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| Michelangelo, Brazen Serpent, Sistine Chapel, c. 1511-1512 |
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.
— John 3:14–15
Kaa, the Rock Python, is one of my favorite characters in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Kaa is an ancient and enormous snake. He's 30 feet long and 100 years old, with "beautifully mottled brown and yellow" skin. Kaa climbs trees as well as the monkeys who live in terror of him--and he moves along the ground as quickly as Bagheera the panther. Kaa fights like a living battering ram, and he has a killer hug. As Kipling puts it, "when he had once lapped his huge coils round anybody there was no more to be said."
Kaa, of course, is just one example of the many snakes that populate the human imagination. The serpent is one of the most powerful cross-cultural symbols; serpents writhe through mythologies the world over. Sometimes they symbolize fertility and rebirth because they shed their skins. And sometimes they signify healing. For example, Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, carries a rod with a single snake wound round it that has come to symbolize the medical arts. Even today the Rod of Asclepius is the most common symbol for emergency services and hospitals. Sometimes serpents are guardians, from the giant naga that is said to have shielded the Buddha from a storm, to the rattlesnake of Revolutionary America, with its warning, "Don't tread on me." And, of course, snakes are often the source of fear. Emily Dickinson wrote that she had never met a snake
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
Snakes also slither across the pages of Scripture. In the beginning, the serpent deceives our first parents in the Garden. In the end, a great dragon is thrown down from heaven, "that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world" (Rev. 12:9). In between, there's nothing good about snakes: they're signs of evil and deception. The psalmist compares liars to snakes, and a proverb says that wine can bite like a snake. And it's not meant as a compliment. There's nothing good about snakes in Scripture.
And then, there's the serpent Moses lifted up in the wilderness. In today's Gospel lesson, Jesus refers to that story, the story of the bronze serpent found in Numbers. Do you remember it? Moses has led the people of Israel out of Egypt, and they are wandering in the wilderness on their way to the promised land. The Israelites become impatient and begin to complain against God. They say they had it better as slaves in Egypt than they do now, hungry and thirsty in the desert. So God sends fiery, poisonous serpents among the people, which bite them—and they begin to die. Moses intercedes for them. And the Lord says to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live." So Moses makes a bronze serpent and lifts it up on a pole, and anyone bit by the fiery serpents could look at the bronze serpent and live. (cf. Num. 21:4-9).
In John's Gospel, Jesus applies this story to himself. He says, "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." The story about a serpent becomes a story about the Savior. And we see that the story about the Israelites is also a story about us and our salvation.