Before the famous John 3:16 is this sentence: “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” (John 3:14-15, NRSV).
Jesus was referring to a story about the salvation of God’s people in Numbers 21:4-9 in the Old Testament. Under the leadership of Moses, the children of Israel had been miraculously delivered from slavery in Egypt. After leaving Egypt, the Bible tells us they won some great military victories, but they must have suffered some significant losses as well, for instead of heading straight to the Promised Land of milk and honey, they took a 40-year detour south to the deep desert of the Sinai peninsula and a wasteland called the Negev, where there was nothing to drink and nothing to eat.
True, Moses struck a rock with his staff and drinking water flowed out of the rock and every morning there were white communion wafers called manna on the ground for food, but if that was all you had to drink and eat for 40 years while you were going the wrong direction in 120-degree weather, you might have grumbled just like the children of Israel did. You might have joined some of the complainers who went to the school board and griped about Coach Moses and tried to get him fired. Of course, the Israelites were not just complaining about Moses, they were rebelling against God.
When things don’t go our way in life, we get dissatisfied with God, as well. We feel that if he were doing His job, things would be coming up roses for us, not thorns. Dissatisfaction leads to rebellion, and we decide we know how to better manage our lives than God.
We look for ways to numb our pain with the things of this world. We might decide to shop our way to happiness, but a multitude of things do not fill up the soul and we could end up with insurmountable debt. We might lash out with abusive language or behavior against others until we end up isolated and alone. We might try to numb our pain with drugs, alcohol, or sex, but discover that all of those “solutions” are not solutions at all but mere short-term analgesics that leave us empty and spiritually nauseated.
In other words, we wander in the wilderness until the serpents of life surround us and we are bitten, suffering, and even dying.
Surrounded and bitten by serpents, the children of Israel repented and asked Moses for deliverance and healing. Following God’s instructions, Moses made a bronze serpent and put it on a pole. All who lifted their eyes from their misery to gaze upon it were healed. That was a strange thing for Moses to do, for the pagan people all around them had hand-crafted idols and it must have conjured up images of Egyptian serpent worship.
Indeed, hundreds of years later, that same bronze serpent became a focal point of idol worship and King Hezekiah had to smash it to bits to get people to return to worshipping the one, true God (II Kings 18:4). Yet, even today, the serpent on a pole is the symbol of medicine.
Just like the serpent on a pole is a strange symbol for healing, the cross is an outlandish symbol for our faith. Today there are multiple crosses in every church. Crosses symbolize the Christian Faith. Yet can you imagine the repulsion that people in the first century must have felt about the symbolism of the cross? The Romans used crosses to execute rebels who dared to challenge their empire. It was a symbol of their dominion, power, and cruelty. A cross produced fear among the oppressed. Putting one in a church in those days would have been worse than our having a hanging noose or an electric chair at the center of our worship.
Yet, if we are to repent and return to God, we must lift our eyes from our personal serpents and see the Son of God, the Beloved, on the cross. He was crucified because of the wickedness of all humanity. We must see His death, the penalty imposed by our human corruption on the Holy One.
The cross symbolizes the price paid by God for us. May we look upon Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and be healed. However strange it may sound, the love of God flows from an instrument of death and leads us out of bondage to sin, death, and the devil.
Through the cross we are born again as the liberated children of God and given the gift of eternal life.
Dr. Dan Darby is a retired United Methodist pastor.
