Moses and the Serpent

I have not been a faithful blogger by any stretch of the imagination, and I suspect that even those few people who used to read this blog have given up hope of seeing a new post. Adding something like blogging to a full life only comes about by subtracting something else. The subtractions have their own merit, however, and eventually return to crowd out the new. The trick is to keep everyone happy, the old and the new. Sounds like church, doesn’t it?

This week’s OT lesson about Moses and the bronze serpent is one that makes the scientist in me just cringe. It’s sympathetic magic, plain and simple, and no commentary can convince me otherwise. I imagine the average person walking into a church and hearing that and thinking, well, that’s a bunch of malarkey! Why should I think this Jesus stuff is any less a pre-scientific tale than Moses’ serpent? Why, indeed.

It’s clear that the passage from Numbers was chosen because of the reference made to it by Jesus in John’s Gospel. Yet that hardly helps. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness” sounds like “what I’m about to say next has as much validity as that story about Moses.” I know that Jesus transforms the story; it becomes a story about salvation rather than a story about magic. But why isn’t the salvation story magic as well?

Then there’s the claim to exclusivity that runs throughout the Gospel of John. “Those who do not believe [in the Son] are condemned already,” John writes, “because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” This really is counter to contemporary culture. At least I know where to find some help with this one: Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. I suspect that dealing with that issue will help me with the other.

The trick will be figuring out how to explain all of this so a junior high student can understand it. It’s not likely that someone will walk into church off the street on Sunday. But it is likely that there will be youth there who have their own questions about how such antiquated stories can be read in church, and wonder what they can possibly mean to their lives today. That’s the real challenge of preaching.