Snakes, particularly for those of us unfamiliar with them, epitomize fear. 

There is a Janet Frame short story, You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/03/29/you-are-now-entering-the-human-heart) about an English teacher who took her class to the Discovery Centre in the City Museum. There a gentleman told the children how harmless snakes were and how they were misunderstood. The gentleman, with a python as a scarf, invited the teacher forward to demonstrate his point. 

The teacher had had a bad week. One of those weeks when she’d wondered why she kept doing what she was doing. There is little appeal about thirty cranky and tiresome children when one is likewise cranky and tired.   

Now her bad week had just got worse. She was being asked to demonstrate the benign nature of snakes when her personal feelings were far from benign. Should she just confess her fear upfront and lose considerable face? Or suppress her fear and tough it out. She went for the latter. All went well until that snake moved.

Christianity as a religion has had a long and ambivalent relationship with fear. On the one hand it has tried to free us from fear[s], and yet on the other hand has also told us to fear hell, sex, difference, disapproval, and of course God. Instead of releasing us from our fear[s] religion has often heightened them. 

In John 3:14,15 there is mention of a snake: ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so the Chosen One must be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in the Chosen One might have eternal life.’

The background is chapter 21 in the Book of Numbers. The story goes that the wandering Israelites were in the desert hungry and thirsty and grumbling. And their God, who didn’t like grumbling, sent along some poisonous snakes to bite them and kill them. (You might think, like me, that God doesn’t send snakes to bite and kill people, but let’s just ignore this theological difficulty for now).  

The Israelites faced with snakes and death said ‘sorry’ to Moses for grumbling, and Moses passed on their sorry to God. (There’s also a theological difficulty there too, but let’s ignore that.) Then comes what I think is the interesting bit. God tells Moses to craft a bronze serpent, a sculpture, put it on a pole and raise it skyward so that all who looked upon it would live. The people stared at what they feared and were healed.

Making an image of a snake to cure snake bite is called by anthropologists ‘sympathetic magic'. The image of the creature is said to offset the creature's power. It is also recorded in 1^st Samuel 6 that it was done with mice – offsetting a plague of mice with images of mice. (Probably why people have gnomes in their gardens).

Nowadays we could understand 'sympathetic magic' as similar to what immunologists do when making hyper-immune serum. A little of the disease is administered to a healthy person in order that their body develops its own immunity.

In ancient times there was a close relation between 'sympathetic magic' and the idea of scapegoating (Leviticus 16).  Scapegoating is the belief that somehow an animal can carry the blame of a community and thereby bring healing for that community. (There is a significant ethical problem with this. Ask the goat!) Isaiah 53 talks about a human 'suffering servant' carrying that blame. The early Jesus communities, when struggling with the fact that their Messiah Jesus had been executed by the Romans, drew upon this idea of a scapegoat as one way of interpreting his death.

Back to the pole and Moses. Well, you might be surprised to learn – though not too surprised if you have been around churches – the crafted bronze serpent that had been affixed to a pole was not left in the desert. It continued the journey into what was to be called ‘the Promised Land’, also known as Canaan. It outlasted Moses and the Judges and David and Solomon. After the division of the Kingdom of Israel into Israel and Judah, it remained in Judah. In the Temple no less. And, by Hezekiah’s time at least, it was an object of worship. Regardless of whether you’d been bitten by a snake or not.

There are, of course, problems with 2 Kings 18:1-5. Hezekiah is praised as an all-round good guy, king extraordinaire, for smashing indigenous matriarch religion (Asherah being a female Canaanite deity), as colonizing patriarchal religion often does. But let’s park the ethics of that too.

The progressive Unitarian preacher Carl Gregg in interpreting this passage writes: “The bronze serpent had been built to remind the Israelites to look to God for healing and to stop complaining about minor inconveniences like food quality and to be grateful for major events like freedom from oppression. But by Hezekiah’s day that same bronze serpent had become an end in itself. Judeans were worshipping the snake instead of the God to whom the statue pointed.”

Gregg goes on, “The writer of the Gospel of John finds healing (from fear) in Jesus being lifted up on the cross - just as the Israelites found healing in Moses lifting up the serpent in the wilderness. But in 2 Kings 18, we see how the symbol of the serpent has hardened. It no longer points beyond itself to God. Instead it has become a simplistic formula: if you want to be healed, go visit the bronze snake. But God cannot be reduced to a formula.”

