There’s something decidedly un-heroic about the children of Israel as they wonder about in the wilderness on their erratic way to the Promised Land, as portrayed in this afternoon’s first reading from the Book of Numbers.
Back in Egypt, where they’d escaped from, regime change in the form of a new king had been accompanied by policies specifically designed to reduce the size of the immigrant Israelite population. At first this was to be achieved indirectly by making the lives of the Israelites intolerably difficult: forcing them to build a series of new cities, making their lives bitter, as it says in the Book of Exodus, ‘with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labour.’ Later, this concerted attempt at ethnic cleansing was to become fiendishly direct. Midwives were summoned by the king and told that when they were dealing with Hebrew women they could allow female children to live, but male children were to be killed.
But far away, close to Mount Hor, all this - the forced labour, the never ending quantities of bricks and mortar, the murdering of children - had been forgotten, as had the dash through the Red Sea, as had all that Moses, and indeed all that God, had done for them.
And to our hearing, we’re left not with the children of Israel, but with the children of Year 8, complaining, and I quote, that ‘there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.’ And this miserable food of course, when its not quails, is none other than manna from heaven, food that falls from the sky, the answer to prayer, the stuff of dreams. No wonder God’s angry. And there’s something wonderfully un-cozy about the way he shows it.
He sends poisonous serpents to bite them.
And only when they confess that they have sinned against Moses and against God, only when Moses has interceded on their behalf, does God show mercy. He tells Moses to make a serpent, which Moses makes out of bronze, to set in on a pole, and God promises that whoever has been bitten and looks at the serpent, will live.
It’s a wonderful story, wonderful enough to inspire Tintoretto and Rubens to paint it, wonderful enough for Michelangelo to chose it as one of the Old Testament stories he depicts on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
But wonderful stories and accounts that provide real spiritual nourishment aren’t necessarily the same thing at all. I’d like to try to persuade you that this, however, is both, a wonderful account indeed, but also an account that can deepen our understanding both of God’s power to heal, and our own understanding of this season of Lent.
As an aside, I’d like to clear up something that may lead to confusion. Talk of serpents, poles, and healing, may lead you to think of the medical symbol of the serpent, wrapped around a staff. While there may be a connection with our account from the Book of Numbers, it is more commonly thought that this symbol is connected with the Greek hero Asclepius, the son of Apollo, who had been taught the mysterious arts of healing by the centaur Chiron who raised him. When Asclepius misused this knowledge and started charging money for raising people from the dead, he enraged Zeus who sent a thunderbolt and killed him. Zeus did, however, recognise that - despite his somewhat wayward entrepreneurial efforts - Asclepius had brought great good to the human race and so made him into a god, transforming him into the constellation Ophiucus, the serpent-barer. That’s where the medical symbol comes from. Aside over, back to the far more important ‘Book of Numbers’.
There’s something very intriguing about the serpent in our reading being both the animal that bites and kills, and being somehow also – in its bronze form, the antidote; both the means of death, and the means of healing.
I’d like to read for you a short extract written by a Rabbi who is the modern-day Director of the ‘Shalom Centre’ in Philadelphia, a centre set up to grapple with the issues of war and peace, and ecology.
‘And for us’, writes Rabbi Arthur Waskow, commenting directly on this passage from the Book of Numbers, ‘we who still shudder from our brush with death in Auschwitz, our brush with death in the H-bomb doomsday system, our continuing brush with death in the scorching of the earth we are brining on ourselves, our brushes with death in the cancers of our friends and lovers, what does this mean? For us who choke on the dryness of our lives, us who fear the burning serpents that writhe their way into our very souls, what does this mean? Stare these dangers in the face, before we blink.’
