Look and live

I really, really don’t understand what is going on in our first reading, do you? I mean, one minute you have God being absolutely livid with the Israelites for building a golden calf to worship, and threatening to destroy the lot of them, and the next minute you have God telling Moses to build a bronze serpent for people to look at to be healed of snakebite. And the snakes themselves were, we are told, sent by God because the people were grumbling! I mean, hello? If God punished us for grumbling like that, not a one of us that wouldn’t be reaching for the snake-bite serum at some time during the week! I rather suspect that this is a story that sort of crept in by mistake. Or, perhaps, they found a statue of a bronze snake in the Temple and made up this story to explain how it came to be there. And, of course, the fact that it is there means that God meant it to be there, no matter what its provenance!

Of course, the people who wrote down what’s called the Deuteronomic histories, which basically means the Pentateuch and some other bits of our Bible, do like to make a perceived punishment fit an alleged crime. Moses doesn’t quite make it to the Promised Land, so God must be punishing him for something. The people of Israel take 40 years to get there, there must be a good reason for it. And so on and so forth. And in this instance there was a plague of snakes. So the people must have been grumbling.

I suppose grumbling is a sin, really, when you come to think about it. After all, it is either futile or hurtful and can often be both. The Israelites were mooing on about how much better off they’d been in Egypt, totally forgetting that there they had not been free, and moaning on about the strict rations that they were getting in the desert. Talk about hurtful to Moses, and utterly futile, too, as nothing was going to change. They weren’t going back!

We grumble, too, most of the time. It wouldn’t be us if we weren’t chuntering on about the weather, or the trains, or the health service! Just look at your Facebook page, especially when we had that snow a couple of weeks ago! All things we can do absolutely nothing about! I dare say that’s pretty harmless.

But then, there are the times when people could do something about it, but, instead, they grumble. It is easier to expect the other person to do something than it is to get up and do it yourself. Although, quite often, if you want something done properly, it is a lot easier to do it yourself!

And sometimes we grumble about each other, which is all very well, but the things we say have a nasty habit of being relayed to the person we said them about, hurting them, and causing us all a great deal of bother. It’s best to try – heaven knows, I know how difficult it is – to try not to say anything behind people’s backs that you wouldn’t say to their faces. Which is all very well when it’s one’s spouse, because one does, as often as not, grumble at them, but one doesn’t tend to grumble at other people.

So yes, by and large, maybe grumbling is a sin. But to be bitten by snakes for it? It doesn’t sound so much like God to me. But there you are, the story got put in the Bible, and physicians liked it so much that they adopted the snake on a pole as their emblem. And, of course, one of the reasons it is important is that Jesus refers to it when he is talking to Nicodemus, as we heard in our Gospel reading: 

"And 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. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."

That, of course, is why the story still resonates with us today, as it is a type, or picture, of the crucifixion. I remember one sermon I heard on this passage where the preacher pointed out, quite forcefully, that the Israelites didn’t have to do anything with the snake – they didn’t have to go up to it, or touch it, or lick its tail, or anything like that. All they had to do was look at it, and instantly they were healed of their snake-bite. And similarly, we too, the preacher said, just have to look to Jesus, and instantly we are saved.

And so Jesus himself tells us. All we have to do is to believe. To look to the Cross.

It is, of course, God who saves us. We can do nothing to save ourselves. Nothing. The Israelites in the desert could do nothing to save themselves from the snakes. They didn’t know about anti-snakebite venom back in the day. If they were bitten, the probability was that they would die – unless, of course, they could just look at the bronze serpent.

There would, of course, be those who refused to look. They had been bitten by a snake, very well, they were going to die. Or perhaps they thought they knew better: looking at an image wasn’t going to help, was it? Maybe if they did this or that instead, that would help. You’ve got to DO something, after all.

But no, if they wanted to live, all they had to do was to look. They could do nothing to save themselves, all they could do was look at the serpent. And, similarly, we can do nothing to save ourselves – whatever we may mean by that, and I’m not always quite sure – all we can do is look at the Cross. And God does the rest.

It’s about love, isn’t it?   What we remember on Mothering Sunday isn’t just our mothers, although that, too, but above all, the wonderful love of God, our Father and our Mother. After all, there are people whose mothers have died; people who didn’t or don’t have a good relationship with their mothers; and above all, people who would have loved to have been mothers, but it didn’t happen, for whatever reason. Many of those will not be in church this morning. The Church isn't always very tactful about Mothers Day, I'm afraid – I used to find it very patronising, especially considering that for the rest of the year I was rather left to get on with it, and was told that the loneliness and isolation and lack of fellowship was “the price you pay for the wonderful privilege of being a Christian Mother!” As if....

The worst Mothers Day sermon I ever heard was from a young curate who had just discovered his wife was expecting their first child – sadly, he moved away during the course of the year,

as several of us were longing to hear what he would have had to say after several months of the reality of parenthood!

But one of the things that those of us who are parents will know about is unconditional love. We know that, no matter what our children may do, we will go on loving them. When they are young, we may have to punish them if they behave badly; when they are older, how much we see of them very much depends on them, not on us. But we never stop loving them, no matter how infuriating they are.

I am vividly reminded of Jesus saying: 

“Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

“How much more”! We find it very difficult to comprehend God’s love, the love that says you only have to look to live. The love that reaches out to us infinitely more strongly than we are able to reach out to God. Jesus said that

“Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

But the thing is – light! After all, if you think about it, when you are in a dark room, you switch on the light, and the darkness has gone. People might have preferred darkness, but it is easier to make it light than to make it dark. And in the light, all you have to do is look, look at the Cross – and you will live! Amen.