Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 30, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

A bronze serpent on a stick saving people from poisonous snake bites? Give me a break! I mean, what kind of stuff (I have to watch my language up here) are we expected to believe? We all know that a bronze replica of a snake won’t save anybody from anything, unless maybe you use it as a club to whack the poisonous snake that’s trying to bite you, which isn’t what Numbers says happened. What Numbers does say happened doesn’t happen today, and I don’t believe that it happened in the Sinai desert 3,500 years ago. Stories like this one from Numbers can, if taken literally, lend credence to the claim of some atheists that faith is nothing but superstitious nonsense.

So what then? Are we simply to reject this story altogether, to write it out of the Bible? I’m sure we all have passages that we would write out of the Bible if we could. I know I’ve got my list at any rate. I’d love to just put the Bible on my computer, highlight the passages I don’t like, and hit delete. Poof! Gone! Gone as magically as that bronze serpent supposedly cured snake bites. Now since, as you know, I am not a Biblical literalist, and since I take scholarly Biblical criticism very seriously, I think in fact that there are passages in the Bible to which we could do just that to our benefit, although we have to be very careful about how we do it. Paul’s statement that women should remain silent in church in 1 Corinthians, and Leviticus’ claim that homosexual acts per se are an abomination deserving death come to mind. These passages are reflections of ancient cultural prejudices and not the will of God.

Even though it sounds to our ears like primitive sympathetic magic, however, I’m not so sure this passage is one of those we can just ignore. One reason I’m not so sure that it is one of those is that it is included in the Revised Common Lectionary readings for this Sunday. The people who put together the lectionary are very smart people. If they included a passage it means, I assume, that they think there is something in the passage of value for us. They leave it up to poor preachers like me to figure out what that thing of value is for particular congregations like ours in particular times like ours. Sometimes I could just throttle them! But let me take a shot at pulling something of value for us here and now out of this apparent nonsense about Moses lifting up a bronze serpent and curing snake bite.

I suspect that it will come as no surprise to you that I think the way to do that is precisely not to take the story literally. There is a widespread belief in our culture today that reading the Bible literally is somehow the obvious, natural, and only legitimate way to read it, that until modern academic scholarship went to work on the holy text that is the way everyone always read it. The problem with that belief is that as an historical matter it simply isn’t true. From very early on, the church used many different ways of reading and interpreting Scripture, especially Hebrew Scripture. Literal reading was one of those ways, but only one of them. Almost from the beginning the church had no trouble seeing the stories of Hebrew Scripture as allegory, for example. They also used a technique, now fallen out of favor in academic circles at least but still a non-literal approach to Scripture, of seeing certain passages in Hebrew Scripture as what they called a "type" of things found in the Christian Scriptures, in the story of Christ. By "type" they meant that the thing or story in Hebrew Scripture represents a foreshadowing of Christ, a symbol in effect written long before Jesus that would be realized in him and that could be used to interpret who he was what he meant to the world. This is clearly a non-literal way of reading Hebrew Scripture. And one of the classic "types" of Jesus that the early church thought it found in Hebrew Scripture is this story of Moses lifting up the bronze serpent in the desert. It was, for the early church, a type of Jesus lifted up, of Jesus crucified and then risen. That, I think, is why the lectionary folks included it and did not hit delete when they came to it.

The connection between the two events may not be obvious to us (at least it wasn’t obvious to me when I first read these two passages as I prepared for today’s service), but it apparently was obvious to the author of the Gospel of John. Notice again how the passage we heard from John this morning begins: "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. In the understanding of the early church, Moses lifting up the bronze serpent to save the people from the poisonous snakes was equivalent to, or better was a "type" of, Jesus Christ being crucified and raised to save us from sin and give us eternal life. Can we make any sense out of that?

