Lent IV

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

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I NEVER DID LIKE SNAKES .  When I was a kid in Mississippi, every so often one would show up in our yard or the shed by our house or in the garden, and either my dad would go after it with a shovel or, if we were at my grandmother’s house, she might shoot it.  Snakes were already something to be afraid of, and that was before I became a consumer of media.  One of the first cartoons I can remember was called “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” about a family who moves into a bungalow in India and run afoul of two cobras who resent the intrusion into their house and garden.  The snakes hatch (no pun intended) a plan to kill the family, but Rikki the mongoose kills the snakes and saves the family.^[1]  All’s well that ends well in the cartoon, but I had dreams for months about cobras slithering all around my house.  My favorite miniseries of all time just made it worse.  “Lonesome Dove” was a great miniseries, and I own it on DVD, but I always have to fast-forward through the part where Sean, the sweet Irish kid, gets attacked by a swarm of water moccasins crossing a river.  Blame it on the media, or blame it on my grandmother, but I have snake issues.

Now take my aversion to snakes, multiply it by about a thousand, and that’s probably how much the Hebrew people disliked snakes.  For some people, snakes had good connotations, like the Egyptians who revered the snake as a sign of fertility and rebirth because it shed its skin.  Even the AMA has used a caduceus (a pole with two intertwined serpents) as its symbol because of the snake’s connection to healing.  But the Hebrew law called the snake unclean and “detestable” (Lev. 11:41).  A snake tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden.  It was one of the ultimate symbols of sin.  Yet in today’s gospel, Jesus takes the story of “the Bronze Serpent” and uses it parabolically, as a “type” of his coming crucifixion.  The Greek “tupos” means a form or a pattern, and a type is an event that happened in salvation history that then becomes a lens to interpret a later event. ^[2]  The earlier event (the prototype) foreshadows the later event (the “anti-type”) like the Exodus foreshadowed baptism.  The Israelites looked at the serpent Moses raised in their camp and their physical lives were saved; that event became a lens through which we see how people look in faith at Jesus to receive not just physical life, but eternal life. 

Looking at today’s OT reading in that way, the story of the serpent on the pole can also be a lens through which we see our own story of salvation.

First, it foreshadows how the way of our salvation can feel like a detour – The people of Israel journeyed from Mount Hor by the way of the Red Sea, to compass the land of Edom, and the soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way.  (Num. 21.4)  When Israel left Mount Hor on their journey toward the Promised Land, the KJV says they had “to compass the land of Edom.”  The Hebrew is clearer because it says they had to “go around” where the Edomites lived.  They had to take a detour.  Moses had asked the King of Edom for permission to travel through his territory on “the King’s Highway,” but he refused.  (Num. 20.14-21)  So Moses had to lead the people around Edom, through some really tough territory, and they were none too pleased about it.  Our version says “the soul of the people was much discouraged,” but the literal Hebrew is that their soul was “shortened.”  They didn’t have anything left.  They were at the end of their rope; the trip was getting on their last nerve.  They were tired of manna, Moses and God, and now they had to detour, to go out of their way to get where God wanted them to go. 

Israel’s story foreshadows our story because the way God leads us along toward salvation is not the way we would choose for ourselves.  Lent is like a snapshot of that way.  It feels like a detour into places we don’t want to go.  It’s long; by the time we break out the rose-colored vestments, it’s getting really hard; and maybe you feel like it’s taken you into the wilderness.  And the wilderness is where the fantasies kick in.  Once they were in the wilderness, Israel did what they’d done before – they forgot how God had brought them out of slavery, and they started to fantasize about how much better they had had it back in Egypt.  They didn’t want manna; they wanted the food they had eaten as slaves.  They didn’t want the land they were promised; they wanted the old beds they’d slept in as slaves.  Like the Israelites had been slaves in Egypt, we have been slaves to sins of self-interest and to our old appetites.  In the wilderness we can forget we were really and truly miserable before.  We believe the lie that we were happier before our sanctification began and think how wonderful it would be to sink back into the comfort of our old situation and old habits again. 

But it’s often in the middle of the wilderness that we see the other way the story foreshadows our salvation, namely the that our salvation is (a) from a real danger, (b) by an objective event, (c) subjectively applied – And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.  (Num. 21.8) 

First of all, our salvation is from a real danger.  The snakes biting the Israelites were real.  They weren’t just figments of the imagination, and the people couldn’t get free of them just by getting in the right state of mind and pretending they weren’t there.  They couldn’t meditate them out of the camp.  Israel was under God’s judgment, so they repented of complaining against Moses and God, and God provided a way for them to be saved, the serpent Moses crafted and put on a pole.  Like the snakes, the means of their salvation was a real thing, something objective, something that existed outside themselves. 

But the objective event had to be subjectively applied.  For those who were dying, the image wasn’t magic.  They weren’t healed simply because Moses made the image and put it somewhere in the camp; each one had to look at it.  God provided the means of their healing, but they could only appropriate it by trusting that what God told Moses was true, that they could save their lives if they would look at the serpent.  The objective event couldn’t do them any good unless they subjectively applied it as individuals.

We face a real danger, as well.  We’re really separated from God, really in slavery to sin.  St. Paul says “[a]ll of us once lived . . . in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and sense, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.”  (Eph. 2.3)  Jesus himself said “those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.”  (John 3.18)  But for us there is an objective event that has to be subjectively applied, too.  Raymond Brown wrote in his commentary on the book of Numbers: 

Anybody could look [at the brazen serpent], though not everybody did.  All that was required was a believing look, and healing was assured.  Nothing more was necessary; nothing else would do . . . .  Jesus explained to his disciples that, like the bronze serpent in the desert, he too would be ‘lifted up.’  He would die a sacrificial death on the cross.  If women and men looked away from their sins, self-effort and reliance on religious observances or moral achievements, they could be released from the vicious sting of sin’s power and the fear of death, receiving the underserved gift of eternal life.^[3]

The objective event by which God saves us, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, really happened in history.  But only when we look to that event in faith do we find our salvation, and that’s why the brazen serpent was an “apt picture of [Jesus’] own saving ministry.”^[4]  Michael Card is a singer I like who actually wrote a song about this story.  The refrain says:  “Lift up the suffering symbol, place it high upon a pole; tell the children to look up and be made whole.”^[5]  We have to look up to be healed.  We can’t do it by looking back, by looking to a romanticized past, wishing things could just go back to the way they were.  We can’t do it by looking around us, focusing on the “dangers of our journey” or the “forbidding landscape of our lives.”^[6]  Only by looking with faith at the figure on the cross can we find salvation.

The question for us is:  Will we look up?  At the end of the prayer of consecration in every mass, we’re called to look up, to “Behold the lamb of God; behold him who taketh away the sins of the world.”  That is the bread that can sustain us in the wilderness.  Look to that for healing and your salvation. 

Nothing more is necessary; nothing else will do. 

+ In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

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