Numbers 21:4-9 Looking Up
Looking up
I want to tell you two things about snakes. The first thing has to do with physical snakes and is knowledge I gained through firsthand experience. The second thing has to do with the symbolic meaning of snakes in folktales, myths and Bible stories.
First thing. My grandfather owned a Safari Lodge in the Lowveld region of South Africa. It has a tropical climate, the kind of climate where you find lots of reptiles and snakes. So, as we visited this lodge with everybody bringing their kids, snakes and scorpions were a constant worry to parents. You see children like to play on rocks. They like to climb and hide and the places where they climbed and hid happened to be the very places snakes liked to hang out in. So, we were lectured again and again about how dangerous and poisonous snakes are and how we should be vigilant, ever on the look-out for them. You see, there was this one common snake called a black mamba that was especially deadly and poisonous. And they are very fast. Their reaction time is seven times faster than that of a human being. Therefore, your best defense mechanism wasn’t fighting these snakes. It was to spot them as soon as the arrive on the scene and get out of their way as quickly as possible. Some of my sisters, nieces and nephews were scared to the point where they refuse to play on the rocks. I was weirdly attracted to snakes because of them being so dangerous as were some of my nephews but all of us, the scared and the brave were hyper-vigilant on the look out for snakes and I can think of at least a few times where that hyper vigilance helped us to dodge catastrophe. The thing with snakes is, they are sneaky. It is easy to not see them coming.
Second thing. In ancient Myths snakes or serpents (and in some even dragons which is just a bigger, more scary kind of snake) had two main symbolic meanings: The first and oldest was that of life and fertility. The second was that of impeding doom and evil in the form of a physical or internal or spiritual threat. These two meaning seems contradictory but if you think about physical snakes, one could imagine how both of these connotations could come about. Snakes has been with us for as long as we can remember. They have an amazing ability to reproduce, and eggs usually hatch by the hundreds. Hence the connotation with fertility and life. Snakes are also sneaky, poisonous, and dangerous, hence the connotation with what is evil inside and outside of us. Snakes give life easily. Snakes take life easily.
Snakes in Numbers 21
I tell you all this because I believe it is a key in understanding this familiar yet strange story. The Israelites lament things that threaten their lives. Hunger, loss, and a dubious destination. What they experience is not really that time specific and contextual. We know the same kind of anxieties and discontentment. We fear things like job security. We make leaps and decisions that at the time felt right and even God-ordained that we later doubt and regret them when things aren’t going well. Sometimes the Egypt that we once detested suddenly seems like paradise in the face of what you now face after your change of direction. We like the Israelites, usually default to blaming others, especially leaders and even God, rather that soul search for our part in our dilemma.
So then unexpectantly as they often do, snakes enter this story. The first snakes we read about in this story enters in the capacity of their second meaning as symbols of evil threating life. This is a huge surprise in this story. It doesn’t make sense. These people complain about God allowing too many threats in their lives to prevail and how does He respond? He sends even more! The kind of threat that has been so prevalent throughout human history that it became the symbol of what threatens life! And people actually die.
You see, sometimes what is implicit needs to be made explicit before we see it. These Israelites had a toxic attitude that would have killed them if they remained blind to it. God sending toxic snakes isn’t the vengeful act it looks like. It is God making explicit what is an implicit attitude in them so that they can see it and the end game of it. God sending the snakes is a saving act.
And then another unexpected response
Wouldn’t we expect these Israelites that were already enraged with their current circumstances, to now be even more enraged…maybe to the point of parting ways with faith in this God? I mean, once bitten, twice shy right? But that is not what we read. We read the very opposite.
It seems like these people’s eyes suddenly opens not only to the physical snakes outside but to the evil snakes inside of them. They repent and acknowledge their sins against God and even against Moses. They humbly ask for a solution from God and that shows their vulnerability. They acknowledge that they themselves are unable to solve what they have brought over themselves.
But is what happens here really so strange? We all have this constant but manageable discontent about our lives. We have good reason to be discontent about many things and to voice them to the powers that be and God is a good thing. It is just also incomplete if it isn’t accompanied by soul-searching. And often then something happens that makes the things you were discontent with pale in comparison. Something that really makes you realize how powerless you are and how dependant on God’s grace you are. Something that suddenly gives you the gift of that very difficult honest look at yourself. A cancer diagnoses, a pandemic, the loss of a loved one. Suddenly you humbly reach out to God and other people he has put in your life.
