Because a Snake Is Never Just a Snake | A Sermon on Numbers 21:4-9
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin for the people of St. George’s on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 14, 2021.
Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
Is it possible to come across any snake in literature, the arts, or at our feet and not think of that first snake, the serpent . . . more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made (Gen. 3:1)? I doubt it. That first snake, only later identified as Satan, made quite the impression, and not for the quality of its bite, but for the precision of its strike.
You will not die, [it tempted]; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil (Gen. 3:5).
Of course, the implication is that God doesn’t wish Adam and Eve, or us, to be like Him at all. Notice, that the snake does not challenge God’s existence or even His authority, but it is God’s trustworthiness that is called into question.
And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Gen. 2:16).
And the serpent said, you will not die.
It is God’s Word that is put in doubt. Will we trust God, or will we take matters into our own hands? That’s the serpent’s move. A precise strike, indeed, because we all know what comes next.
As Emily Dickinson so beautifully reflects, Sweet is the swamp with its secrets, until we meet a snake. [1]
In today’s reading from Numbers, we once again encounter the snake, this time far removed from Eden. The Israelites, liberated from slavery, now live and die in the wilderness. They are on the way to the Promised Land, and yet grow weary. Their confidence that God will deliver them wanes as they look over their shoulders to days long past and times made better by their predictability and the haze of nostalgia.
Patience is running thin, gratitude is scarcer even then patience, and they begin to lodge their complaints. And what do they get for it? Poisonous snakes striking them back to their senses. Some of them die. All of them pay attention.
Because a snake is never just a snake. Somewhere along the way, in that dry, hot desert, God’s own people begin to distrust God. And they begin, in the language of the King James Bible, to murmur, “Will we trust God, or will we take matters into our own hands?”
This God who delivered them in power and might, who came in the form of plagues and a pillar of cloud by day and by night, who thundered on the mountain in fire and in smoke, this God who could, one would think, deliver them, immediately, into the Promised Land, this God should do that already, or else he should have just left them altogether alone.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the question biting persistently at the heels of this narrative is why God allowed the people to linger and die in the wilderness in the first place; why God didn’t send the snakes away or stop them from coming in the first place; why God allowed the snake in the garden in the first place.
Of course, the question “why does God?” isn’t sinful in and of itself, but it belies an inner disposition that if left unchecked will most certainly lead to death, rather than life.
Because the natural extension of “why does God” is “why does God, because I would not,” as if God were made in our image and not us in His. As if our plans, our solutions, our remedies will save us, if God could kindly step out of the way or else play by our rules.
It not our questions, nor perhaps even our complaints, that sicken us, it is our belief in a way that is other than God’s way, our insistence on taking matters into our own hands, our reliance on all kinds of things that cannot truly heal us, including our own wherewithal.
Nothing can save us that is possible: We who must die demand a miracle. [2]
God doesn’t abandon the Israelites to their woundedness, nor does God provide them exactly what they asked for, the snakes remain. Instead, God instructs Moses to lift up a bronze serpent on a pole, so that everyone who is bitten can look at it and live (Num. 2:8). The very source of the people’s fear, rebellion, and death is taken up from beneath their feet and lifted high so that they might be healed.
God does not remove the snakes from our midst, but God offers a strange, paradoxical remedy for what ails us. As one preacher notes,
They are to look at the image of the venomous serpent, the very thing that is killing them, and that is the thing that will bring healing to them. This is a remarkable insight given to the children of Israel as to how God saves. Almighty God saves sinful man in a way that so confounds the mind of man that there is no other possibility but to say: it is God and God alone who saves completely. He saves to the utmost, [using] a “prescription” that would seem foolish to us. Yet, the divinely wrought method is the only cure for the disease of the soul. The means that he uses is the gospel. [3]
And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up (Jn. 3:14).
It astonishes me how we struggle to understand in rational terms, to contain, what happened on the cross, what happened in the wilderness, what happened in the Garden, given the fantastical nature of these events. Theirs is a truth that is neither logical nor containable by human understanding, and yet we seek to know so that we might believe.
We are told that, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life (Jn 3:16) and we either approach that with a troubling kind of certainty or we ask, “How the heck does that work?” And “why did that have to happen anyway, if God is God”? As if this greatest of mysteries is not complete without our comprehension. As if belief is a call for perfect comprehension rather than a gift of Grace.
For it is by grace [we] have been saved through faith, and this is not [our] own doing; it is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8).
We are all bitten, so to speak, by the snake of our own need to contain, to control, to conscript God to our service and to worship Gods made in our image. To be healed, what harms, poisons, breaks, and kills us, must be confronted. We must contend with the many ways in which we take matters into our own hands, we must look without flinching at the monstrous things that our sin conjures.
We lift high the cross, because on it, Jesus exposed the sham at the heart of all human kingdoms; the sham that we can save ourselves. As Debie Thomas puts it: “he unveiled the poison, he showed us the snake, he revealed what our human kingdoms, left to themselves, will always become unless God in God’s mercy delivers us.” In the cross, we are forced to see the outworking of our distrust of God, of our need to be Gods. “When the Son of Man is lifted up, we see with chilling and desperate clarity our need for a God who will take our most horrific instruments of death, and transform them, at great cost, for the purposes of resurrection.” [4]
As we continue our journey through Lent, may we gaze upon the cross, the Tree of Life, seeking not to know so that we might believe in God or become God; but rather, seeking to believe so that we might truly know the one to whom we all belong.
Amen.
[1] “A Snake,” CVI, in Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (Gramercy Books: New York, 1982), 175.
[2] W.H. Auden, from “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.”
[3] Michael A. Milton, “Look and Live,” at Faith for Living, Inc., March 12, 2018: https://michaelmilton.org/2018/03/12/look-and-live-numbers-214-9-ephesians-21-10/#_ftn7.
[4] Debie Thomas, “Looking Up,” at Journey with Jesus, March 7, 2021: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay.
