Fourth Sunday in Lent March 11, 2018 Numbers 21:4-9 “What To Do With This?”

(Lectionary for March 11, 2018)

I am always very sorry to see this text once again raise its weird head into the season of Lent. What in the world can we do with this strange little tale about poles and snakes and sympathetic magic? Now, I know perfectly well why it is here; the Gospel of John grabs this story and allegorizes it to mean something about the crucifixion of Jesus. To whit: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so shall the Son of Man be lifted up.” In other words, the author of John’s Gospel saw the saving act of the bronze serpent on the pole, raised by Moses to cure the bites of the fiery serpents in the wilderness, as an allegory of the saving act of Jesus whose lifting up on the cross was an act of universal “cure” for the world’s sins. Well, OK!

That does not in any way help us to understand what this story could mean in the Hebrew Bible. It is on the surface another example of the evil and lack of patience that the people of Israel displayed as they traversed the wilds of the desert after their escape from Egypt. “The people spoke against God and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no food or water, and we detest this miserable food’” (Num.21:5). As a result of the constant complaining of these ingrates “YHWH sent poisonous (or “fiery”—the word used is “seraphim,” a noun containing the word for fire) serpents among the people, who bit the people so that many died” (Num.21:6). The biting/fiery serpents are God’s punishment for the wailing ingratitude of the chosen people who spend most of their energies in the wilderness crying and whining both about things they do have (they have food, but it is now to them “miserable”), and things they do not have (food they like and water to wash it down).

This is dreadful theology, an empty-headed tit-for-tat where bad actions are punished instantaneously by a God who becomes mightily sick of the people God has chosen and attacks them with various kinds of death-dealing natural events or creatures. This story is fully reminiscent of the plagues of Egypt where actions of the recalcitrant pharaoh are punished with successively appalling divine reactions, sent directly by YHWH. We 21st Christians need no more foolish tales like this one to draw a portrait of God that sounds nothing more than infantile—you complain to me so I attack you! This is a God of earlier centuries, whose wrath was quick-tempered and easily provoked by us ever-sinning would-be followers. There are in our time more than enough Christians who believe God is in fact something very like this, and can point to such stories as our text for today to prove their point.

Well, it is in our Bible! Are we thus stuck with this primitive snake-handling narrative as another necessary statement of just who our God is? Or can we allegorize it out of its ancient vindictiveness, in the manner of John, helping us to find the tale’s “true” meaning in the theology of Jesus the Savior of all those who are “snake-bitten”? The obvious danger of allegory, a long-employed method in biblical study it must be agreed, is that my allegory is just as good as yours. In other words, there is no check on meaning if it is merely my imagination over against yours. Maybe the snake story is about something other than Jesus. Maybe the snakes are the enemies of Israel whose bite is death for the nation, and Moses’ serpent pole is a figure of the weapons needed to defeat those enemies? Well, why not? Allegory is a very weak bridge over which to cross the river to some sort of meaning.

I would rather consign this narrative to the pile of tales that reflect a completely different way of viewing the world, and hence a different way of viewing God. Like Elisha’s murderous bears, whom he conjures up to maul those children who dare call the prophet bald; like the foolish Samson, who simply cannot keep his hands off the wrong sort of girl, and is finally shorn by one despite plenty of evidence that she does not have his best interests in her devious heart; like Daddy Jephthah whose idiotic and mortal vow to murder whatever greets him at his homecoming from a battle leads to his own daughter’s burning, a story like the serpent’s pole as cure for snake bite is from another age than the one in which we live. It is a time when magic was real, and knowledge of reasonable explanations for actions and reactions were few. It is an age we can surely study, but one that we need not drag into our century as a credible way of understanding the will and way of our God. We, you and I, simply must divest ourselves of the last vestige of such primitive claims for God lest we make ourselves ludicrous before our world of reasonable science and fail miserably to present the saving word of the gospel to a world in desperate need if what it has to offer.

Snake poles to cure snakebite are absurd, and we must say so clearly. Snakebites are not curable by sympathetic magic; they are cured by medicine, administered by those who know how to do such things. And God does not attack us with snakes because we are evil and impatient. God is the creator of snakes whose nature is to bite any creatures that wander too close to its poisoned mouth. And God is also the creator of minds that can learn how to treat snakebite effectively. The world created by this God is not a simple one; it is wild and gritty and wonderful and mysterious, and that God is decidedly not one who keeps a computer file on each one of us, toting up the deeds of our life, looking for enough good actions to counterbalance our poor actions and thus avoiding the divine desire to drop us into the fiery pit of Hell, or the God who is anxious to give us our own mansions in the sky in which to sing hymns for eternity with others who have somehow made the grade. This Santa God needs to die and that quickly! No more snake poles! No more divinely sent serpents to teach us a lesson. That sort of God does not exist and never did exist.

I suggest that a preacher might use this text to begin the discussion of the nature of God with a congregation who would probably welcome such a discussion to rid them of the last notion of such a snake-handling, vindictive God forever.