Don't Look Away
Lent 4B (Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21)
So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
The Old Testament readings during Lent have progressively described God’s self-revelation. After the flood, God first promised never again to counter human violence with divine violence. Then, God promised to Abraham and Sarah to be God for a specific people who would descend from them, and last week we heard God’s vision for how those people would live as the People of God after God had freed them from bondage in Egypt, in the Ten Commandments.
And then today we have this very strange story from the forty years Israel spent wandering the wilderness. It’s about 200 miles, as the crow flies, from the Red Sea to Jerusalem, and in the beginning I doubt anyone imagined it would take 40 years to get there. When we moved our worship service online last March 15, we were thinking it would last maybe two or three weeks. And here we are a year later, and it’s easy to sympathize with the people of Israel for their impatience.
But it seems that, while God can take the people out of Egypt, but taking Egypt out of the people turned out to be the more difficult project. After generations of living under taskmasters who couldn’t have cared less whether they lived or died, as long as the quota of bricks was met, learning to trust God and to trust one another was not easy. The skills and the habits that had enabled the people to survive in Egypt turned out to be ill-suited to life in freedom. And so, as Moses started out on yet another long detour, the people explode against Moses, and against God. Why have you brought us here? You promised us a land of milk and honey, and all we have is this wretched manna, manna, manna every single day. Save your vision of a wonderful life together in community – we don’t want it any more. We wish we had never left Egypt.
And then, the story goes, the Lord sent poisonous snakes among the people, and many died. Then the people came to Moses and apologized, and asked Moses to pray for the snakes to be taken away. Moses prays, but the Lord does not take away the snakes; instead, Moses is told to put a snake on a pole, and that anyone who is bitten will look at it and live. Moses makes a snake out of bronze, lifts it up on a pole, and whoever looks at it lived.
Let’s be honest, that’s a strange story. First of all, did God really send the poisonous snakes to punish the people for their impatience? That would be petty. And then, when the people apologized, why didn’t God just take away the snakes? What’s up with looking at a bronze snake on a pole? How does that fix being bitten by a rattlesnake? Is it supposed to be magic? That doesn’t sound like God. What a strange story.
Well, first of all, the text of the story doesn’t actually say that God sent the snakes to punish the people. That’s perhaps our assumption, but for the people who escaped from Egypt, they had seen God do this before – in the plagues that struck Egypt when Pharoah refused to let the people go. In those plagues, God made clear to the Egyptians that their way of life was leading to death – their domination over other people, their indifference to human suffering, their beautiful brick pyramids built on the backs of slaves – this way of life was a way of death, not just for their victims but even for the Egyptians themselves. And it’s precisely because God also loves Egyptians that God slowly allowed them to see their choices of death for what they were, until eventually Pharoah gave in and changed his mind.
This is how the first generation of Israel in the wilderness remembered God dealing with Egypt. And so, when the people of Israel, in an understandable fit of impatience and frustration, asked to go back to Egypt, and then when the death-dealing consequences of that wish immediately became apparent, I imagine that generation understood this as God’s way of saying, You want to go back to Egypt? Let me show you what the ways of Egypt lead to.
But the people of Israel then showed that they had learned a thing or two about this God who freed them from Egypt and was calling them to a new and more abundant life. They recognized their lack of faith, and turned away from it. And they asked Moses to pray that God would return them to the path of life – or, at least, that God would get rid of the danged snakes.
And so Moses prays. We are not told what Moses says to God, but if he were a Lutheran Moses would have said: Merciful God, we confess that we are still captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. You have freed our bodies but our hearts and our minds and our souls are still at some level stuck in Egypt and we need your help to get out.
And what Moses discerns in his praying is that God is not going to just take away the snakes and pretend this whole unfortunate incident never happened, let it be covered up in the darkness of history. No, God wants to give God’s people a way forward, a way into a deeper and more lasting freedom, so that they can experience the joy and peace of the life God wants them to enjoy.
So Moses is inspired to give the people a way to look their death-dealing impulses right in the eye. Moses tells the people: Don’t look away from this mess you’re in, or from the reasons why you’ve put yourself in this mess. No matter how uncomfortable it makes you, don’t look away – and this is your hope for life.
What Moses discerns in his time of prayer is an important truth about faith: when we are shown that, when we are not really free, when we buy into the narratives of death that are all around us, then we harm ourselves and our neighbors, the path to freedom and life begins by facing up to this truth and not letting ourselves look away from it. As the theologian Chris Green writes, “The truth hurts, but it never harms. In fact, it hurts only because it reveals how we have been harmed. Our healing always begins in the pain of these revelations.”
I’ve been struck by how whenever another video emerges of something like the death of George Floyd, something that people of my background and life experience wouldn’t believe actually happens if someone with a cellphone didn’t document it for the world to see – when people online share the video or the news, they will often use the phrase: Don’t look away. I know this video, this information, will make you uncomfortable, but don’t look away. Looking at this, coming to terms with the fact that this really happened, trying to answer the questions it inevitably raises for you – that is the path to making this right. Ignore it and it will happen again and again until we stop looking away.
When people say, Don’t look away, they are tapping into the same knowledge that Moses received from God. And Jesus too, for that matter, as we see in the gospel reading today.
In today’s gospel Jesus says: Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so the Son of Man will be lifted up – that whoever looks upon him will have the life of the Age to Come. For God loved the world in this way, that God sent the Son so that those who trust in him will not die, but live.
The Son of Man will be lifted up onto the cross and be crucified. But don’t look away: For here we see that we have come full circle from the days of Noah. In the flood, when humans chose death, God gave death in return. Now when humans choose death, God comes in flesh and accepts the worst of all that we human beings do to one another, and yet rises to live with forgiveness and grace and an invitation to follow him into life.
Jesus is crucified, but don’t look away. For it is here that you will see more clearly than anywhere else who God really is.
Jesus is crucified, but don’t look away. Yes, you will clearly see here what your choices have meant for you, and for your neighbor – maybe without your intending it, but no less really so. If you look away, your deeds will remain in the darkness, so don’t look away. Because if you are willing to look at Jesus crucified, you will see yourself exactly as God sees you, without any justifications, or pious promises, or excuses, or obfuscations. And when you do, you will see that you are a beloved child of God destined for life. So if you want to live, don’t look away.
Not looking away from the consequences of our choices that lead to death doesn’t bring back the dead. It didn’t bring back the people who died from snakebite in the wilderness, it won’t bring back George Floyd, or any of the other countless victims of human indifference and violence. Only God can raise the dead, and we believe that God does. But not looking away changes us. Not looking away draws us into the life that God wants for us. And this is how we share in God’s healing the whole world.