Those Good Old Snakes [Lent 4B]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Numbers 21:4-9

Those Good Old Snakes

They watched with eyes wide open and mouths agape. It was like watching a man possessed, a wild man. He started with their shrines and their sacred pillars – those monuments to outside influences, built for foreign gods that had migrated into YHWH's country. He shattered them, smashed them, broke them into a thousand pieces; he was merciless. Eyes still glued to this royal deity hunter, they watched as their king, Hezekiah, entered now the Temple. But for what could he possibly be looking? This was the Temple; this was no local shrine, no seat of idolatry.  Here was the earthly throne of YHWH.  But he continued to stalk and so they continued to watch, to see what might happen next.

And then he found it; the predator king found his prey. There in the Temple it stood: an image their infidelity and disrespect had made graven. Silently it stared back at him, frozen, eyes ever open. It had a name: Nehushtan. They named it – as if it were alive, as if it could hear their prayers, as if it were a worthy replacement. Hezekiah grabbed hold of the cool bronze and smashed it with all his might – a frenzied offering to YHWH, the final task in his mission to banish from the land all of God's rivals. And those watching gasped – in horror, perhaps, maybe in shock. There it laid, destroyed: Moses' bronze serpent.

Hezekiah might have framed the event differently than the stunned masses.  He might have said that he was simply cleansing the Temple.  The people were offering incense to the serpent; they were worshiping the bronze snake in the very house of God.  But the great prophet Moses made that snake; he was a hero among heroes.  And he formed that serpent with his own holy hands.  It was priceless.  It was sacred.  It had healed their ancestors.  It was a precious artifact; a beautiful symbol of a special time in their history.  That serpent was a link to the good old days.

The good old days: back when they were with Moses – the great Moses.  He was like prophet, priest, and king all rolled into one.  Probably he was the greatest man who ever lived. He led them out of Egypt – the Exodus, their defining event.  He performed amazing miracles.  He carried the Ten Commandments down the mountain for them.  He spoke with God.  He knew God.  Amazing times; miraculous times.  The golden age, for sure.  And Hezekiah destroyed his handiwork; he smashed a beautiful link to that glorious, romantic past.   

Oh, the past.  My gosh, did those desert wanderers miss Egypt.  Those were the days, the good old days.  So much delicious food, unlimited water to drink.  And steady work, sure it was slave labor, but it was steady and consistent.  And Moses: ugh, that guy is the worst.  He led them into a barren wilderness – obviously to watch them die.  No food.  No water.  And the food that they did have, it was miserable – just terrible.  God and Moses ruined everything.  Everything they had back in Egypt: gone.  All they have now, thanks to Moses and God, is stupid desert and impending death.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, then the snakes come.  The text is not explicit that the snakes are a result of their complaining, just that after the complaining came the snakes. But the people interpret the plague that way.  Death and misery everywhere. And there seems to be only one way to stop the bleeding.  And so the people to repent to Moses and beg him to pray to God to take away the serpents.  Moses is a solid guy.  Even though the people constantly grumble against him, the man who led them out of slavery, Moses prays for the people, prays that the snakes will go away and leave them alone.

They do not.  Perhaps the people would have preferred St. Patrick to Moses.  St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland with his drum; it is perhaps his most famous miracle.  Moses, however, is no Patrick.  And the ancient Israelites are not so lucky as the Irish. Despite Moses' prayer, God does not drive these snakes away; they don't even stop biting. Instead the people get the bronze snake – the one Hezekiah will later destroy.

This story from Numbers is an odd story, right?  It raises more questions than it answers. We might wonder why these snakes attack the people to begin with.  Is it directly a result of their complaining or just a coincidence that the people ascribe additional meaning?  Certainly other people in the Bible complain without bringing plagues upon their heads.  We might wonder why God would allow some of those who escaped slavery in Egypt, walked through the Red Sea, survived the harsh desert conditions, to die from a snakebite.  We might wonder why God commanded Moses to create an image of a snake to heal the snake-bitten rather than to just send the snakes away. 

But perhaps the oddest feature of the story is this bronze serpent itself.  Why this?  Why would God choose this method?  Not long after God commands the people to make no graven images, God now commands Moses to do just that.  The people look to the image for their healing.  And in time the people make the serpent into an idol.  They set it up as a shrine in the Temple.  And until Hezekiah destroys it, they worship it as a god. 

It is not hard to see how they got there.  That bronze serpent was there in their time of need.  They could see it, touch it.  It was safe and predictable.  They could understand it because one of their own manufactured it.  It was everything God was not. 

And in time it took on sentimental value.  It was a link to a past remembered through rose-colored glasses.  It is hard to know if it was really the bronze serpent they worshiped.  Perhaps it was that golden age from whence the serpent came that they really worshiped.

A month from now we will celebrate our 125th anniversary as a congregation.  It is an exciting milestone, a great achievement.  Not many little church plants take root.  St. Andrew's has.

And as we celebrate we will remember our past.  We'll remember Fr. Gruetter and Fr. Reasner and Fr. Brown – the big three.  We'll see pictures of big Confirmation classes and dozens of Sunday School children gathered around those priests of old.  And people will tell stories about setting up folding chairs on Easter because the space in the pews ran out.  And it would be easy to long for that golden age when the budgets were not deficit and there was enough money to pay as many as three priests at once.             

And of course there is nothing wrong with remembering our stories, celebrating our history.  St. Andrew's has a great history.  I personally love the old pictures and the old stories, all those things our ancestors have passed on to us; they are great. 

But this ancient Bible story reminds us that the things we carry from the past into our future can also be the things that became our graven images.  The bronze snake was a medium; God worked through it.  But it was not God.  And the people, they forgot that.

In ages past, the people experienced God through that serpent.  But God kept moving.  God continued to live and work in their midst, to move in new ways, through new people and new objects, but they were too busy looking at a piece of old metal to notice.  Hezekiah destroyed the snake to wake the people from their trance, so that the people would once again train their eyes on God, to remember it was not the serpent who healed them, but the God behind that metal snake.  Beyond all the stuff – the buildings, the legacy, the metal and stone – is a mysterious, unseen, powerful God.  And that God was their source of life, healing, strength; everything else was just dust in the wind.

It is almost always easier to see God in the past – to look back and see that miracles were happening all around, to look longingly to the golden age of old.  But with God there is no golden age. God is just as powerful and just as present today as ever before. God is not stuck in the past. God is still moving. God is still speaking. Even in life's most barren deserts, God is still resurrection and life. 

On a long enough time-line, everything we treasure from the past, or to which we cling in the present, all those objects through which God once spoke, will crumble and turn to dust around us. But not God. God remains. And that's enough.