There are just snakes that blindside us all. Things others saw coming and prepared for but we didn’t. And they bite us in such a way that it threatens our future and our very existence. Sometimes the snakes come within. In the form of a bitterness you carry or a resentment or discontent you harbour. To some these snake bites from the inside and the outside, becomes a burden so huge that it kills them or sucks the will to live right out of them. That is why we read that the snakes killed many Israelites.
Fortunately, that is not all we read. We also read about this snake switching from a symbol of threat and death to one of hope and life…
But best of all…
Moses is ordered to put a bronze snake on a pole and raise it above the people. This act is heavily pregnant with symbolism. You will remember that I told you that when it comes to physical snakes, it is of key importance to pay attention and notice them. It is also difficult. They sneak up on you and one’s impulse is to turn your gaze away from what scares you. The Israelites are now called upon to look their greatest fear, the source of much pain in the eye! That seems to have the healing and life-giving effect.
Also, when you are bitten by a snake, it is very hard to look away from yourself. The most unselfish person will become all self consumed when bitten by a snake and nobody will blame such a person. But these Israelites bitten are ordered to look up…and to themselves but also beyond themselves, their own pain and discontent. They had to look up to that what sacred them and to what was destroying them from the inside. But to look up was also the common Jewish prayer posture. To look up meant that you were in a way looking towards God. So, they were basically ordered to face evil around them and in them but not without looking towards God.
It might not sound so, but looking at that snake was not that easy to do. It was kind of a counter intuitive things Moses asked the people to do. We want to look away from things that scare us and when we do look at them, we find it hard to look at God from whom our salvation comes from. A lot in life depends on fixing your gaze but it is never easy to do that.
So, there are two elements at play here. Looking at the source of your fear and your own mistakes honestly and directly. Looking away from yourself towards God for the solution outside yourself. Both require courage, faith and vulnerability. But these actions bring healing and life. When we look the evil in us and around us straight in the eye, the only things that can help us bear and defeat it is to then also see God at work in the midst of it.
What about Jesus then?
So, John draws a line between the snake on the pole and Jesus on the cross. Some might find that strange because we all know the well-known creation myth of Genesis 3. In it a serpent represents evil, not life. So, our default connotation with a snake is death and evil and to link Jesus with a snake then does not feel right, does it? Now that you also got introduced to the snake as a symbol of new life, it might make more sense…
But in a way Jesus on the cross is both kinds of snakes…Him on the cross shows us evil. Where evil leads. To horror, a trampling of innocence, injustice, isolation and death. The evil around us still leads to that and the evil inside of that will lead to that. Jesus putting himself right at the centre of that picture and Him lifted up shows us that He did not shy away from the painful parts of our human experience. Jesus definitely knows how bad things can get. Looking at him in the grip of life devouring evil is seeing a God that understands our pain and works his grace in the midst of it.
But looking up to Him also implies looking beyond our own pain to what we are called for. Sacrifice for what is good. The laying down of our lives so that our lives could become life giving.
Life lies in knowing two things. Jesus knows and cares for me, forgives me and has paid for me. Secondly Jesus calls me to follow, take responsibility and sacrifice. If you only hold on to Jesus understanding and caring for you, he becomes your shrink not your Lord. If you only hold on to Him calling you to sacrifice, He becomes your slave master, not your Lord. To acknowledge Jesus for the Lord and the King of all creation He is, takes to embrace both. To receive his life, requires you to embrace both his love and His call.
Close
It wasn’t wrong to voice their discontent to Moses and God. It was, not reckoning what role their own brokenness and limits played in that discontent. We all tend to look out the window when things go wrong and look in the mirror when things go right. God recalibrated that impulse. He made them look inside themselves in a crisis and made them look beyond themselves to Him, when it came to a solution.
May the love and acceptance of Jesus give you courage to face what is unpleasant to face in your life and in our world. The poisonous snakes inside you and around you. May his call make you embrace some responsibility, to know your place, do your part and trust in Him for what you cannot bring about.
That is the way to life. That is Jesus.
Amen