The Serpent on a Pole, Christ on the Cross

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 14, 2021, by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

The Israelites have had enough. They listened to Moses, followed his lead, and where has it got them? Lost somewhere between Mount Hor and the Red Sea. Precisely in the middle of nowhere. There’s no food and no water, and the manna from heaven (fresh baked each morning) is getting old. They become impatient. They start to murmur. And they bring their grievance to Moses--”Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” The situation is a little dicey. Moses is a hair’s breadth from being killed as the source of all the Israelite’s problems. It’s a story as old as time--when things aren’t how you want them to be, look around for someone to blame and expel them. That’ll solve it. Human history is an interesting footnote to that basic scapegoating mechanism: the angry mob huddled up against the despised other. The many against the one. Jesus anyone?

Reluctant, tongue-tied Moses is doing his level best to lead the Israelites from slavery under Pharoah into freedom. And the Wilderness is the place where all the old habits, old identities, entrenched patterns of being, are exposed. Under Pharaoh, the Israelites had three squares a day. They knew what their “purpose” was--to make lots of bricks for Pharaoh. They could measure their worth by their daily brick production--who was best, who was lagging behind--all neatly displayed on the productivity graphs. Sure, making bricks wasn’t their favorite activity, but there was certainty, predictability, and measurability. Some of them perhaps even came to enjoy it and found themselves proudly proclaiming, “I am among the top one percent of brick-makers for Pharaoh!” while displaying their “Slave for Pharaoh of the Month” plaque from the local trophy shop.

The wilderness, the desert, has a nasty habit of undoing all that. God leads the Israelites out of Egypt in order that they might discover their true identity beyond that of mere producers. That identity, that addiction, to being “useful” and “productive” members of the Egyptian Brick-Making Industrial Complex, has to fall apart, to die, to be crucified, in order for their true identity as beloved children of God, created in God’s image and after God’s likeness, to emerge. Self-sufficiency has to be replaced with relationship and dependence upon God. They have to be moved--kicking and screaming and murmuring--from their producer identity to people who live from the gift. They have to learn to recognize and receive God’s gracious provision for them even in the midst of apparent lack. They have to learn to trust. To be faithful. To obey (listen to) God’s representative Moses even if things don’t seem to be unfolding exactly how they would prefer them to unfold. Certainty, predictability, and measurability need to be replaced with not-knowing, willingness to walk by faith, and living open-handed from the gift--living water gushing from the rock and the bread of life falling as manna from heaven. Scary stuff to be sure.

But no less scary, if we’re honest, than what these forty days of Lent are calling us into. I remember when I first started silent prayer in earnest having the uncomfortable realization that I wasn’t the person I thought I was. In the silence, my inner turmoil was revealed in all it’s technicolor splendor. Old hurts, grudges, judgement towards myself and others cascaded through my mind. How was this, I wondered, the way to the peace that passes understanding? When I complained to my spiritual director he just chuckled, crossed his legs, stroked his beard and said, “Self-knowledge is never good news. Welcome to the human race!” The wilderness of Lent, the silence, simplicity, and stillness we enter into is designed to show us to ourselves. Not merely as a project of morbid introspection or analysis, but in order to free us from the power of those old stories, those dignity-diminishing habits and preoccupations (what the Fathers call the passions), so that we can receive the gift of our belovedness and be that covenanted belovedness for others. As St. Augustine says, “A person must be restored to themselves, that making of themselves as it were a stepping stone, they may then rise to God.” Coming to know ourselves is how we learn to forget ourselves in love for the other.

The wilderness is that place where we learn all the ways we define ourselves aren’t the whole story--our family history, our job, our education, our looks, how much or how little money we make etc. etc.--none of these define, ultimately, who we are. These are elements of the resume, our biography, but not the true nature of who we are. And who are we, really? As Paul says in the Letter to the Colossians, “Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in Glory” (3:2-4). Paul tells us that we aren’t our resume, or our lack of resume. We aren’t defined by how many bricks we produce or don’t produce. That life, through the cross of Christ, has been put to death. Who we truly are is hidden with Christ in God. It’s through union and communion with Him that the life of the resume falls away and the glory of our calling comes to be revealed.

