A Reflection for Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Find today’s readings here.
For Christians, checking out the Old Testament due to the New Testament is often almost like a video game: Where is Jesus hiding? How is Jesus prefigured this time, in a story set countless years prior to he was born?
In today’s readings, we have a strange one: The Hebrews grumble that they’re starving, that they would have been much better off in Egypt. God, irritated, sends out snakes to bite them, and a lot of them pass away. Then individuals ask Moses to ask God to take the snakes away.
So Moses wished individuals, and the LORD said to Moses, ”Make a saraph and install it on a pole, and whoever takes a look at it after being bitten will live.” Moses appropriately made a bronze snake and installed it on a pole, and whenever anybody who had actually been bitten by a snake took a look at the bronze snake, he lived.
The individuals are injured; they take a look at this thing raised up on a pole at God’s command, and they are saved. This is plainly a prefiguring of the Crucifixion.
So in this situation, Jesus is prefigured by…a poisonous snake. That’s strange! It’s not how we think of our precious rescuer, prefigured or otherwise. It’s not how we think of redemption.
Here are some methods to understand it:
First, individuals ask God to eliminate the snakes, however rather, he provides them a method of not passing away from the bites. This feels really familiar. That’s how it is: Sin and death and suffering remain in the world. God doesn’t eliminate them, however he offers us a treatment so they’re not deadly.
If the snake association feels uneasy, possibly it’s due to the fact that we’ve ended up being a little too comfy with taking a look at the crucifix.
Second, the snake remembers the story of how sin and death entered the world: Through the sin of Adam. Jesus is the brand-new Adam. Just as sin entered the world through Adam (with the help of the snake), life entered the world through Jesus.
And I might go on. Other, more found out individuals have actually had plenty to state on the passage.
Does any of this make the image of a brass snake as a proto-Jesus stop being strange? Not at all!
And that’s most likely an advantage. If the association feels uneasy, possibly it’s due to the fact that we’ve ended up being a little too comfy with taking a look at the crucifix. It’s a little too familiar, and we’ve stopped being shocked by the sight of it.
Maybe the weirdness of the brass snake story will help us keep in mind: The cross is expected to be strange and awful, stunning like a near-death experience in the desert, frightening like a violent, poisonous snakebite, unpleasant like a prefiguring that doesn’t sit easily and doesn’t cuddle in gently with a fairy-tale type of Christianity.
That’s the point. It’s odd, it’s stunning and you might in fact pass away of its bite. You might pass away, unless you aim to Jesus to save you. So do that.
