Serpents and Salvation

When I was a graduate student in botany in North Carolina, I encountered a fair number of poisonous snakes. In Duke Forest I once discovered a copperhead right next to a measuring line that I had laid down. Another time in the southern Appalachians I found a rattlesnake coiled up in the sun in the middle of a trail. I made a wide detour around him, and decided then and there that I would never again refer to snakes as “cold-blooded.” I was pretty sure that fellow had very warm blood in him, and I didn’t want to get close enough to find out. On a trip to the Atlantic Coast we were taught how to tell the difference between the poisonous water moccasin and the non-poisonous but ill-tempered water snake. All of this made me very happy that I had chosen to study plants.

It also gave me a healthy respect for poisonous serpents. In Sunday’s reading from the book of Numbers, we hear how the Israelites wandering in the desert developed a healthy respect for serpents as well – or perhaps I should say had a very unhealthy encounter with them. It’s a rather bizarre story, in fact, one that pictures a God so annoyed with their whining that he unloads a whole trailer full of vipers on them. The plague ends only when Moses prays for help and is told to make a bronze serpent and run it up a pole. The snake-bitten people are healed when they look at it, as though this were some kind of magic.

Such stories always make me cringe when they show up on Sunday morning. I’m afraid that first-time visitors or long-time members will create a file marked “Unbelievable” into which they put stories like Moses and the serpent. Then they’ll be tempted to put stories about Jesus there as well. Isn’t it all from the same Bible? It doesn’t help that Jesus specifically links the story of Moses lifting up the serpent to his own being lifted up on a cross. On the other hand, we know that the latter actually happened. Jesus really was crucified. And Jesus reveals to us a very different picture of God than the one found in Numbers.

John’s Gospel shows no uncertainty about the reason Jesus was crucified. It was necessary that the Son of man be lifted up, the Gospel tells us, so that everyone who believes may in him have eternal life. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16 is a verse that many know by heart, one that Martin Luther called “the gospel in miniature” – and football quarterback Tim Tebow put on his face. In reality, we don’t know whether Jesus actually said those words or if they are part of John’s commentary. The ancient Greek texts did not include punctuation, so quotation marks are the work of a translator. But that’s not the point. John the evangelist, and the community for which he wrote, understood these words as explaining what God was doing.

“God so loved the world…” God’s desire for universal salvation is very clear here. There is no question that God desires all to receive eternal life. It is a gift given to us by the grace of God, as we hear in the letter to the Ephesians. It is the promise and the hope of Jesus Christ. At the same time, John’s community also recognized that there were people who refused to acknowledge Jesus. Most likely that community consisted of Jewish Christians who had been expelled from the synagogue both for their faith in Jesus and their willingness to extend God’s love to Greeks and Samaritans. They took the pain of that synagogue rejection with them, pain that became enshrined in the Gospel of John as God’s rejection of “the Jews.”

God does give us the freedom to turn away from God. In John’s terms, we are free to choose darkness rather than light, to choose evil rather than good. Exercising that freedom becomes self-judgment, rejection of God rather than God’s rejection of those for whom he desires salvation. “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Sometimes I think we focus so much on the love of God and our own desire that no one should be lost, that we overlook the fact that some people want to reject God. And God is perfectly willing to let them do so. C. S. Lewis, in his delightfully imaginative book about heaven and hell called The Great Divorce, put it this way: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek, find. Those who knock, it is opened. ”

To be free from God and God’s love is to live in hell. It’s to live as though one were bitten by a poisonous serpent, and in pain and terror all one can think about is death. God offers a different way to live. Just as Moses raised up the bronze serpent in the desert so that the Israelites would focus on God rather than themselves, so Jesus Christ came to lead us toward God and one another, to freely choose life.

Since I have become a priest, I don’t wander in the woods as much as I used to. I miss it – I miss the plants, that is, not the snakes. Yet in being with people and spending more time immersed in God’s word, I experience even more of the richness of God’s loving the world. It is life that we are offered through Jesus Christ, true life, living in light rather than darkness. Doesn’t that sound like the place to be? Wouldn’t you rather live in that light?

[Lent 4: Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21.]

Listen to this as preached on the Fourth Sunday of Lent.