Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent: Numbers 21:4-9
Early on in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, we learn that our hero, Indiana Jones, hates snakes. Later on, in the video clip above, he needs to enter a chamber where the floor is filled with snakes. “Why does it have to be snakes?”, he moans.
We can easily sympathize with him. The snake has long been a symbol of danger, duplicity and even the devil. Snakes inspire fear in many people. Few there are who love snakes, or who can see their positive qualities beyond the symbolism we have often seen in them.
This fear of snakes is itself a symbol. If you don’t share Indiana Jones’ visceral loathing of snakes, what, then, is your ‘snake’? What inspires the same kind of reaction in you that we see in Indiana Jones in this clip?
In today’s reading from the book of Numbers, the people of Israel have a “snake moment”. Their faith in God and in Moses is being tested by their long journey through the inhospitable wilderness of the Sinai peninsula. God has sustained them up to now. Still, they begin to doubt, and then to complain against God and Moses. They fear that they will die of hunger of thirst in this arid environment, and, in their fear, lament that they were better off as slaves in Egypt. They even complain about the manna that God has fed them with.
As a result, saraph serpents appear on the scene. Their bites cause many to die. Ironically, in allowing their fear of death in the desert to override their faith in God, the people have brought on themselves the very thing they feared in the first place. They then go to Moses, acknowledge their sin and failure to trust, and beg him to pray that the Lord will take the serpents from them.
Interestingly enough, God does not remove the snakes. No, he tells Moses to make a bronze snake, mount it on a pole, and to tell anyone who has been bitten by a snake to look at the bronze one. All who do so will be cured. In a strange and unexpected way, the very source of their fear would be transformed into the means by which they would be saved from that fear. The snake, a symbol of death, would become the means through which God would give new life. The feared object will not be banished. People must face that fear, in faith, to find grace and healing. The feared object will be transformed into a great gift – but only in this way.
Death has been, and remains, the greatest fear that people encounter. Governments use the fear of death at times – in the form of capital punishment – as a means to deter people from certain serious crimes and to compel obedience and more desirable behavior.
Fast forward to the coming of Jesus. The Romans also used capital punishment. For them, the ultimate weapon was the cross. Crucifixion was considered the most degrading, most horrible way for anyone to die. The Romans counted not only on fear of death in general, but in fear of the cross in particular, to keep their subject peoples in line. The cross was certainly a kind of “snake” for the people of Jesus’ time.
In this context, it’s easy to see how startling , strange and even sickening it must have seemed to His first hearers when Jesus proclaimed that anyone who would follow Him must take up their own crosses each day. The cross? Such a symbol of fear and death? The cross, the ‘snake’ of their own time? How could that be?
Jesus associated the cross with the story from Numbers about the saraph serpents and the bronze serpent. In today’s Gospel passage, He speaks about being “lifted up”. Later in John’s Gospel, Jesus will explicitly cite the Numbers story and say that just as people were healed by looking at the bronze serpent, so, too, when Jesus is lifted up, healing will come to all who believe in Him.
For people in Jesus’ time, the cross represented Roman power, fear, and the worst that could happen to those who broke Roman law. Jesus, in taking upon Himself the cross, and yet remaining to the end totally faithful to the Father, and then being raised up, broke that power of fear. Jesus made the cross a sign of His love for all humanity. He also made it a kind of trophy for Christians. It’s as though Christians could now say, “Listen, world… death on a cross… is that the worst you can do to us? Jesus Christ has faced the cross and transformed it. We know that death, even a horrible death, isn’t the last word for anyone who believes in Him.”
Jesus, then, has taken upon Himself our great fear, and changed it into our great sign of hope. All who look upon Him with faith, as the “good thief” did at Calvary, can be forgiven, healed and saved. If even the fear of death cannot overcome our faith, then what can? If even the greatest “snake” can’t defeat us in the end, then what can?
Be not afraid, then, to follow the Lord. Be not afraid of snakes, suffering, or even death. Look to the Lord, rather, with faith, hope, and love. The fearsome ‘snake’ of the cross is now the symbol of the Lord’s victory and of our salvation. What can anyone or anything ultimately do to us, if even the fear of death is now changed into hope and life?
May this be a source of encouragement for each one of us as we are confronted by our personal “snakes”!