Jesus the Snake--March 11, 2024

Jesus the Snake--March 11, 2024

[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." [John 3:14-15]

It was one of those old family stories the children of Israel recounted to their children around the hearth... one of the great legends handed down from past generations about the wild and mysterious days of the wilderness... a tale that had been told and retold over campfires and on journeys for centuries. It was story about the importance of trusting and respecting the awesome power of God. It was a lesson in not grumbling even when you couldn't see the next phase of the plan. And it was just plain weird, too.

It was the story of the poisonous serpents in the wilderness, and how a bronze serpent on a pole saved the day. And it's the story that Jesus references here in his conversation with Nicodemus, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, borrowing the imagery from the old tale in Israel's wilderness wanderings as a way of explaining the meaning of his looming cross. Now, Jesus just assumes that Nicodemus, who had been trained in the teachings of the Torah, knows the story and can recite it chapter and verse. But in case you never made it to Sunday School on the day they were getting out the poisonous snakes for the ol' flannel-board, here's the short version.

Once upon a time when the recently liberated, formerly enslaved children of Israel were wandering in the wilderness, they started complaining about life in the middle of nowhere. They didn't like not knowing where they were going... they were getting nostalgic for life in Egypt... they didn't like having to rely on God for food every day... and they were starting to get tired of trusting Moses to guide them. And they complained that they didn't think God was doing a very good job of taking care of them. So, as sometimes happens in life, God gave the people exactly what they asked for, and they realized it was not what they thought. God let the people see what it was like without God's direction, guidance, and provision. God withheld the protection the people had been relying on, and whaddayaknow, all of a sudden, poisonous serpents [which, you know, already live in the wilderness] started coming up to the people and biting them. So now you've got a whole group of people with dangerous snake-bites, who all of a sudden realize there had been a whole lot of dangers they hadn't even realized they were being protected from, that God hadn't even made a big deal about mentioning. But they're also on the verge of death from the venom--so God directs Moses to make a representation of a serpent out of bronze and set it up on a pole. 

And this is the absolutely bonkers part of the story--God just decrees that everyone who as much as looks at the bronze serpent will be healed from the snake bites. That's it. There's no sorriness ritual, no sermon demanding a public show of repentance. There's not even a logical connection between how looking at a snake made of bronze would cure a bite from a very real, very deadly actual snake. It's simply a question of whether they will trust that God has provided a way for them--and just look at the bronze serpent that you almost couldn't help but see, since it was up on that pole.

Now, once you get past the sheer strangeness of that episode from the book of Numbers, it's hard to hear that story be anything other than humbled by it. Here the people come off as fickle, foolish, and ungrateful, and when they get their just deserts, God provides a remedy that leaves no room for bragging. They realize ultimately that God knew what God was doing all along, that God has been caring for them in ways they didn't even know about, and then they are handed a remedy so unlikely and preposterous it has to be a gift of grace. In other words, there's nothing anybody has to "do" or "achieve" or "earn" in order to win the antidote to the snake bites--they simply trust that God has provided everything and is giving the healing away for free. You can't receive a free remedy for a problem you got yourself into and still be an arrogant jerk about it--you just can't. God's love has a way of doing that to us--healing us and humbling us at the same time.

And with that in the background, Jesus takes the image of the snake on the pole and tells Nicodemus that this is what he has come for, too. Just as the serpent in the wilderness was "lifted up" and provided life and healing to anybody who merely looked at it, so he [the "Son of Man," or "Truly Human One"] will be "lifted up" (a polite euphemism for a death on a cross, like a first-century lynching) and give life to any and all who trust him. That's it. No rituals to be performed. No quests to be completed. No offerings or sacrifices, and no rules mentioned as prerequisites. There is simply the free gift offered to anybody who finds themselves in a world of hurt and needing a lifeline. And it comes, preposterously, not from a vision of beauty, a meditation path to enlightenment, or a divine oracle, but from the grotesque figure of an executed man on a Roman death stake. The cross is the new pole, and Jesus casts himself as the new bronze serpent--the one who becomes ugly for the sake of making us whole and beautiful, the one who bears all of our deathliness to bring us to life.  Like the lyric by Garrison Starr puts it so achingly, "Ugly... I'll be ugly... I'll be ugly... so you don't have to be."  Yeah--that's Jesus, the one who becomes the new snake-on-the-pole who heals us at nothing more than a glace.

So what does any of this ancient storytelling have to do with us in the twenty-first century an ocean away from Jesus, Nicodemus, and the wilderness where the serpents live? Well, for one, Christians dare to believe that Jesus is our Savior and Healer, just as he says it here to Nicodemus. Jesus saves us the way the bronze serpent saved the bitten Israelites--that is, without our contributing effort, ability, skill, or smarts. It's all a gift, which undercuts any grounds we had for pride that makes us look down on someone else. It's why, after a lifetime of faith and dedicated service, Martin Luther's final words were, "We are beggars--this is true," and not, a la, Frank Sinatra's song, "I did it my way." It's why Jesus' community was always full of people who knew they were mess-ups and why it was such a scandal to the people who were trying to convince they world they weren't mess-ups.

Let's be honest: sometimes Christians talk about their faith like it's their accomplishment--they believe correctly about God, and should thereby be rewarded... or they have endured in the face of hostility [which is often why modern-day American Christians want to cast themselves as persecuted, even when we're not], and therefore have earned themselves one of those golden crowns. But that's not how Jesus talks about things here: he's not doling out rewards for the Heavenly Honor Roll. He's rescuing us from the hell-of-a-mess we've gotten ourselves into. And when we realize that, it has a way of humbling us. When we see that we're recovering from our own snakebites, it takes away our arrogant impulse to scold the person nursing a fang-shaped wound next to us. None of us gets to look down on the person next to us--we're all desperate for the same anti-venom.

And it turns out that God's already given it away for free without strings--there he is, lifted up on a cross, just where we can see him... and find ourselves healed.

Lord Jesus, we dare to believe you are rescuing us right now--let that knowledge humble us enough to love the ones around us who are recovering, too.