The Snake and the Stick

Propers: Laetare (Lent 4), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

In our Old Testament reading for today, poisonous snakes afflict God’s people Israel in the wilderness. And the people interpret the attack of these serpents as punishment from God for their sins.

The word used here for snakes is seraphim, which literally means fiery ones, burning ones. It brings to mind the image of tiny dragons, or of the rattlesnakes in the woods of Pennsylvania where I grew up. I should note that the text does not explicitly claim that God sent the serpents as punishment. It is implied, and it is certainly the conclusion that the people themselves draw, but never clearly stated.

The people assume that God is punishing them because they already know that they have sinned. They already know that they are guilty and deserving of punishment. So they turn to Moses, the great prophet and lawgiver, and they beg him to pray to God, to intercede for them, that God in His mercy would make the serpents go away.

Moses dutifully prays, and God answers that prayer. But not in the way that they expect. God doesn’t take away the snakes. Instead, God gives to them a new snake. God tells Moses to fashion a bronze serpent—a graven image, mind you—and to place it atop a staff, a long pole. And should anyone be bitten by a venomous snake, a fiery one, they have but to look upon the bronze snake and they will live.

God doesn’t take away the thing that afflicts His people. Instead, He transforms the very agent of their suffering into the instrument of their deliverance. How peculiar. The serpent giveth, and the serpent taketh away.

The Israelites are grateful, of course, and they keep the bronze serpent as a reminder of God’s promise and mercy, how with but a look He had forgiven them their sins and saved them from death. Eventually, generations later, the bronze serpent would be placed in the holy Temple in Jerusalem as a memorial of this. But, being human, the Israelites had a tendency to overdo it. People began to worship the snake itself as a god, bringing offerings to the bronze serpent of Moses, and the king at the time was forced to melt it down to prevent its being used as an idol.

Snakes and sticks, mind you, have a long history together. Early humans developed such good eyesight in part so that we could watch for snakes. And just as it was back then it is today: if you want to catch or kill a snake, you’re going to need a stick. Yet if snakes were a symbol of death due to their venom, they were also a symbol of life due to the shedding of their skin. They seemed to us immune from the ravages of time and old age, and we envied them for that.

There’s a reason that the Rod of Asclepius—that ancient medical symbol—has a snake or two around a pole. The blood of the gorgon, a snake-monster, was said to produce for Asclepius both medicine and toxin, both death and life. The Greek root of our word pharmacy can be translated as either the poison or the cure. A little bit of venom makes you immune to the bite.

The ancient Egyptians picked up on this too. In their religion, the gods would guide deceased Pharaohs through the underworld by holding up a staff that transformed into a guardian snake, to defend them from the great serpent down below. When Moses cast his staff before Pharaoh in the Bible, and the staff became a snake, this was a clear sign to all present that Moses was defended from death by a God.

Of course, a serpent in a tree must also bring to mind Satan infiltrating the Garden of Eden, promising to us as he did a new and godlike life, while instead delivering only suffering, sin, and death. It makes a certain sort of sense that our oldest earthly foe, the snake, would come to represent our ancient spiritual foe, the Devil. Both possess a lethal bite.

But getting back to the bronze serpent. I mentioned that the serpent on the pole was placed by later generations in the great Temple at Jerusalem. But we must keep in mind that the Temple was understood to be merely a representation, a model or microcosm, of greater eternal realities that exist beyond the heavens. Everything in the earthly Temple was but the image of a greater truth in the heavenly Temple. And this went for the serpent as well.

When Isaiah experienced his great prophetic vision of Heaven, he said he saw seraphim—burning ones, fiery ones—soaring and dancing about and above the very throne and presence of God. And they burned because they radiated with the reflected glory and power and love of the God whom they adored. Ever since then, the very highest of the angels, the ones so far above us that we cannot hope to comprehend them, have been known as seraphim, the burning ones. We might think of them as the dragons of God.

Thus are the highest of the angels in Heaven and the lowest of the demons in hell both described as serpents, as dragons, and burning ones. The celestial seraphs burn for their rapturous love of God, while the infernal one burns only with rage and wrath and pain and pride.

Thus once again we discover the dual nature of the snake as a religious symbol, at once embodying life and death, wisdom and folly, the hellish and the holy. To this day, the bishops of the Eastern Church bear as the sign of their office brazen staves sprouting snakes. And it’s due to all of this.

Okay, so, what’s my point? Why go off on all these esoteric tangents? It’s because the snake teaches us something about God. The people are afflicted by poisonous serpents in the wilderness and they think it’s God punishing them. So they pray for the snakes to go away! But the snakes don’t go away. Instead, God answers their prayers by turning the very thing that afflicts them into the thing that saves them.

That’s why the serpent on a stick is Christ on the Cross.

In life, we suffer. And we don’t suffer because God is cruel or indifferent. We suffer because it’s a broken world, and because we are broken people. Things that are good have been twisted bad. And even things that are still good are often misunderstood or avoided or experienced as bad.

There is no avoiding suffering in this world. We wish there were. We wish God would snap His almighty fingers and force the world to be good again, take all the snakes away. But He doesn’t. Instead, He shows us that the way to deal with suffering is to confront it, to transcend it, so that we can become more than what we were and thus be enabled to alleviate the suffering of others. That’s the hero’s journey. That’s death and resurrection.

And I know that’s a tall order. I know that’s impossible to ask of people. We aren’t heroes, we aren’t gods. We’re just people, broken people. Which is why God doesn’t only show the way, but leads the way. He becomes one of us. He becomes a mortal human being. And He confronts the suffering that we cannot confront. He takes all of it upon Himself, all our sin, all our suffering, all our anger and brokenness and pride. He takes it all, and He nails it to the Cross in His own flesh.

And then He transcends it. He transcends sin and death and hell. He pours out His life for the world and overcomes the world, filling to overflowing the vast chasm of our tomb, so that we have a God who suffers with us, who suffers for us, who enters into our very flesh and bone so that we too can confront suffering! We too can rise up from the dead! We too can work for the salvation of the cosmos by entering with others into their pain and taking it upon ourselves!

The very thing that broke us has now become our life. The very wounds we suffer are the way Christ enters in. The waters of our death become the waters of new birth.

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 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.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirt. Amen.