The Cross and the Caduceus

Propers: The Fourth Sunday in Lent, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

They called it Nehushtan, and at one point it was worshipped as a god.

The name is a play on words. It can mean either “brass” or “snake,” and that’s exactly what Nehushtan was: a brazen metal serpent wrapped about a pole. Moses had cast it, they said; Moses had fashioned it at the command of Almighty God. But over time it became an idol, a magical fetishistic statuette. And so King Hezekiah destroyed it during his religious reforms, breaking the snake into pieces. At that point it was said to have been some 700 years old.

The image of a snake on a stick is surprisingly ubiquitous throughout history and across cultures. Sumerians, Babylonians, Greeks, Aztecs all knew some version of it. And while the significance of it to most of those peoples may have been lost to time, the serpent on a pole is most often associated with duality, the union of opposites: with life and death, weal and woe, poison and cure.

To the Greeks it was the Rod of Asclepius, the famous physician. He was said to have derived his cures from serpents, which we instinctively fear due to their venom, yet which appear to possess the secret of eternal youth. An old, beat-up snake sheds its skin, and thus is renewed. Even today, herpetologists “milk” the venom of vipers in order to distill new medicines. Asclepius’ cures, mind you, were called pharmakoi, a word that can mean medicine or poison or addiction—rather like the English word “drugs,” which we find at a pharmacy.

Sometimes the Rod of Asclepius was confused with another symbol, the caduceus. They’re very similar. But whereas the Rod of Asclepius has a snake on a stick, the caduceus—symbol of the god Mercury, or of the pagan prophet Hermes Trismegistus—displays two serpents intertwined upon a rod with wings. It was said that the caduceus would wake the sleeping and send the waking to sleep. If applied to the dying, it made death gentle; if applied to the dead, it raised them back to life.

An ancient symbol with a curiously steady meaning. Consider that the next time you see it on the back of an ambulance or the side of a hospital.

In the Bible, of course, the serpent-and-staff is neither the Rod of Asclepius nor Mercury’s caduceus. It is, again, Nehushtan, the brazen serpent. And the story told about it is a curious one. It takes place during Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, between their liberation from slavery in Egypt and their resettlement in the Promised Land of their ancestors.

Facing the hardships of the wastes, the Israelites grow grouchy and grousing. They claim to miss how easy they had it as slaves. “Why have you brought us out of Egypt, only to die in the wilderness?” they demand, and so curse both God and Moses. Then, in the midst of their complaint, poisonous serpents start to plague them, biting many, killing some. And they interpret this as God’s punishment for their sins.

Now, how literally one takes this is open to exegesis. Does God send serpents to do His dirty work, His alien work? Or is this the natural result of large groups migrating through the desert having removed themselves from any sort of divine guidance? I confess my interest piqued by the term chosen to describe them, for what we translate as venomous or poisonous is literally “fiery” and “burning”—that is, seraphim. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because this is the term we use in the Bible for the highest choir of angels: the Seraphim, the Burning Ones, the Dragons of the Lord.

That’s right, people. It seems that Satan was a serpent long before he fell. When we imagine the cherubs and seraphs of the Bible, we tend to think of Renaissance paintings, of chubby little cupids and of soft white wings. Yet in the Hebrew Scriptures, cherubs are lions and seraphs are snakes. This isn’t a literal description, of course. Angels, being spirits, do not possess a physical form. But we are reminded how dangerous holiness can be, when heaven is populated by lions and by dragons.

Anyway, people are getting bitten by snakes. And they beg Moses to pray to God to make the snakes go away. But He doesn’t. The snakes, it seems, are here to stay. Yet what God does do is instruct Moses to cast the brazen serpent, a metal snake on a pole. And should anyone be bitten by a flesh-and-blood snake, they have but to look to the shiny brazen serpent and they live. Once again the image of the snake on a stick is both life and death, both poison and cure.

You may recall that earlier, in the story of the Exodus, God instructed Moses to display His power to Pharaoh by casting his shepherd’s staff upon the ground, and that staff would thus become a snake. And when Moses seized the serpent by the tail, it grew stiff and wooden once more. Now, this was a different staff than Nehushtan, but people gave this one a name too. They called it Ebenezer, the Staff of Moses. And besides being spooky—sticks turning into snakes—God had in this wonder a clear message for the Pharaoh.

See, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, those who have died, and especially Pharaoh, must be guided safely through the underworld to the land of the gods. And the underworld holds many horrors for a poor, lost Egyptian soul—the most dangerous of these being Apophis, the Chaos Serpent of hell.

But fear not, for in the Book of the Dead, divine guides appear to guard souls and to lead them safely through their terrors. These guides, these gods, can be recognized by the serpent-headed staff that they carry. Their staves transform into snakes in the underworld, which surround and protect the dead from the serpent Apophis. Thus, a staff that turns to a snake is the sign of a god; just as Moses’ staff turns to a snake before Pharaoh, and consumes the serpents of the Egyptian priests when they try to emulate this miracle by their magic. Once again, we have serpents as both life and death, protector and predator, devilish and divine.

Bishops in the Christian East carve serpents on their staves to this day, just as bishops in the Christian West used to do back in the Middle Ages. It’s all there in the Bible.

So now the $64,000 question: What does all this have to do with Jesus? We’ve talked about Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews—what about Jesus? What is the snake to Him?

In our Gospel this morning, Jesus is speaking with Nicodemus, a highly educated and well-respected leader of the Pharisees. Yet Nicodemus does not come to Jesus by day, for fear of his reputation, fear of what people might say. He comes by night. And so Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus is peppered, even more so than the Gospel of John as a whole, with references to light and dark, night and day. Jesus can also, in a sense, cut loose intellectually, for Nicodemus is an educated man, wise in the ways of both Hebrews and Greeks.

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus says, “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 whole world might be saved through Him.”

Here we have the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16, and it is in the context of Nehushtan, the brazen serpent on a pole. Just as the snake was a sign of death and fear to the Israelites, which God transformed into life and light, so shall Jesus be lifted up—lifted high on the Cross for all the world to see. To those in darkness, the Crucifixion appears as horror, shame, humiliation, defeat. But for those who recognize the Light, which the darkness cannot overcome, the Cross is God’s judgment on the world: that He has sent His Son, His Word made flesh, not to condemn the world but that all the world should be saved in Him!

Christ is the snake on the stick. His is the death by which death has now died. He is poison to the false and balm to the true and we have both of those within us, do we not? Judgment Day isn’t what we think it is, what we feared it would be. It isn’t terror and danger and flashing, dripping fangs. It isn’t God out to get us. Our judgment has already been declared from that Cross: Not Guilty, purely by God’s grace. Not Guilty, by the Blood of the Lamb we have slain.

Come out from the darkness. Live in the Light. Look to the God whom we killed on the Cross—who took all our violence and drowned it in love—and know that this world has been saved.

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