Lenten Meditation: As Moses Lifted Up the Serpent

On third Sundays at Open Table, our worship is influenced by the Taize (France) community.  The mood is meditative.  We pray through scripture, song, and silence.  Often I offer some commentary on scripture or a guided reflection, but no sermon.  Excerpted from yesterday's worship service, I share below 2 of yesterday’s lections with the accompanying commentary and guided reflection.  The rest of the liturgy included litanies, songs or chants from the Taize and Iona communities, other scriptures, more silence, and the opportunity for embodied prayer at several prayer stations.

HEBREW BIBLE LESSON      Numbers 21: 4-9         

⁴From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. ⁵The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” ⁶Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. ⁷The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. ⁸And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” ⁹So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

COMMENTARY

I am phobic about snakes.  Even the nonvenomous types.  I avert my eyes if snakes appear on television.  I turn the page if a snake is pictured in a book.  I’ll dodge the glassed-in containers of snakes in a pet store.   And I’m ready to move out of my house if I see one in my back yard.  But here is a story that says people dying of snake bite must look at an image of the thing that is killing them in order to live.

Reading this story metaphorically and meditatively, we notice that our healing hinges upon our willingness to gaze directly upon the image of the thing that has been hurting us.  Of course, we look at a representation of the snake; we do not continue to subject ourselves to the harmful thing itself.  Instead, we consider honestly, straightforwardly the thing outside of us or inside of us that is not healthy.  Only by facing the truth of what is harming us will we be able to acknowledge and be released from its harm.

Lent is a time for looking inward and outward at things that are injuring or limiting us—or our world.  Most of the time the objects of our fears or discomforts make us want to turn the page or change the channel or move out of the house.  Most of the time we’d prefer just to end a relationship or give up a responsibility.  We don’t want to look at the person or situation that hurts us, and we certainly don’t want to acknowledge the toxins within us. But something in us might die if we don’t.  Something in our world might not be healed.

So Lent is a season for looking outwardly at personal relationships and daily practices and societal problems.  And Lent is a season for looking inwardly at our own tendencies and personalities that sometimes cause harm to us and others.  In the story of Moses and the people he was leading away from bondage, ALL were being harmed by their constant spirit of complaint and fear, by their lack of gratitude, by their over-reliance on Moses.

And those toxic attitudes slithered through the whole community, creeping up on them until the community would have died if they’d not realized what they were doing.  So they prayed that God would remove the venomous threat. Which God did not do.  Instead God instructed Moses to lift up—to make everyone face—this harmful thing.  And thus they were saved. 

In this Lenten season we, too, look up, figuratively, to realize that truth and self-awareness can be saving virtues. We can look to something higher and greater, something beyond all that is striking at our feet and twining around and constricting our hearts.  We look inward, outward, knowing our own truth, which God holds out to us. When we gain God’s lofty perspective, even the serpents of life ultimately become bronzed, immobilized, powerless anti-icons. Lent is a time for a spiritual de-tox.   Don’t look down.  The things swirling at your feet can overwhelm.  Look up.  See the thing as it can be: a habit, a trait, a personal challenge that does not have to harm you, that can in fact show you the higher perspective.

CALL TO REFLECTION

Let us examine our lives in the presence of Loving God, opening our hearts so that we do not deceive even ourselves.                   

GUIDED REFLECTION

Recall a time when you were able to face something “poisonous” in your life that was harming your spirit.  How were you able to “look at it and live”?  Consider how “anti-venom”—derived from the toxin—is activated when you can name the thing that threatens spiritual health. Now bring to mind anything that is currently having a potentially harmful impact on your spiritual growth: an attitude, a tendency, a pattern of behavior, a mindset. 

SILENCE

SUNG PRAYER

GOSPEL LESSON    John 3: 14-21

¹⁴And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. ¹⁶“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. ¹⁷“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. ¹⁸Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. ²⁰For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. ²¹But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

CONTEMPORARY READING    by Alice Walker

“I grew agitated each time [the minister] touched on the suffering of Jesus.  For a long time my agitation confused me.  I am a great lover of Jesus, and always have been.  Still, I began to see how the constant focus on the suffering of Jesus alone excludes the suffering of others from one’s view . . . I knew I wanted my own suffering--and the suffering of women and little girls, still cringing before the overpowering might and weapons of the torturers--to be the subject of a sermon.  Was woman herself not the tree of life?  And was SHE not crucified?  Not in some age no one remembers, but right now, daily in many lands on earth?”(Possessing the Secret of Joy, 1992).

COMMENTARY

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”  Like any metaphor, this one comparing Jesus on the cross to the serpent on Moses’s pole finds one main connection between two very dissimilar objects or ideas.  The community that wrote the Gospel of John believed that they had been “saved” because Jesus was lifted up on the cross.  What it means to be saved and how Jesus makes that salvation/healing/rescue possible is the subject of centuries of theology and innumerable writings.  It’s a subject we as progressive Christians have considered before and will continue to revisit because one of the ways our ministry in Mobile brings a saving word to our community is by retuning churchy words like “saved.”   Let me take a little liberty with John 3:16, rooting it in its biblical contexts, with my own paraphrase of one of the most well-known verses in the Bible: God loved the entire world so much that God gave to us a way of life, revealed by Jesus, and whoever lives in that way will not succumb to the venomous things but will experience love eternal.

So much more should be said about the third chapter of John’s Gospel.  But for today, let’s use the words of Alice Walker we’ve just read in order to consider how Jesus, lifted up on a cross, can keep us from perishing. 

I remember years ago when a pastor said something that later seemed quite obviously true but which shocked me at the time.  He said that Jesus’s death on the cross was not the worst suffering any human being ever endured.  And indeed the Bible never claims Jesus suffered more than any other person, though I had heard others claim that Jesus’s suffering was unique in its extremity and type.  But think about it.  Surely there have been some who endured physical torture greater than crucifixion.  Surely others have endured physical suffering for far longer than Jesus did.  Surely others have endured emotional and psychological trauma far greater than Jesus who, though hated and feared and betrayed by some, was loved by many.  Surely Mary’s suffering for her dying son was in some ways worse than his own.  And why would Jesus need to win the suffering contest?  Why, theologically speaking, would his pain have to trump the pain of a tormented and tortured victim of some other atrocity in human history in order for Jesus to make for us a way of salvation?   

The pain was not the point.  In fact, if we "lift up" violence, we will glorify it.  And if we make too much of Jesus’s agony, we can, as Alice Walker says, forget that others are being crucified today.  Our tears for Jesus can blind us to the suffering of others.  And even the smaller sufferings deserve our pity.  Let us not forget that others are enduring as best they can the lesser pains of human living. 

What is central to Christian teaching is that the God-in-flesh, the Christ, knows human pain and is with us in each and every suffering in this earth.  Because you and I are united in Christ, we, too, want to practice a compassion that joins our hearts with the ongoing birth pangs of a world laboring to birth God’s new humanity.  We begin to pray, with tenderness of heart, for those who are bearing burdens, large and small.  For God so loves the world . . .

PRAYERS OF INTERCESSION

We name aloud or hold in the silence of our own hearts those who are sick or in distress, those who are alone or in grief, those who are hungry and homeless, those overwhelmed by their responsibilities, those who are victims of violence and injustice.

SUNG RESPONSE

“Kyrie Eleison”