Today’s first reading from Numbers is a recounting of how the Lord sent poisonous serpents among God’s people as punishment for their complaints against the Lord during their sojourn in the wilderness. When the people acknowledged their sin, Moses prayed for the people. In response, the Lord’s instruction to Moses was this: “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So it is that Moses made the serpent of bronze and put it on a pole and the bitten sinners would look at it and live.

Antivenom that treats snake bites has traditionally been made from snake venom. The scientific, and in the case of Moses and God’s people in the wilderness, also the religious wisdom, seems to be that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. That which you want to treat and eradicate is used in the service of treatment and eradication.

In the case of antivenom, venom is used. In many cases, in the development of vaccines, forms of the virus are used. In the case recorded in Numbers, God used the image of the poisonous serpent to eradicate the effects of the serpents’ bites.

And in the case of Moses and the people in the wilderness, the healing happened by looking at the serpent on the pole. The healing power seems to be activated in the gaze.

What were they looking at? They viewed the image of a serpent, a symbol of temptation and the fall from grace as recorded in the book of Genesis when the serpent tempted Adam and Eve who ate from the prohibited tree in the paradise garden. This was the first rebellion against God. That’s perhaps a feature of what is seen in the serpent, a sign of our age-old rebellion, our sin. When God’s people in the wilderness gazed upon the serpent on the pole, they saw their sin, their rebellion which then made for their healing.

Which brings us to today’s gospel reading from John where Jesus invokes the story of Moses in the wilderness to help make sense of what he was about, particularly in drawing attention to what would befall him in the last days of his earthly sojourn. John reports Jesus as having said, “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.”

When Jesus is lifted up on the tree of the cross, our gaze is directed at that spectacle. Indeed, the Gospels report many and various onlookers at the scene of crucifixion – the soldiers, the two other criminals also crucified, the crowds, the women and other disciples, many of whom looked on from afar.

In the case of Moses and the wilderness people, the people looked upon the serpent on the pole. In the case of Christ’s cross, those at the scene in ancient times and we today gaze upon Jesus’ body on that pole.

But there is more to be seen. Up on that cross, that pole, is also the serpent, that is, the fullness of human rebellion and sin. I think of what the apostle Paul said, “For our sake [God] made [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

Think of what the cross is. It’s an instrument of torture and execution used by imperial Roman powers to humiliate and punish those who were deemed enemies of the state. Jesus was perceived to be one such threat, one such enemy, perhaps particularly threatening to the religious authorities of Jesus’ day. But it was the abusive power of the state that employed violence and torture to bring about what was thought to have been the end of Jesus and his ministry and mission.

The worst of what human beings are capable of is all wrapped up in one image of Jesus lifted up on the pole of the cross. It’s as if the serpent is all slithered up and snaked around Jesus’ limbs and the beams of the cross, entangling Jesus like weedy vines that try to choke out the life of the host.

Yes, this is what we see when we gaze at the cross. But the cross is also a mirror reflecting back on us our own brokenness and sin, what we have been capable of in our own lives, our share in the kinds of communal circumstances that ended in the crucifixion.

To look upon all of this without much flinching, with the courage to see what is really there, is akin perhaps to confession, the confession which we ritually enacted on Ash Wednesday, a fuller confession then that names particularities of our human sin to a greater extent than our usual rites of confession.

When we gaze at the cross, we may see our versions of speaking against God akin to God’s people complaining people in the wilderness: “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.” (Numbers 21:5)

Or, to invoke the language in John’s gospel, it may be our unbelief when we look upon the cross. “But those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” (John 3:18b)

Or it may be, again invoking John, that we see and acknowledge in truth that we “loved darkness rather than light because [our] deeds [are] evil” (cf. John 3:19b).

But this is not the end of the story. There’s more to be told because there’s more to be seen.

Yes, our unflinching gaze at the instrument of torture and execution is our confession of our part in all of this. But the staying power of our looking upon the cross also reveals that this instrument of state violence is also and at the same time the tree of life, a vessel for the embodied communication of God’s love and mercy and grace and forgiveness.

Listen again to the beloved words from John’s Gospel: “For God loved the world in this way, that God gave the Son, the only begotten one, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 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.” (John 3:16-17)

Likewise, hear again how the apostle Paul puts it in today’s second reading: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:4-9)

Here we are back to the paradox of using poison to eradicate the effects of poisoning, of employing venom to make for antivenom, of using virus to make for healing vaccines. God used the cross at cross purposes, to short-circuit the human attempt to engage in violence to eradicate life, thus making the cross into a tree of life for us and for the world.

When we see this paradoxical love in the cross alongside our human sin, our collusion, our participation in sin, communal and individual, we are led to make another kind of confession – a confession of faith. Yes, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief (cf. Mark 9:24b). Such faith, such life, forgiveness, love, mercy, grace – all of this is the fruit of the cross as tree of life that makes for our healing and that of the nations.

So it is that the Son of Man was lifted up to generate and to awaken again and again our belief, our trust, our faith, our share in eternal life, even now.

We see the Son of Man lifted up when babes and adults are lifted up out of the waters of baptism for new life, a share in our Trinitarian God.

We see the Son of Man lifted up when the bread and cup at the table are lifted up – the memory of which we see in our mind’s eye, the anticipation of which we long to see again when we return to our in-person assemblies.

We see the Son of Man lifted up when people of faith, responding to and extending God’s love and mercy, lift up the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed out of the dusty pits which unjust societies have systemically dug for them.

The message in the ways in which the Son of Man continues to be lifted up is the same as it was in the beginning: “For God loved the world in this way, that God gave the Son, the only begotten one, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

In this season of the pandemic’s ongoing claims on us and on the world, may this good news of God in Christ lift us up as well in the power of the Spirit.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

For your reflection and holy conversation at home:

• When you gaze at the cross which reveals human sin, what is reflected back to you?
• When you gaze at the cross as tree of life, in what ways does it reveal to you divine life and love, forgiveness and mercy?