Numbers 21:4-9
So the Old Testament lesson this week is pretty weird. All the people of Israel are continuing in their fantastic habit of bitching and moaning--"murmuring" is of course the preferred theological term--and they're doing it without cause. Complaining with cause seems to go fine--the Psalms offer plenty of examples of that. However, when there's no cause, I can quite clearly here God sounding much like Tom Hanks from A League of Their Own in the line we used on small children at summer camp: There's no crying in baseball! They complain, in the same breath, that they don't get any food anymore, and that the food sucks. We are all, in our hearts, 8 years old.
So God decides to punish them. Earlier in Numbers, there's a story much like this one--as brief and with as few explanations. There, the people on the edge of the camp just start burning up. Fairly impressive, that.
But here, God sends snakes. I can't help but think that, somehow, calling them poisonous snakes is not the fairest translation of the Hebrew. The word in Hebrew is 'Seraphim', which, as you may know from that lovely hymn with all the heavenly orders or the tabernacle in Isaiah, is also a word for flaming heavenly beings.
The people then repent--probably the flaming snake-beings speed that along. And so God has Moses build a giant bronze snake, stick it on a pole, and if people look up at it, they'll live.
So it's a weird story.
Quasi-idolatrous, supernatural, and entirely unexplained. And, even stranger, it's the very image that comes to mind when Jesus is talking to Nicodemus in the gospels lesson for the day, John 3:14, when Jesus is looking for an analogy to his crucifixion. Can you imagine? A story so common to Jesus that it sprang immediately to his mind, yet a story so unusual that many people I've spoken to this week have never heard it. If you'll pardon the mixing of internet and church lingo, RCL FTW for using new lessons!
So, what do we do this story? Usually, I think, we ignore it, like we try to ignore most of Numbers. And in the gospel, everyone acts as though the gravity of the story pulled the meaning toward verse 16 simply because it matches what people want to be Jesus' thesis statement. Looking at the Jesus/Nicodemus dialogue as a whole, it's probably not a thesis statement for that section or the whole.
That snake on a pole, by the way, turns up again in the Old Testament, somewhere in one of the Kings. Hezekiah, that great cleanser of Temple worship, finds it in the Temple. Apparently people have given it a name and started worshiping it--entirely unsurprising, in a way, and so Hezekiah tears it down and burns it.
So, does this commend idol worship to us? Probably not. After all, God does the healing--the people simply must have faith enough to look up at the snake. But it might, in a roundabout way, show something interesting.
The snake-on-a-pole (sounds like a fried treat you'd order at the fair for a small child) starts out as an icon, a window into the divine forgiveness and (literal) life that comes from God. Then, it becomes an idol, so much so that Hezekiah has not a worry in the world about getting rid of a thing that Moses himself made. The people confuse a window for a painting, a hole for a stop sign, an icon for an idol, a symbol for what points beyond it. The snake-on-a-pole is supposed to serve as a convenient meditation and prayer aid, and soon it starts receiving prayers.
If Jesus is asking us to see his own crucifixion in a similar light, perhaps we should also consider the ways that we turn that event into an idol. Certainly, we keep crosses everywhere, sometimes with dying Jesuses on them and sometimes not. We expect them to ward off vampires, scare the ghosts that go bump in the night--we build them into the architecture of most interior doors, as though a cross itself is protection. You know, just in case.
But our idolatry of crucifixion goes far deeper. We begin to revel in the pain, not share in the suffering that it symbolizes. It is the difference between the Ignatian exercises and Mel Gibson's Passion. The difference is in many ways a subtle one, lost to one who glosses over the similarities. But the two processes are enormously different--Ignatius inviting us to look through a window, where Gibson invites us to self-satisfaction at our own awe and disgust.
So, our friend the bronze serpent certainly suggests that one theme--the many ways that we turn Christ into an idol.