God in Moses frees the Israelites and us from the producer identity. God in the person of Jesus on the cross puts his finger on an even deeper fear and source of existential dread--our slavery to the fear of death. When we live under the sway of updating the resume, under the power of slavery that is the fear of death, we get wrapped up in all sorts of strategies and projects. Life seems an endless and unrelenting assault on our frantic efforts to shore up the “story of me” and deny the simple truth of our mortality. But the wilderness and the cross reveal to us that that whole frenzy of shoring up that we mistakenly call “life” is completely unnecessary. Unnecessary and ultimately unfulfilling like a prize that remains tantalizingly out of reach receding into an infinite future. That’s where the serpents come from--thinking that under our own steam, by our own efforts, we can find the joy, the peace, for which we are made. That day, lost between Mount Hor and the Red Sea, “Many Israelites died,” the Book of Numbers tells us. Life with the resume at the center, life parked next to the brick-kiln, life lived in the staunch denial of our mortality, is a snake-bit existence that even when it doesn’t literally kill us, hollows us out from the inside. It’s what T.S. Eliot is talking about  in his poem “The Hollow Men”: We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!/Our dried voices, when/We whisper together/Are quiet and meaningless/As wind in dry grass/Or rats’ feet over broken glass/in our dry cellar.

When Moses lifts the bronze serpent on the pole, however, the people who have been snake-bit are miraculously healed. When the people recognize, name, and acknowledge the hollowness, the strawiness, the stuffedness, of life lived under Pharaoh and turn in faith to God, they are cured. The sickness itself--hoisted high and gazed upon--becomes a doorway to new life for the individual and the community of fellow travelers--a new life lived for God and God alone. It’s as if the Israelites, having seen the serpent hoisted high upon the pole, decisively see that their whole way of navigating the world brings them only “grief and pain for promised joy.” There’s another way to live, they realize. And God in God’s mercy wants to show us that new way, to teach us in that way, and fashion us into a people, a community of belovedness. All we have to do is listen. Follow him. Trust in the “immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us.” Simple. Simple, but not easy. Pharaoh’s fleshpots continue to raise their heads in our lives.  That story that we are what we produce follows us around like a bad smell as my father would say. But it doesn’t have the same power, the same hold over us. We’re not as unconsciously driven by it now that it has come to light, been exposed.

No wonder then that Jesus specifically references this story from scripture (one that is mostly concerned with census roles--it’s not called the Book of Numbers for nothing): “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3: 14). Christ on the Cross and the Bronze Serpent on the Pole. What then do we see when we gaze upon the cross? Our blindness, our ignorance, the cost of our weddedness to illusion that we kill love when it comes into the world. All of that. But something more as well. We see the victory of the cross. We see Christ reigning in Glory from his throne on the tree. The tree that was the occasion of our disobedience in the Garden is healed and revealed  in its glory through Jesus’ obedience--obedience even unto death. We see Christ trampling down death by death. 

God in Christ uses the very thing that keeps us most enslaved--the fear of death--to show us that we don’t have to live that way any more. Just as antidotes for snake bites employ a judiciously chosen amount of the venom to heal us, Jesus becomes the very thing that we fear most, the thing that drives our lives and is the source of greed, anger, ignorance, and violence and explodes it from the inside with the power of the resurrection. Paul, taunting death, blowing a triumphant raspberry in its face writes—“Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15: 54-55). 

The victory of the cross, the healing power of the cross, is to be found in the triumph over death, and in its revealing to us the shape our lives, following Christ, are to take. Loving, giving, forgiving, serving others--not life lived by the predictable time-card of Pharaoh’s brick-kiln to be sure, but a life of immeasurable riches, peace, and joy no moth, no rust can touch and no thief can break in and steal.

Moses leads the Israelites from slavery into the Promised Land. Jesus through the cross shows us that this very place is the gateway of heaven. Today we are with him in Paradise. We have been brought into the Kingdom where death is no more. Bricks? We don’t need no stinking bricks! Death? We don’t need no stinking death!