When I started reading the passages for this week, I could not help but remember the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken,” written in 1920:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Frost, of course, was not talking about the choice between following Christ or Satan. Or was he? The path he took was somewhat less worn; but the other was not yet trodden black either. Jesus tells us that the path to heaven is narrow and the gate through which we may pass is small, while the path to hell is wide. Still, the path more traveled can look really enticing, and it is not clear where it will ultimately lead, try as we might to divine the future. We cannot enter heaven carrying a heavy sack of worldly goods; yet we do peer down the road that might lead to riches. Unable to see the future, some will pursue that “yellow brick road,” hoping that we can escape the death by drugs and too-rich living that might also be along that road. And who has not sighed, wishing we had pursued those riches, even when our lives have been good? We always wonder what might have been....
Our scriptures for today are part of the Lenten preparation for Good Friday, Easter, and Ascension. They tell us what we cannot know: the plan God has for us, as his children. That plan will certainly end in good for us, returning kindness to us for the grace we bestow on others in this life. There are warnings as well -- vicious as an adder’s bite, sin will always result in evil, and that path leads ever away from God and God’s love for us.
Numbers 21:4-9
“Snakes in the ancient world were a symbol of both death and danger, and of fertility, life, and healing,” according to The New Interpreter’s Study Bible notes on this passage (and in comparing this passage to the Gospel lesson for today).
How can it be that snakes were both a symbol of life and healing as well as death and danger? And what is Moses doing putting an ancient Egyptian symbol on a stake in the desert? Are we missing part of the story? These questions are going to come up in the minds of our listeners this Sunday. We could sidestep them, or we can meet them head-on. I recommend the latter: it’s a fascinating story.
First, we can assume correctly that the Middle Eastern deserts are full of poisonous snakes. They were an ever-present danger: asps, adders, stilettos, all hiding in the shadows or in their dens, escaping the heat. From Saudi Arabia to Syria, venomous snakes abound. Children who have yet to learn better can even today put a hand down a hole and come up screaming with a pit viper attached to their hand or arm. The poisons are swift, often neurological, and deadly. So we aren’t surprised to know that they were a symbol of death and danger. Especially since the Genesis second creation story features a snake to poison the minds of Eve and Adam against God.
But a symbol of healing and life? Yes, and that is tied to the snake as a symbol of fertility. We can thank Freud for making the modern world aware that snakes have long been symbols of sexuality, but again, this is not extravagantly surprising; a quick check on the internet serves up pictures of scantily-clad women with large snakes coiling around their curves. This sort of thing goes very far back in history -- back to at least 1600 BCE, when the Egyptians and Myceneans worshiped snake goddesses. These were household gods, mostly, and women would pray to these goddesses to grant them children and to keep them safe in childbirth (a dangerous proposition for women even today, without proper care such as trained midwives, EMTs, or doctors).
The symbolism of the snake related to healing is a bit more complicated. Snakes that are about to shed their skins look to the untrained eye to be near death. The old skin releases from the new one growing under it and takes on a rather dusty appearance. The snake tries to go to a protected place, since it will be vulnerable to the attacks of other animals during the shedding, and slowly crawls out of the old skin, leaving it looking as though the snake just disappeared from it. This process apparently suggested to the ancients a resurrection from sickness, even an avoidance of death on the part of the snake. Since this is what we want -- survival in the face of disease -- the symbolism became part of many types of medicine in ancient times.
This kind of thinking was still in operation in ancient Greece, and led to the use of the snake as a sign of healers. The symbol the ancient Greeks used was the staff of Asclepius, which had a single snake wrapped around a walking staff, or even the two symbols separated, one in each hand of the god.
In the 18th century, the caduceus became a symbol of healing. Unlike the staff of Asclepius, the caduceus features a pair of snakes entwined around a staff with a pair of wings at the top. The caduceus was the symbol of Mercury, the messenger of the gods -- and the god of the passage to the underworld (the land of the dead). He was associated with money and business and a certain amount of mischief, but also as the protector of negotiators. By the time the ancient peoples were leaving written records about their beliefs, the two snakes stood for the dual nature of the negotiator.
This returns us to the question: why would Moses erect the symbol of a pagan god in the Hebrew camp? More important, why would God tell Moses to do this? There are two possible explanations for why Moses would do this:
1) It could be a carryover from their time spent in Egypt. Remember the golden calf? It may simply be that this was familiar, and the people would trust it. This leaves us with the question of God’s intent in all this, and that question really cannot be answered. If God objected to the golden calf, why would God tell Moses to use the bronze snake for healing? Furthermore, why would Jesus use this image to talk about the meaning of his own death, pagan symbol that it was? More about that in the Gospel discussion below.
