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| "The Brazan Serpent" (Tissot, Fr. 19th Cent.) |
“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 might have eternal life.” (John 3:15)
Sometimes God can drive a
hard bargain. In the Hebrew Scripture lessons for Lent in Year B of the Revised
Common Lectionary, we’ve had this theme of God making pretty lousy deals.
Lousy, that is for God, but pretty good for the rest of us. There was God’s
non-aggression pact with Noah in which God promised never again to wipe out
humanity and asked no conditions on our part[i]. Then there was God’s
lopsided deal with Abraham in which God promised a whole freakin’ nation,
eternal fame, and more descendants than stars in the sky in exchange for a
little faith.[ii]
That was followed by God’s contract with Moses and the children of Israel in
which God, having already delivered the people safely out of slavery and was in
the process of providing their social safety net in the wilderness, asked in
return for obedience to ten little laws which were in the people’s best interest
to begin with.[iii]
(Spoiler alert: The
people reneged on that last deal, and we’ve been reneging on it ever since!)
But in the Hebrew
Scripture Lesson for Lent 4 (Numbers 21:4-9), God isn’t fooling around anymore.
Nope. It’s no more Mr. Nice God. God’s coming to the bargaining table with God’s
sleeves rolled up (Metaphorically speaking, of course. God doesn’t actually
have sleeves) and this time God means business. In this story God’s people—whom
God has rescued from slavery and provided for in a nasty, hostile, desert land—are
still whining, moaning, complaining and otherwise kvetching against God, their
leader Moses, and the circumstances they’re actually pretty darn lucky to be in.
So what does God do? God
makes the punishment fit the crime. Since they’re tearing apart their own
nation with lies and contemptuous speech—with poison from their mouths—God gives
them a taste of some really poisonous
mouths. God sends venomous snakes to bite the people and teach them a lesson.
Suddenly, as they’re all dying from snakebite, they don’t think Moses is such a
bad leader anymore. Now they want to suck up to him so he’ll mediate with God
and save them from these disagreeable reptiles.
God tells Moses to make a
serpent of bronze and put it on a tall stick and make the people look at it. I
think what God wanted was to have the people see themselves. They needed to see
their own sin, their own likeness to poisonous snakes. They had to see it, own
it, and repent of it. God was telling them: “You want to be healed? You want me
to heal you? First you need to acknowledge who you are and what you’ve done. You’re
vicious, self-involved, ungrateful, and low-down. And if you won’t see that you
won’t get well.”
I think that’s something
Jesus is trying to tell Nicodemus in the accompanying Gospel Lesson (John
3:14-21). We all need to see the Son of Man lifted up. We need to contemplate
what it is to have a human being impaled on a piece of wood and left hanging
there to drown in his own bodily fluid. We need to recognize just how cruel a punishment
this was and how twisted the injustice of it was to put an innocent man through
that kind of torture. And we need to learn gratitude to believe Jesus loved us so
much he was willing to suffer in this grotesque way. We need to look to the
cross and the man who is bleeding and dying upon it.
There’s a real
misconception among American Protestants about the absence of the image of the
suffering Christ in our churches. We’ve been told Roman Catholics focus on the crucifix—the
cross with Christ’s image upon it—because their theology emphasizes Jesus’ suffering.
Protestants, we’re told, view the empty cross because our theology emphasizes
Christ’s resurrected victory.
This is not actually
true.
I’ve always suspected the
absence of Christ’s image on Protestant crosses was due merely to the early
Protestants’ poverty and inability to pay the craftsmen who so lovingly
depicted our Lord’s dying form. Similarly, the opulence of church art was seen
as symbolic of a decadent, usurious, and oppressive church hierarchy. The
Protestants opted for simplicity, but Martin Luther would doubtless have us
keep our focus on our Lord’s pain and sacrifice.
Luther would want us to
know that this disgusting and savage form of execution was devised by human
beings just like us. Just as human beings are responsible for the savage
suffering in Gaza and Ukraine. We are responsible for damage to the earth,
climate change, and pollution. We are responsible for gun violence, racial
oppression, and poverty. And if we fail to look at these things, these things
will continue.
We are in a crucial
moment in history.[iv]
It’s very easy for us, smothered as we are with news and information, to want
simply to ignore it all and turn our attention inward to our own, individual
needs, grievances, or whatever. However, if all we want to do is sing “Victory
in Jesus” and accept simplistic answers to complex moral questions, we are
missing the point of the Gospel. If we ignore our sin, we won’t be free of it.
The great Lutheran
theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer was asked in 1943 how the German
Church could allow someone like Hitler to seize power. His reply: “It was the
teaching of cheap grace.” According to Bonhoeffer:
“Cheap grace is the
preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church
discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal
confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross,
grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”[v]
We run, I think, a
serious risk of bitterness, apathy, and decay of the soul if we do not look to
Christ lifted up on the cross. It is there and only there that we recognize our
sin. It is there that we learn compassion and love. It is there that we are
healed.
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