Snakes get my attention. More than once have I been startled by that dark, wavy outline on the ground, on the edge of my field of vision, only to realize that it was a stick that scared me. Last week, Nancy and I went to see our newborn grandson Liam and his parents at their home, and I almost jumped off the front steps leading up to the door—there was a snake stretched across the handrail. Nancy just laughed—she already knew it was there, she had stopped by their house before, she knew it was a rubber reptile, and she let me know that its purpose was to keep birds from flying against the window by the door. We know how easily birds confuse the reflection of the sky on glass with the open sky itself. I noticed two more snakes, resting on top of the trimmed hedge like sunbathers, and I had visions of unsuspecting delivery people tossing boxes of pizza or diapers up in the air and running back to their vehicles, terrified.
My fear of snakes—or call it healthy respect—isn’t rooted in lived experience; I suspect it’s programmed into my DNA, a gift from ancient ancestors. Along with this fear, they have also passed on their fascination with serpents. The snake appears in the myths of peoples around the globe, and its image is among the oldest symbols humans have used. Our ancestors have been particularly intrigued by the snake’s ability to shed its skin, to quite literally slip out of it like some worn-out piece of clothing, and they associated powerful ideas like renewal and rebirth with it.
In Scripture, the serpent has a prominent role in the story of the garden of Eden, and a less prominent one in Exodus. There we read how God called Moses to go back to Egypt, and to tell God’s people that God had observed their misery, and knew their sufferings, and would deliver them from the Egyptians, and bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
In the course of the conversation that follows that call, Moses says, “Suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’” And the Lord responds, “What’s that in your hand?”
“A staff.”
“Throw it on the ground.”
So Moses threw his staff on the ground, and it became a snake. Moses, with healthy respect, drew back from it, but the Lord said, “Reach out your hand, and seize it by the tail”—so he reached out his hand and grasped it, and it became a staff in his hand.[1] That’s strong imagery, and it’s tempting to think that Moses’ crook was imbued with magical power or that Moses himself, the reluctant but faithful servant of God, possessed powers to divide the waters by simply stretching out his hand over the sea—but the power was God’s, and God’s alone.
What Moses did have, and God’s people did have, was the courage to trust God’s promise of liberation and land, good and broad land, flowing with milk and honey. And so they walked out of Pharaoh’s Egypt, into the wilderness—with joy, with hope, with confidence. But when the wondrous deliverance at the sea led only to more desert and hunger and thirst and one kind of trouble after another, they started complaining. “The people became impatient on the way,” we read in today’s passage from Numbers. Can you blame them? It’s one thing to hear stories about their wanderings, it’s another to do the wandering. And forty years of wandering is a very long time.
What happens to a promise when the horizon keeps moving from one line of dusty hills to the next without ever opening up to that good and broad land? The words that once had the power to inspire courage and hope slowly turn into mere talk without resonance or response. Regret and resentment set in, faith erodes. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they said to Moses. “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” To some they may sound like spoiled children, but forty years of wandering is a very long time. Forty years means that early on some of them had to make peace with the thought that they themselves might not ever set foot in the land of promise, but perhaps their children or their children’s children.
When the poisonous snakes came among them, and bit them, so that many of them died, the people immediately assumed they were being punished for speaking up, that giving voice to their frustration after years of wilderness wandering was an offense to God and to Moses. “Pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us,” they said to Moses. It is painful to think that God would act so punitively, but we know that this is where our hearts and minds can take us when trust in God’s faithfulness erodes. Don’t complain, or God will send snakes, the implicit theology seems to be. Just keep walking, eat your manna, don’t complain.
In the book of Psalms, though, we hear a very different voice:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?[2]
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.[3]
With the Lord one day is like a thousand years,[4] but God knows that for God’s people forty years can feel like a lifetime, and “just a few more weeks” can feel like entering the homestretch or like “no end in sight.” God knows that to God’s people justice deferred can be indistinguishable from justice denied. God knows that to God’s people the promise delayed can feel like the promise broken.
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.” The Lord didn’t smite the serpents or send them to a different part of the wilderness to bother the Canaanites or the Edomites, which suggests, to me at least, that their presence was not a punishment, but simply their presence. The serpents were there because they lived there, because there were plenty of rodents for them to eat there. They simply occupied their place in God’s good creation.
So the Lord didn’t take away the serpents from them as the people had asked Moses to pray, but neither did the Creator tell Moses to give the people a lesson in wilderness ecology. In fact, the Lord, who is very partial to speaking as a mode of communicating the divine will, and very critical of graven images because of their potential for encouraging idolatry, the Lord did a very risky thing by telling Moses to make a serpent and put it upon a pole for all to see—so that whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live. The power was not in the bronze sculpture, nor in the pole, nor in Moses who made and assembled the piece. The power was God’s who both visualized and fulfilled the promise of life in the very thing God’s people could only experience as yet another deadly threat. God assured them through the power of healing that the promise was not vain—and that was enough for them to resume the journey.
They carried the pole all the way to the promised land where it was given a home in the holy of holies for generations. The last time it is mentioned in the Old Testament is in 2 Kings, where we’re told that “[King Hezekiah] broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it.”[5] The symbol of God’s faithfulness had become, in Cameron Howard’s words, “a bronzed, domesticated, manufactured idol.”[6] The image had ceased to point to the living God; it only pointed to itself. Any object, of course, any building, any ritual or idea is in danger of becoming a mere idol, a bronzed or gilded dream.
Jesus, according to the Gospel of John, picks up the broken tradition of the serpent in the wilderness. He picks it up to speak of his own being physically lifted up on the cross as well as of his being lifted up in exaltation by God, for the sake of life. From our perspective, the cross is torture, a violent assertion of imperial power, a triumph of sin, a moment of complete humiliation and defeat. But from Jesus’ perspective, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are a single movement of exaltation. And just as Israel was “paradoxically required to look upon the very thing that brought death in order to receive life, so we are asked to look upon Jesus’ ‘lifting up’ in humiliating crucifixion” and see it, recognize it as God’s glorification of Jesus and the salvation of the world in the embrace of this love and life.[7] In the embrace of this love, life in fullness is both the promise that draws us into communion with God and God’s creation, as well as its fulfillment. In the embrace of this life, we already participate in the fullness we await. May God continue to bless your journey.
[1] Exodus 4:1-5
[2] Psalm 13:1-2
[3] Psalm 22:1-2
[4] 2 Peter 3:8
[5] 2 Kings 18:4
[6] Cameron B.R. Howard https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-numbers-214-9-3
[7] See Lance Pape https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-john-314-21-3