2) Moses may have put the snake up as a reflection of “as above, so below,” a very common thought in religions over the centuries. Things on this earth are reflections of what is true in heaven. The bronze snake is not biting, as the snakes they have found in their camp; if we look to the bronze snake, these snakes will become as still as that bronze snake, and the snake may even be able to pull the venom from those who have been bitten.
These both beg the question of why God would think this was a good idea, especially since this snake and the consequences of its use in the wilderness persisted down the centuries. There was a bronze snake on a staff in the Temple at the time of Hezekiah, and the people did worship it. This led to all kinds of trouble later, trouble which God surely could have anticipated.
These considerations make this story puzzling in ways that probably cannot be handled in the course of a sermon. It is, perhaps, much like the story of Abraham and Isaac, where the notion of human sacrifice seems to be more Abraham’s own thinking about the Canaanite practice than God’s explicit command, with God intervening and giving the ram as an alternative to the sacrifice of the firstborn.
Ephesians 2:1-10
Paul is putting a metaphor to good use in this passage. In the original Greek, verse 2 says “in which you once walked, following the course of this world....” There are decisions that need to be made about which path we are going to follow in life. There is one path that follows the pull of “the ruler of the power of the air,” which Paul equates with Satan. This is hardly the way we would talk today about Satan or the power of evil; we tend to use language that suggests that Satan dwells in the lowest part of things, following after Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. That work is the main source for our idea of heaven being up above and hell down below.
Paul tends to think of life as being divided between those who follow Satan and those who follow God, with Jesus being the point at which those roads divide. Everyone before the days of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (all of this together making up what is called by some “the Christ Event”) was walking the path of the flesh, which must by its very nature lead to death, since the flesh must die. Once we have met Jesus we can see a different path, a path which leads us to heaven, which we are entitled to share with Christ because of his sacrifice.
Before Jesus offered his life on the cross, Paul says, “we were by nature children of wrath.” By this he does not mean God’s wrath, but the angry nature of those who follow Satan, who is the leader of “the disobedient.” Those who follow Satan try to make themselves feel good by means of the things that satisfy our flesh’s desires. We think that going out to a bar, maybe going home with someone for the night, spending money, having nice things, eating comfort foods -- all of these will make us happy or comfortable, at least for a while. The problem is, all of those things work for an hour or a day or until the excitement wears off. So we get the idea that if it worked well for a night or a week or a few months, all we have to do is go out and do it again. Unfortunately, as with heroin, alcohol, and other drugs, we can never experience the same “high” again. But the memory of that high persists, so we keep going back and back and back, hoping for the same feeling we had the first time. This is how people wind up marrying three, five, or even eight times, never getting what they want from the next partner, and not understanding that no other human being can ever do for us what God can do.
On the other hand, those who have met Jesus, who have decided to follow in the pattern laid out for us by God, will come to know the kindness and grace of God. There is no substitute for this spiritual path. There is nothing else we can count on for our long-term, even eternal happiness. In fact, happiness isn’t even a strong enough word for what happens when we decide to follow the Christ path. There is a joy that can help us over the most difficult terrain, and that joy comes from loving God more than anything else.
People need this reassurance if we are to leave the path we were following, the path that the retailers and bar owners and drug pushers want us to believe is the only sensible path. If my car won’t keep me feeling sexy, if cosmetics and skin-tight clothing with lots of sparkle can’t keep me desirable for my whole life, if I can’t get a mate no matter how many drinks I buy, then God had better have a plan for my life that will make me happy!
Fortunately, God does have a promise: We can experience kindness and love forever, and it won’t cost us a penny. It’s a gift! Not only that, it’s what God had in mind for us from the beginning. So many people have this phrase in their vocabulary: “God has a plan for your life.” This is true, but it doesn’t mean that everything that’s going to happen to us is “written” before we were born. We have choices to make. We can choose wrongly, and end up dead early from a bad liver or heart or a stroke. Or we can choose the path of Christ, and even if this mortal life ends early we have an eternity of good things waiting for us. Because this life can be cut short, not only by our bad choices but by the bad choices of others -- the drunk driver who plows into our car, ending our lives as we have known them; the gangbanger who gets into a gun battle on the street and ends the life of a child sitting on her grandpa’s lap and watching TV; the corporation that dumps sewage or chemicals and pollutes our water, causing death and disease. All of these are choices, and it isn’t always the “bad guy” who suffers, at least not in this life. Sometimes the innocent bystander is the one who dies or is disfigured by those evil choices.
