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| "Aesculapius / Äskulap" by Harald Schmid, on Flickr |
Numbers 21:4–9
From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against 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." Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned by speaking against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD to take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people. And the LORD said to Moses, "Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live." So 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.
Ephesians 2:1–10
You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God — not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
John 3:14–21
And 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. For 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. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God."
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Every hero has a weakness. For Indiana Jones, archeologist and adventurer, his downfall is snakes. He can deal with bugs and with death threats, motorcycle chases and skeletons, gunfights and treachery. But not with snakes.
Unfortunately for him, we start with snakes today, out there in the wilderness with Moses and the Israelites. We are at year thirty-seven of their forty-year wanderings. Most of the old generation has died off. With the taste of milk and honey already starting to entice these wanderers, their dissatisfaction with the current situation grows and grows. "There is no food," they say, " and the food that God has provided is terrible." It's the joke that opens Woody Allen's Annie Hall: “Two women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of ‘em says: ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know, and such…small portions.’” There is no food…and the food is miserable.
Grumbling becomes anger, and anger becomes rejection of the very God who had drawn them out of their slavery in the first place, and they beg to go back to Egypt because they think slavery is no big deal compared to hunger and weariness. And God, frustrated to high heaven with this ridiculousness, sends the same sort of plague on his own people as he had sent upon the Egyptians. Snakes. Snakes everywhere. Snakes that bite. Snakes that bite with venom. Snakes that kill. Terrifying. I think I'm with Indy on this one...
Hearing the cries of the people, Moses intercedes, and God relents, and tells Moses that he is to fashion a serpent out of bronze, and put it up on a cross-pole, and everyone is to look up at it, and in the lifting of their eyes will come their salvation.
For author and theologian Phyllis Tickle, this story of Moses and the bronze serpent is a formative story in her own faith development. She spends a number of pages in her memoir, The Shaping of a Life, retelling the story and reflecting on it. She points out that God's promise to Moses is that the people will be saved from death when they are bitten…but not that they won’t get bitten in the first place.
She reflects, "Those men and women and children who believed [Moses] and believed in Yahweh's message through him looked up at the pole with its burnished snake and not down at the desert vipers who were besieging them. They elected by a combined act of will and faith to look, not down where the agony was and where the snakes might still be pulled from their bodies and their children's bodies, but up where they might live. And, the story says, some eighteen months later those who had made that choice were those who entered by way of Jericho and its tumbling walls into the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey...."
If you're keeping track of the oddly circular logic in the story, the Israelites are being saved from death by the very image of the thing that is killing them. And at the same time, the Israelites are still navigating a world of snakes, but have in the cross before them a way to make it through the snakes alive.
In our sister story today in John 3, the image of the bronze snake on the cross pole is reimagined as the image of Christ being lifted up on the cross.
In John 3, Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus, a pharisee, a teacher of the law, who comes to him by night, wondering what he needs to do to be saved. Jesus has been teaching many people, many crowds, healing people, doing signs and wonders, that people might see him and believe.
We’ve been spending a lot of time in Mark’s gospel recently, where Jesus keeps shushing people and telling them not to make a big fuss about the miraculous stuff he’s doing, because he wants people to see him first and foremost through the lens of the cross.
But in John’s gospel, it’s all about the signs. Signs and wonders are the way that people come to know who Jesus is and who he came from. In fact, the book is organized around seven signs of Jesus, beginning with his turning water to wine at Cana. John's gospel is all about “seeing-is-believing.”
When Jesus talks about people of light and people of darkness, and how they will be judged for their deeds, he is really lamenting that there are people in his midst who have seen him, have witnessed the signs and wonders, and who still choose not to believe him.
Jesus says to Nicodemus that those who refuse the light, those who see but do not believe, have brought judgement upon themselves, and their judgment is simply this: that they continue to do evil deeds in the dark, which is, as it turns out, exactly what they are too afraid to stop doing.
But to those who believed, to those who followed Jesus around in person, and saw, and saw some more, and chose to step into the light, these words in John's gospel are the assurance that their belief in Jesus isn't worthless, that there is something more that is promised them beyond the joy of following a pretty nifty savior around the world. For God so loved the world that he sent Jesus to bring eternal life. Yes, that's the heart of the matter. For all the signs and wonders and teachings, the bonus is that Jesus has all power to give life.
This is how John's gospel begins. "In the beginning was the Word," that is, Jesus. And "in him was life, and the life was the light of all people…The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it."
And how does Jesus bring this light to us? By being lifted up, just like a bronze serpent. Lifted up onto the cross. Lifted up from death to life on Easter morning. Lifted up from earth to heaven at his ascension.
Yes, at the end of a book of signs and wonders, John’s gospel will be about seeing Christ lifted up on the cross and believing, and it will also be about seeing Christ resurrected and believing, and then, for us, not seeing Christ in the flesh and yet coming to believe.
We live in a world that is full of light and shadows. There are blazing sunrises, but there are also starless midnights. There are good deeds done in the light and there are evil deeds done in the darkness. In ourselves, we know that we have bright sides and shadow sides. The conflict between good and evil, darkness and light, things of God and things not of God is a very real conflict.
We know that there are snakes that bite us as we wander the wilderness of this world, things that nip away at us and destroy our spirits, things that cause us fear and pain, things that sting us and poison us and take all life from us if we let them.
Phyllis Tickle says, “I…know for a hard, enduring fact that life is full of snakes; that they bite fiercely; that they will kill you if you look down and wrestle with them; and that, peculiarly enough, the very act of being wrestled with often is what gives them their potency. I had also learned that, just as the story teaches, looking up doesn't stop the pain immediately, but it does prevent death from it...."
Just as the Israelites were saved from snakes by lifting up a snake, the same is true for us: the remedy for our human brokenness, for the brokenness and sin that bite and devour us and our world, is the lifting up of human brokenness in Jesus on the cross.
The God who delivered the Israelites from the Egyptians, who parted the Red Sea, who gave manna and quail in the wilderness and water from the rock, who worked through Moses and a bronze serpent to offer healing is the same God who delivers and saves us by the cross of Christ. God in Christ gives us the gift of being able to lift up our heads to see God's promises instead of being stuck watching the snakes swirl at our ankles. We affirm a God of salvation who is not apart from the pains of this world, but who offers us salvation even in the midst of it.
And so our faith always puts a choice before us: The choice to step into the light of salvation, or the choice to stay in the dark and do evil deeds that are their own condemnation. In the words of 1 Peter, "To you then who believe, [Christ] is precious; but for those who do not believe...they stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Paul, in Ephesians, reminds us that we were created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. These works are a sign of our salvation; faith restores in us the ability to choose deeds of light over deeds of darkness.
Brothers and sisters, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son to give us life when the world gives us snakebites. God did not send Jesus to the world to condemn us, but so that we might believe - that we might have proof! - that there is abundant, eternal life given to us as a gift of faith.
Lift up your eyes and see: there is light, even in shadows. There is salvation to be found. For Christ has been lifted up as a sign of life in the wilderness. And Christ says to each of us, “Walk on with me in this light, for we are about to cross over to the land of milk and honey. Do not be afraid. Lift up your eyes from the ground and live!”
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