During the
summer between first and second grades, I went to the Horry County Memorial
Library in my hometown. Little church
mouse that I was, I perused the room with the Dewey Decimal .220 collection in
it, full of Bibles and storybooks, located next to the children’s section. I checked out a great big fat brown
illustrated book of Bible stories for children, probably printed in the 1920’s.
I brought it home and began reading. I
could hardly put it down. That is where
I first learned much of what is in the Bible.
I don’t
recall, of course, exactly what I thought when I came upon a story such as the
one in Numbers today, where Moses fashions a serpent of bronze and sets it up
on a pole so that all the snakebite victims among the Children of Israel could
look upon it and be healed. But I am
sure of one thing. I did not approach
the story critically. I did not wonder
how the serpent worked healing powers, nor why Moses did not get blasted for
such a thing when a few chapters away his brother Aaron gets roundly trounced
for fashioning a calf out of gold. I
don’t think I took the Bible stories as if they were just some other
interesting stories, such as Uncle Wiggly and Nurse Jane. I think you could say without stretching a
point that I read the stories naïvely.
They conveyed to me a sense of the Presence of the Holy One of Israel,
with whom I had a complete fascination.
To my boyish mind, nothing seemed beyond God. And yet I don’t recall ever being afraid of
God—don’t ask me why.
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| "So Moses made a serpent of bronze." —Numbers 21:9 |
Not until I
hit adolescence did I begin to sense some dissonance between some of the Bible
stories and the world around me. But
even then the dissonance did not pose a crisis for me. In high school I had the good fortune of
having a teacher who taught the Bible as literature. She taught me how to ask critical questions
in a way that led me more deeply into the meaning of the texts. The process continued in college. I learned to plumb the scriptures and the
layers behind the scriptures to understand things like the culture that
produced them, the language that expressed them, the meaning they probably
conveyed to the first generation of readers or hearers. At such a place in my development, I would
have appropriated the story from Numbers about the bronze serpent as perhaps a
piece of pious folklore, or perhaps the signature story of sympathetic magic, a
spin-off of some Egyptian serpent-magic captured in the famous headgear of the
Pharaohs with its protecting cobra. I
might have made the connection between the bronze serpent Moses fashioned and
the story about how that very artifact was destroyed by the reforming King
Hezekiah, centuries later, who smashed it in the Temple of Jerusalem where
people had developed the custom of making offerings to it.
Then one
morning, a few years after I had become a priest, from the Old Testament (which
is the name we Christians give to the Hebrew Scriptures for theological
reasons, not because “old” means inferior), —I was reading a story about how
the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens, and I realized some minutes after
finishing it that I had made it through the entire story without having once
questioned its veracity. Instead, I had
pondered the many unlikely ways in which God providentially fed me. Elijah’s ravens had become signifiers to me
of experiences—maybe physical, maybe spiritual—in my own life. That was an incredibly important day in my
life, because on that day I was aware for the first time that I entered what I
later learned the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “the second naïveté.” My “first naïveté” belonged to my boyhood in
which I took bronze serpents and food-bearing ravens at face value and the
stories about them quite literally. The
second naïveté, however, was made possible because by then I had learned to
question, to probe, to think analytically, in fact to doubt. Although I never had gone through an
atheistic phase, I can readily appreciate those who do, for it clears away tons
of baggage, liberating people from taboos and superstitions that have nothing
to do with God but everything to do with social control. Freed from literalism, I could engage the
symbols and the stories on another level.
In that way, the serpent became to me a life-bearing symbol, which I
could experience as (let me put it this way) a messenger of something
divine. I say “divine” because I have
come to believe, and take responsibility for believing, that God is in fact
True, and reaches out to me—to us—using the very data of our everyday lives (including
what we see, read, and meditate upon) as ways of opening us to layers of
Reality that sustain and nourish our souls, help us to grow, enable us to
evolve into the persons we have the potential of becoming.
Now this is
where the bronze serpent story gets really interesting. In this “second naïveté” I could, as I did
with those ravens feeding Elijah decades ago, simply imagine the poisonous
reptiles to represent the darts and arrows and venomous stings that arrest me
in the middle of my self-absorbed ranting and griping, just as apparently
snakes did to those Israelites in the desert.
That would be a fairly good discipline for me, I’ll warrant. But the story is more than that. On what, please tell me, may I look and find
healing? Ah! Before you jump the gun and point me to Jesus
on his cross, an obvious reference in the gospel story wherein he talks to
Nicodemus using this very image of the bronze serpent, hold on. Stick with the old story about Moses and the
pole for a moment.