But whatever others choose, we followers of Christ Jesus try to live well, making good choices and doing good works, so that we can realize the way of life God intended for us to have.
John 3:14-21
This passage from John’s gospel binds together the two previous lessons. Verse 14 is a quotation from Jesus in which he refers to the bronze snake that Moses “lifted up” in the wilderness when the people were beset by poisonous snakes. He compares his coming execution as the equal of that snake being lifted up on a pole, so that whoever looks upon it will be healed. In New Testament parlance, “whoever believes in [Jesus] may have eternal life.”
Of course, the death of Jesus is only one part of the work that Jesus did which we see in that phrase “lifted up” [in Greek, literally “glorified”]. Jesus was glorified not just because he was willing to die on the cross, but also because he was resurrected and then ascended into heaven. This trinity of action is what constitutes the glorification of the earthly Jesus into the Christ. When we think only of the death of Jesus, we miss the promise that he made to his disciples that they would share in his heavenly kingdom with him. Nor can we speak only of the resurrection, as though Jesus never suffered the tortures the Romans inflicted on him. Likewise, we too often neglect the ascension, which assures us that Jesus has gone before us to prepare a place for us as he promised in John 14 and that he is waiting for us there. This is why these three are collectively known to many as “the Christ Event.” They are inseparable.
Jesus did love to say things that would cause his audience to gasp a little, or even to reject his words. He loved to say things like “the Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman hides in the grain to make bread.” Yeast was an “unclean” substance in ancient Judaism, and preparation for the Passover includes cleaning all yeast-raised products from the house. Only bread without yeast can be used for Passover, in remembrance that the people escaped Egypt so quickly in the dark of night that they had to bake their bread without it having a chance to rise. So comparing yeast to the Kingdom of God would have been a shock to those listening.
In like fashion, he compares himself to that snake that was raised in the wilderness. It’s easy for us today to say, “Well, he’s talking about the healings that took place.” But that snake, as noted in our discussion of the Old Testament passage, was a pagan symbol, used in the worship of their Egyptian overlords (or at least their wives). Probably the main way they thought of snakes was that talking one in the Garden of Eden, and many may have thought that Moses put that snake on that pole as a sort of punishment of the snakes in their midst.
But Jesus knew that we tend to remember best those things that shock or surprise us. So he tended to do that with some regularity in his teaching.
Take his reference to himself as “the Son of Man.” This was the title by which God consistently called Ezekiel, and when Daniel was presented with his major vision he was likewise referred to this way by God. It is also the title that is used for Jesus in all four of the gospels (an amazing thing, since all four of the gospels agreeing on anything in the life and teaching of Jesus is uncommon). The title in the case of the prophets meant that God had singled out this one man to represent all of the people of God as God talked to him.
Most Bible commentaries say that this is the title Jesus is given by God because he is the bridging of the gap between heaven and earth and between God and humanity. But it may also reflect the original meaning in the case of the prophets. God sends Jesus as his own Presence in the world, after all, and his death on the cross represents that ultimate sacrifice on the part of God. On the other side, his death calls all people to the foot of the cross, so that we may know how much God loves us. He represents us to God, and God to us. This is the central meaning of the historical doctrine of the virgin birth.
In bridging that gap, Jesus “did not [come] into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (v. 17). Those who “believe” put that belief in Jesus as the Son of God. Their lives conform to the way God has told us to behave, rather than the way Satan wants us to behave.
Again, it is a question of choices. A choice of behavior, because “all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.” A choice of which path to follow: “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.” A choice of living as God calls us to live, or living as the world seems to think we ought to live.
These kinds of choices are seen everywhere in our world. Recently, cod fishermen off New England were told they would have to cut back on how much cod they took out of the ocean, because there are not enough cod to ensure future catches if they keep going at the rate they have been fishing. Part of the news report showed a picture of fishermen with nearly empty nets, dumping fish into a hold that was less than half-full. Still, the fishermen complained that their livelihood was being cut off. They could not imagine that the cod will continue to dwindle until there are no more.
This kind of choice is much more common than those choices that are clearly a case of choosing evil over good. No one ever does what they cannot justify, and what we can justify we will consider good -- even if it is good for us while damaging others, let alone if we are being warned of the dire consequences to ourselves if we continue along the path we are currently on.
Maybe that’s the reason Jesus liked to shock his hearers -- whatever it takes to bring us up short, so that we may be brought to our senses.
