Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B

And 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.”
~Numbers 21:8
 
This obscure and even troubling story of the wandering Israelites finds new life amidst our preoccupation with health and well-being. It is no accident that both the American Medical Association and World Health Organizations have adopted the Rod of Asclepius—a snake on a pole—as the symbol for medical healing. One of the great wonders of modern medicine is that scientists have learned how to replicate viral forces, render them nonlethal, and return them back to the body as vaccines. The only sure cure for infection is exposure (and inoculation), which allows the memory to be activated to destroy what would otherwise kill us. The disease is used to cure the disease.
 
The image carries well to our human condition more broadly. There is something essential at looking closely and squarely and lovingly at our stories. Like the snake on a pole, like the Christ on a cross, we must not look away, but steel ourselves for the story of who we truly are and what saves us. Attending to our choices and their results is an essential act that enables us to correct, redirect, and ultimately find our way to the new life Christ proclaims.
 
Enter into worship.
 
Readings: Numbers 21:4-9 † Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22 † Ephesians 2:1-10 † John 3:14-20
 
About the Art: Fantoni, Giovanni. Brazen Serpent, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55664 [retrieved March 3, 2024]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brazen_Serpent_Sculpture.jpg.
 
Atop Mount Nebo in Jordan, this serpentine sculpture represents the Old Testament story of the serpent on the pole in Numbers 21:4-9 integrated with the New Testament cross of Christ.

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