Sometimes you hear a reading at Mass and think, “Wow, that’s neat.” Some detail in the language sticks in your ears, or a new type or layer reveals itself, or a poignant human touch reminds you that the Bible wasn’t written by ScriptureChatGPT but by flesh-and-blood people not different from us.
I had an experience like that with today’s first reading. It’s the familiar story of when the Israelites, wandering in the wilderness, complain against God and find themselves beset by deadly serpents. They do what they do best—grumble to Moses—and he, following the Lord’s command, mounts a level-20 Bronze Serpent of Healing on a pole, curing anyone bitten by a snake who looks at it.
Four neat moments in that reading:
1) The people bring this on themselves with their lack of faith in God and gratitude for the food he gave them. Deadly serpents were not part of the plan God intended for the Israelites. Neither was death the state God intended for all of us. But our first parents brought it on themselves—with infidelity to God and ingratitude for the food he gave them.
2) The people beg Moses to ask God to take away the serpents. But this isn’t the solution God offers. The serpents will still be there—they’ll even still bite the people. But there will be a cure for their venom. This is a perfect parallel to salvation history and our personal faith-life: we want God to wave his mighty arm and do away with evil—in the world and in our hearts. We want him to make us healthy by fiat. But he wills something greater. He wants us to cooperate with him in the midst of evil, to bring out of it a greater good.
3) The people have to look up for it all to work. But the deadly serpents are on the ground. So their salvation requires not just some token gesture but a profound act of faith. They have to take their eyes off the thing they fear, let down their worldly guard—and maybe suffer a painful sting!—if they are to be delivered.
4) The disease is also the cure. It wasn’t some cherub or sculpture of a burning bush up on that pole, but a representation of the deadly thing they wanted to avoid. This prefigures the paradox of the Cross, the paradox of the awful Friday we call “good.” The way through suffering and death is to embrace it, in union with Christ’s voluntary sacrifice.
Of course, every moment of amateur exegetical clarity is eventually followed by the realization that our forefathers in the Faith thought of it all before. And so here’s St. Augustine, who, I like to think, had his own “that’s neat” moment while listening to this passage one day:
As, therefore, it then came to pass that whoever looked at the raised serpent was both healed of the poison and freed from death, so also now, whosoever is conformed to the likeness of the death of Christ by faith in him and his baptism, is freed both from sin by justification and from death by resurrection. . . . What necessity then could there be for an infant’s being conformed to the death of Christ by baptism, if he were not altogether poisoned by the bite of the serpent?