As the bronze serpent raised high saved the Israelites’ lives, so the Messiah raised high on the cross will lead to eternal life.

But the lifting up of the Son of Man was not the same as raising an inanimate object; it required the humility of the Son to follow willingly a path strewn with pain, to become “obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” Some wonder what sort of obedience this was, given that Jesus is God incarnate. Would not Jesus know that God’s response to this obedience would result in him being “highly exalted” and given “the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”?

While theologians are divided about what Jesus’ divinity meant in practical terms during his incarnate existence, it is important to insist that Jesus became truly human, a person like us but without sin. This means his obedience to God’s path was a genuinely human choice, not part of an act put on for our benefit. Paul understood that Jesus willingly humbled himself, for he “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”

We share neither Jesus’ divinity nor his sinlessness, but his emptying of himself by taking on human form and then obediently taking up the cross offers us a guide along our own paths that Jesus did not have. We know that his act of humble sacrifice led to his exaltation. We have the example of the reward for the one who remained faithful even to death on the cross, who was raised up and ascended to God, who will be acknowledged by every tongue as Lord. We ought then to trust that when we walk humbly along our paths, we have the promise before us that “everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” The humility of the only Son ought to inspire us to walk our own paths with humility because we know that we have been promised the glory of life everlasting. Humility does not mean never asking questions of God or accepting all suffering along our paths silently, but it does mean trusting that God has as our final goal eternal life with the exalted Son. 

This article appears in Sept. 1-8 2014.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.