Which begs the question about the idols we (the Church) have made out of doctrines and other symbols. For God is not a formula, or a fixed point, or can be captured in a creed that is authoritative forever and ever. No, the essence of God is relationship. Everything about God is relational. And we use words like mutuality, unconditionality, and love to point to and glimpse some understanding of the relation in which we ‘live and move and have our being’, the relation that is God.

And I wonder too if, following the Rev Dr Gregg and his Majesty Hezekiah, the cross itself – and the accompanying doctrine(s) of atonement – have become Christianity’s bronze serpent on a pole.

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I find it intriguing that the author of the 4^th Gospel likens Jesus to a snake. The snake as a symbol has a long history. It slithers into Egypt, Africa, India, Japan, Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Greece. It is an ambiguous symbol. On the one hand it is dangerous, it kills, and it is to be feared. On the other hand, like in the Moses story, it is about healing and protection. Aesculapius, Greek God of medicine, had his staff entwined with a serpent, the spirit of life. It is a strange symbol, a synthesis of both life and death, not unlike a crucified saviour. 

A serpent pops up in the Genesis creation myth as a literary device to critique the deity and encourage Adam and Eve likewise. And, not surprisingly I suppose, it’s the snake and the woman who are forever after blamed for the disruption and disintegration of this so-called ‘paradise’. I would suggest that the serpent in this myth can be understood as a disturber and disrupter, but also the one who helped Adam and Eve into their ‘adulthood’ – leaving the home (where everything had been provided) to then find their own way in the world. Maybe we can understand Jesus too as one helping us into our ‘adulthood’ of not being controlled by our fears of disapproval, but acting, taking responsibility, to create a new community.

There is a well-known Christian hymn “Lift High the Cross”. The original lyrics, which are a little cringe-worthy, are all about the victory that Christ has won. What is less well-known is that the ‘lifting’ is a reference to Jesus being like Moses’ snake – something vilified but which brings healing. Like with the scapegoat metaphor, I suspect the early Jesus communities in struggling to understand both Jesus’ death and the power of that death in their lives, read this story of Moses and the snakes and recognized Jesus as the one was blamed and feared by the people, yet also the one – when the people looked at him – who would bring new life. 

Most of us struggle to understand how Jesus could be feared. Wasn’t he loving, kind, and non-violent?

Yet Jesus was also a ‘disturber of the peace’. And peace, even the oppressive Pax Romana (‘peace through violence’ as Dom Crossan says), had a comforting predictability about it. The Roman regime offered stability. Good for the ‘share market’ and all that. Markets don’t like disruptions and disturbers.

I’m reminded of James K Baxter’s parable of a man in an iron tank. He was comfortably cocooned away (but had to endure (and feared) each day a man outside with a shotgun who would blast holes in the walls of the tank. Eventually the holes rusted, and so did the tank. And one fateful fear-filled day the man stepped out to meet his adversary. Who laid down his weapon and held out his hands. It was Jesus.  

Psychotherapists might offer a similar lens to Baxter in trying to understand why Jesus was a threat. He invited his followers to face their fears, to come to terms with their fears. He invited them to take risks – like leaving livelihoods behind. He invited his followers to face, live, and wrestle with fears, but not be constrained by them. Struggle, doubt, and loss are part of faith. Fear is not to be feared. But it needs to be faced with courage.

And Jesus wasn’t offering surety to his followers. He wasn’t doing conventional religion. He wasn’t doing conventional anything. Like we might imagine with the parable, when the man who walked out of the tank and met Jesus. Jesus was the disrupter sure, but Jesus wasn’t going to be his provider from then on.

Personally, I prefer Mary Oliver to James K Baxter. Her poem Wild Geese is saying something similar. ‘The iron tank’ in this case is the scripting we often imbue from childhood: to be good, to conform, to feel guilt. And freedom from ‘the tank’, is trusting yourself, your body and instincts, to trust that you belong(despite feeling of despair and loss). Freedom and healing are woven into nature itself, offering comfort and wonder. And nature calls to you, offers itself to you. And we need the faith to respond.

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