Look up to Him and Live - Lent 4

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Numbers 21:4-9 and John 3:14-21

Back in June when Rachel and I were first launching into our long three-and-a-half-month tour through the stories from Genesis and Exodus, I sited a famous address from 1917 by the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who insisted that, “within the Bible there is a strange, new world, the world of God.” I noted how in that strangeness, we glimpse something of the human struggle to understand and even contend with the divine.

Well, there is some serious strangeness in tonight’s reading, what with its poisonous snakes sent by God and the strange image of a bronze serpent being raised up on a pole as a source of healing. What’s going on here?

By this point, it has been close to 40 years since they left Egypt, so this incident is quite close the end of their wilderness time. Yet still their protests continue: “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.” No food… and we detest this miserable food, which is a bit like the kid looking into the fully stocked fridge, and complaining, “Mom, there’s nothing to eat…” Yes there is food, it is called manna, and you’re been nourished by it for close to 40 years now. “Not manna again, Mom…”

Their complaint, the writer tells us, is against both Moses and God, and God’s response is quick: those venomous snakes that bite and kill. Here Elizabeth Webb comments,

One of the most difficult questions that this text clearly raises is that of the character of God. What kind of God is this who inflicts death on people for their lack of trust? Recall that the people have been to Sinai; they have received the law and are bound in covenant with God. Their lack of faith is, to the writers of this passage, a violation of the covenant, and therefore worthy of punishment.

Sure, that’s fine so far as it goes, but that is a rather different framework for the character of God than the one in which I’ve been formed, both as a believer and a priest. That’s part of the strangeness of the story and its world; that’s why we can’t just dismiss the story by saying something like, “Oh, that’s not my kind of God, sorry”, but rather must return to it and wrestle in it.

The other bit of strangeness is in the remedy which God offers once the people have come to Moses saying—rather predictably, I’d have to add—“We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.”

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.

That’s truly a strange one, and not merely because “the entire healing procedure in this text smacks of sympathetic magic” and even “quackery,” as the Old Testament scholar Terrence Fretheim puts it, but also because it seems a rather clear violation of the commandment against graven images, “whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Yet here in response to Moses’ prayers for the people, God directs that a bronze serpent be made and then raised high on a pole, such that anyone who is bitten and then looks upon it will live.

And it is not as if they used it during the invasion of snakes, and then gratefully melted it down, for as it turns out it is carried with them across the Jordan and into the land of promise, where it eventually finds a home on display in the temple Solomon would build, evidently considered an entirely orthodox symbol. It isn’t until sometime around 700BCE that the reforming King Hezekiah second guessed that decision and had the thing destroyed, as people had fallen into a practice of making offerings to it.

Seriously Lord, couldn’t you have seen that coming? I mean I am fully aware that symbols and rituals can be an important part of our spiritual practice, and even Jesus used a bit of spit and dirt to make mud to anoint the eyes of a blind man, but so many of the stories of your ancient people tell us that they were inclined to miss the point and fall into some rather disastrous practices—kings, priests, and people alike.

Truly a strange story, and one that evades easy resolution.

And yet it is precisely this story that Jesus calls upon during his late-night conversation with the Pharisee Nicodemus. “

Jesus said to Nicodemus, “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.”

He’s remembering the story and he knows that Nicodemus will remember it too. The story of the poisonous snakes and the bronze figure had not been set aside in the Judaism of Jesus’ day, dismissed as too strange or too arcane to retell. No, the strange story with its strange symbol is invoked as a way of coaxing Nicodemus forward, out of the darkness of the night in which he’d come toward the light he really needed.

Recalling that the snakes are not taken away in the original story but rather that healing is offered after a person had been bitten, Terence Fretheim notes,

There is a gift of healing where the pain experienced is the sharpest. Deliverance comes, not in being removed from the wilderness, but in the very presence of the enemy. The movement from death to life occurs within the very experience of godforsakenness. The death-dealing forces of chaos are nailed to the pole.

And then making the connection to this Gospel conversation with Nicodemus, Fretheim continues,

And so one day the pole must reappear in another godforsaken place, high on a hill, overlooking the holy city. God himself has taken to the pole! Once for all. So that all those who know they are dying in the wilderness can be healed. Look up to him and live… in the wilderness.

“So that all those who know they are dying in the wilderness can be healed,” which is another way of saying that we are not saved from struggle, pain, sin, and death, but that we are saved right in the very midst of those things.

“Look up to him and live,” says Fretheim, “in the wilderness,” and many of us are in wilderness terrain right now, whether on account of having taken on the spirit of this Lenten season or simply because life, the pandemic, physical or emotional frailty are throwing us a series of curve balls we simply can’t catch.

Look up to him, who has been hung on a cross, buried in a tomb, and thus opened the way to resurrection life. Look up to him and live… right her and now, in the wilderness.