‘Stare these dangers in the face before we blink’, writes the Rabbi. Stare these dangers in the face, just as the Israelites were instructed to stare into the face of a bronze replica of the serpent that had bitten them. For healing to be wrapped up in facing fear head-on, certainly makes spiritual sense to me. Facing our own fears. Confronting them directly. Facing the past, the events that haunt us. Facing the future. But this isn’t only personal. Communities cry out for healing as loudly as we ourselves do. I think about what it would mean for the community where I live on the Aberfeldy Estate in East London to stare its own fears in the face. Fear of crime certainly, but more complicated things as well.
Fear of travelling beyond your own immediate neighbourhood, fear of the person with different coloured skin, fears that arise because your children don’t want to live the way that you do, fear of change in all sorts of areas of life. The rabbi leads us into spiritually rich territory: the facing of fear as a pathway to spiritual healing.
The Bible as a whole, however, provides one word of warning. In the Second Book of Kings, chapter 18, we learn how King Hezekiah, ‘broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan.’ This is 500 years after our original account. The bronze serpent had been brought into the Temple and people had begun to worship it. It even had a name. Idolatry had raised its ugly head once again, the confusion of the sign and the signified, the sign being the bronze object itself, what it signified being the healing power of God. Right and proper to worship God and acknowledge God’s power to heal, idolatrous and wrong to worship the man-made object.
I said that I wanted to try to persuade you that our account from the Book of Numbers had something of spiritual significance to teach us about healing, and also that it has something of importance to teach us about Lent.
During Lent we follow Jesus as he is led, or driven, by the Spirit into the desert, the wilderness, where he is tempted by the devil. The name, the ‘Book of Numbers’, in English, reflects the Greek title, arithmoi, which itself reflects the prominence at the beginning of the book of the numbers of people counted in a census of the children of Israel. One of the titles of the book in Hebrew is bemidbar, which means ‘in the wilderness’. The children of Israel led by Moses, spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness on their way to the promised land of Canaan, the land promised to Abraham and his descendants. Much of the Book of Numbers is about these wanderings.
It is no accident that while Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness, Jesus spends 40 days there following his baptism, the story we continually recall during Lent. And that’s only the beginning. At the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, Jesus will appear with Moses. As he takes the bread and wine at the Last Supper there are strong echoes of the Passover Meal, the meal at which the events of the Exodus are recalled. In Paul’s letters, a direct link is made between the waters of baptism and the waters of the red sea, baptism is seen as a movement from slavery to freedom. And most strikingly of all, perhaps, in John’s gospel, chapter 3, Jesus’s own words: ‘And 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. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.’
Jesus is the new Adam, but he’s also the new Moses, the fulfilment of the law, and the themes of the Exodus permeate his life, death and resurrection. And it’s a theme that has inspired millions whether they be puritans sailing for America who saw themselves very much within the Exodus tradition, or, somewhat ironically, whether they be black American slaves who left America, again making explicit connections with the Exodus, in search of a better life in the African Free State of Liberia, established in 1847. Again I think of where l live in the context of what Exodus might mean for people there, about education as one of the paths from slavery to freedom, about what it must mean to live in the slavery of addiction and those who work to set people free from its claws, about the slavery of low aspirations and those who work to set people free by raising them, about the church’s attempt to replace loneliness and isolation with community, about the slavery of hopelessness and what it means to replace hopelessness with both hope and faith.
And to see Jesus in the wilderness in this context, in the context of the Exodus, to read this account from the Book of Numbers now, to connect the 40 years of the children of Israel with Jesus’s 40 days in the wilderness, transforms my understanding of Lent. Less alcohol, chocolate, and caffeine possibly, but much more importantly a time to accompany Jesus into the wilderness, a time of withdrawal for him after which he will begin the extraordinary events of his public ministry, a time of transformation - as the 40 years in the wilderness were for the children of Israel.
In Lent we pray for healing for ourselves, for each other, for our Church, for the neighbourhoods we live in, for our world. And we pray that we might have the courage to accompany Christ into the wilderness, that we might have faith in the one who will be lifted up - as Moses lifted up the serpent - and that we might be inspired once again by the events of the Exodus to commit ourselves to working for the freedom of all God’s children. Amen.