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| Seraph |
The story
says that Yahweh God said to Moses to “make a poisonous serpent” and “set it on
a pole,” so that “everyone who is bitten” might “look at the serpent of bronze
and live.” Remember that this is the
same Yahweh who, the story says, sent
the poisonous serpents among the people in the first place, snakes whose bites
killed numbers of the people. It happens
that the word for “poisonous or fiery” [serpent] comes from the same root as
the word seraph, and the seraphim, of course, are first-class angels in Hebrew
vocabulary. They burn. So these fiery serpents stinging the fire out
of Israel mean something more than ordinary desert reptiles. They are divine messengers (that is what
angels are) that ironically wound and
heal.
Deep in the
consciousness—really the unconscious—of humanity is this ironic marriage
between wound and healing. All over the
world there are stories about how the hero who delivers and saves must first
taste the bitter pain of being wounded.
If this is beginning to sound familiar, that is because it is. You know that truth on two levels. One is your own personal life. You know the irony that the wounds you bear,
from the gashes carved into your soul by rejections, to the stigma and shame
you carry in your body or your mind about your body or your mind, is exactly
where you meet the ultimate questions of self-worth. Your wounds are the battleground itself where
you either have found or will find grace and strength, a widening of your
compassion, and a deepening of your capacity to love. The struggle for your destiny is won or lost
there. The other level on which you know
this truth, or will know it, is that the life-giving story of Jesus is
precisely the thing that opens us up with decisive intensity, deflating our
puffed up egos, bidding us take us off our defensive armor piece by piece. At the same time, Jesus is the one whose
wounds and indeed whose death is the balm that heals us, the salve that soothes
us, the medicine that ultimately makes us whole and sane.
Having been
bitten by a copperhead at age ten, I have a short list of things I don’t
particularly like to think about and looking on a replica of that fiery serpent is on the list. I don’t particularly relish the idea that
Jesus is in any sense a snake. But there
is a deep connection between what we most fear and what gives us life. This
strange story from the desert wanderings of the Israelites tells us that the
divine is somehow at work in even the most hideous of circumstances, working to
bring about a realignment of our purposes and God’s own. I can see, not just in a snakebite but in the
thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, a God whose saving purposes are
running through my life, my words, my fears, my self-doubts, ultimately
bringing me together with all humanity into a land flowing with milk and honey
at the other side of whatever desert it is that we happen to be passing
through.
So it is
not with a simple naïveté, but rather with a second naïveté that, encountering
Truth on a whole new level, we can look upon the Son of Man, lifted up on the
cross, and have eternal life. We can see
in his story the outlines of the old incident told in the tales of our
forebears’ wandering. He rattles our
cages, overturning the tables we depend upon in our economies and in our
temples; he is toxic to our systems of denial; he strikes out relentlessly
against our penchant for oppressing others; he recoils at our hypocrisies; he
calls into question our own retreat into self-loathing and exaggerated notions
of worthlessness. Human beings, as a
rule, even the self-proclaimed religious among us, cannot stand him, and join
with the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov telling him to go the hell back where he came from and
leave us alone. Over and over again the
Christ in flesh and spirit is tacked up on a pole, crucified, a horrifying
sight to any with the guts to look at him.
But look at him we do, our eyes unable to avert a sight so
compelling. Look at him we do, and see
our paltry efforts at being like him nearly laughable. Look at him we must, and see in his wounds,
his hands, his feet, our own wounds. How
does it happen, we wonder. How can it be
that this broken body seems to strengthen us, seems to say to us, “You are
forgiven, though you know not what you do”?
How can it be that we feel ourselves taking courage from him precisely
at the moment we are ready to call it quits?
How can it be that we can look on him and know ourselves to be healed in
the only way that matters?
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| Graham Sutherland, "Crucifixion," 1946 |
Never mind
how. The answer to how is yes. We don’t have to figure it out because we
can’t. All we can do is look: look at his young naked body posted on the
hard wood of his cross.
Behold
him, all ye that pass by,
The
bleeding prince of life and peace.[1]
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| Edward Knippers, "Road to Golgotha," 1992 |
See him with your mind’s eye. Feel him at the bottom of your heart. Let your soul wander through the deserts
until it finds rest beneath that cross.
And allow the Healer on the pole to make you whole.
A sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 11, 2018, previously published in an earlier form on this blog under the title, "Second Story."
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012; revised 2018
© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012; revised 2018
[1] Charles Wesley, "O Love Divine, What Hast Thou Done?" First published in Hymns & Sacred Poems, 1742.
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| Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altar Piece, 1512-16 |
