Yesterday I saw flowers blooming and trees blossoming. New life is springing up from the cold earth.

The gospel passage for today from John is part of the Nicodemus story – where in the dark of night a man searches for the light of truth, searches for new life. John says “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert….” (John 3:14)

In that simple symbolic gesture of holding up that which was hurting them, the people were healed and new life came to the people.

And John uses it to talk about Jesus in whom hurting humanity, as it were, is held up on the cross and the paschal mystery of new life from that death emerges.

And in our lives? What is that which needs to be held up so that we, too, who are wandering in the desert, the wilderness might be healed, might know new life.  We, as Nicodemus, search for the light of truth, for new life.

This Lent our theme is “emptying ourselves” so that God (new life) might be allowed to enter us.

This process beckons us to acknowledge:

• that which needs to be held up, as the bronze serpent in the desert and as Jesus on the cross, and
• that, as Nicodemus, we need to go through the dark to find the light.