I think we can as long as we don’t get stuck in a literal understanding of the story of the bronze serpent. And to try to get at a non-literal understanding of the story that might be helpful, let’s ask why the early church thought Moses lifting up a bronze snake on a stick was somehow equivalent to Jesus on the cross. In other words, why did John say: "Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up...." I don’t think the answer lies in the image of the bronze snake on a stick itself. After all, that image bears only the most remote semblance at best to a man nailed to a cross and then risen from the dead. Rather, I think the answer lies in what the bronze snake on the stick was said to have done for the people. Recall that, as the story has it, God was angry with the people because they had been griping to Moses about how hard things were out there in the desert. Never mind that Moses had led them out of slavery in Egypt. Apparently they didn’t think freedom was all it had been cracked up to be, and they were not happy about it. Apparently in those days God really didn’t appreciate ingrates, so he sent poisonous snakes among them. Many people were bitten, and many people died. Seeing a bad situation getting a whole lot worse, the people repented of their lack of faith in Moses, and in God. Moses prayed for them, and God gave Moses those strange instructions about making an image of a snake on a stick. Odd as that sounds to us, the story says that it worked. When the people who were bitten looked at the bronze snake on the stick, they were healed. Given the Jewish sensitivity about images, we might expect them to see the snake as an idol, but apparently that wasn’t the storyteller’s point. The point seems rather to be that God had provided a way out for the people, a way for them to escape the consequences of their disbelief. And that is exactly what John is saying God did in Jesus. John says that whoever believes in Christ will have eternal life, that is, will be saved from what John believed to be the consequences of not believing in Christ.

So far so good, but I suspect that for most of you the connection between the snake on a stick and Christ on the cross is still not very clear. So let me try again. When we approach a story like the one this morning from Numbers, we can appropriately ask what the metaphorical meaning is of each element of the story. The element of the story I want to look at now is the poisonous snakes. Since they came among the people when they "spoke against God and against Moses," his prophet, they are, I think, a metaphor for the kinds of ills that beset us when we lose faith in God. What might those ills be? I suppose they could be almost anything. For me, I think they would be first of all fear, profound existential fear about my ultimate fate in the universe. Snakes aren’t a bad symbol for fear for most of us. The ills of loss of faith, for me at least, would also include loss of all sense of meaning in my life and a profound sense of cosmic loneliness, a sense of emptiness resulting from a belief that we really are all alone in the vastness of space. Also despair. Without faith in God I would have no source of hope for a better future. We talked about that problem a couple of weeks ago.

The Good News is that just as looking at the bronze serpent on the stick lifted up in the desert saved the people from snake bite, speaking metaphorically saved the people from the consequences of their unbelief, so our faith in Jesus Christ saves us from all of those existential ills that constantly beset us. With faith in Christ, we need not fear our ultimate fate, for we know that that fate is in God’s hands. With faith in Christ, we need never feel that our lives lack meaning, for each of us is called to serve Christ in the world. With faith in Christ, we need never feel ultimately lonely, for Christ is always with us, as Scripture promises. And with faith in Christ, we need never despair. Our hope is in God, and God does not fail us.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we replace our cross with a bronze snake on a stick. I am suggesting this. I speak this morning in a time of war. It is a war that I don’t think any of us is very happy about. It is a war that some of us strongly oppose. I suspect that in one way or another all, or at least most, of us feel some significant spiritual anguish because we find ourselves once again at war. Once again our soldiers are dying in a foreign land. Once again our nation’s wealth is being used to kill people and to bring destruction to a land inhabited by millions of God’s children. We all wish it were not so. For me, and perhaps for you, the present war is the closest and most threatening of the poisonous snakes trying to bite me today. The only place I can turn for my soul’s protection from that snake is to the cross of Christ. If we will cling to that cross, if we will pour out our sorrow and lay our grief at the foot of the cross, Christ will be with us. Christ will sustain us. Just as the bronze serpent saved the people from the snakes in the desert, the cross of Christ will save us from our snakes, even the snake of war.