Feast of the Holy Cross

Sunday September 14, 2008

Our Hope of Healing and Salvation

As we get older, we tend to look back on former times with nostalgia. Autumn is one of those seasons that is bitter-sweet. It reminds us that we are an aging population — all of us, young andold. Although people may tell us we are looking younger, we don’t actually grow younger with the years despite the guarantees of miraculous products advertised on health-watch programs.

But the good old days were not always golden. Very few people pass through life without a scratch or a scar, without fault or failure of one kind or another. Moreover, life hasn’t always been kind nor has it always gone our way. Each of us has faced an opposing force that may have blistered our ego and hindered our progress in school or in our career. Even within our family we’ve been known to grumble and complain about one thing or another.

Life is a mix of many experiences and no one gets out of life alive!

The first reading from the Book of Numbers is a bit bizarre to say the least: not the grumbling of the Israelites about their plight in the desert but the reaction of God to their grumbling. “In punishment, the Lord sent among the people seraph serpents, which bit the people so that many of them died.” Not a very complimentary image of the God that I have come to know. Is it possible that God has changed in the course of history or rather that their view of God was primitive at best and suffered a reputation similar to that of pagan gods?

To think that Moses, great though he was, had the power to change God’s mind and hold God’s hand from punishment is a bit presumptuous of Moses or at least of the author of Numbers.

To be sure, there were indeed fiery (seraph) snakes in the desert. They were fiery because when they bit, the wound became enflamed and felt like a fire underneath the skin. Some did indeed die from the poisonous bite.

The cure also appears a bit absurd but recall that the Israelites were surrounded by people with polytheistic beliefs. There were many gods and many religious cults and superstitious practices that influenced Jewish rituals despite their adherence to belief in one God. Just as the serpent was a symbol of evil within some pagan sects, the serpent lost its skin and was rejuvenated and so it also became a symbol of healing and new life. The caduceus remains a symbol of the Hippocratic oath for physicians’ commitment to healing.

So Moses “borrowed” the pagan symbol not because it had the power to save. He used it as an attention grabber and adopted it as a symbol of the power of the one God to heal and save. It might be considered something like the symbols we use in the celebration of the sacraments, e.g., olive oil used in the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. The oil doesn’t effect the cure but the prayers of the faithful invoking the Holy Spirit together with the ritual laying on of hands and the anointing with oil surely touches the soul of the believer and may even effect a physical cure.

The gospel of John connects the cross and resurrection of Jesus with the bronze serpent. It’s a very interesting association: “Just as Moses ‘lifted up’ the serpent in the desert so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

The Greek work ‘hypsoun’ meaning ‘to lift up’ is used to describe the lifting of the bronze serpent and the lifting up of Jesus on the cross and his being lifted up in glory. Recall that John is a theologian and a mystic. It is his intention to identify Jesus as ‘Lord’, the Son of God, redeemer and savior of the world, the one who brings healing to the sick and salvation to sinners. We look not to pagan symbols but to the living Christ.

But we need to make a disclaimer at this point because this gospel has too frequently been wrongly interpreted to suggest that God sent his son in to the world to die in order to pay back the debt for our sinfulness. This is theologically weak and spiritually primitive. God is not sadistic and Jesus was not a masochist. No, God did not send his son to die but to live and love faithfully no matter what the opposition or cost. He was so obedient to life that it cost him his life. Recall that the word obedience comes from the Latin word, ‘obedire’ which means to ‘listen.’ Jesus listened to the heartbeat of God and in his humanity did the Godly thing.

That’s what makes his life redemptive. He is the exemplar of what we too can become. His healing is not magic, it requires faith and a change of heart within the believer. It is a combination of God’s will and our faith.

The cross is a universal symbol of hope because it reminds us of God’s faithfulness and of God’s will to save us in Christ. The vertical bar connects with God and symbolizes the grace that descends from above despite the ascent of our grumbling from below. The horizontal bar symbolizes our connection to others and our need to hold on to one another as we journey through life with its ups and downs. The bars intersect in the middle to remind us that it is through the life, death and resurrection of Christ that we sustain one another and it is through one another that we come to know the sustenance of God in Christ.

There is a very interesting anecdote that illustrates this lesson which I’m sure you may have heard more than once:

“While meditating under a big tree on the bank of the Ganges, an old man saw a scorpion floating helplessly on the river. Quickly the man stretched himself out on one of the tree’s long roots and reached out to try to rescue the drowning creature. As soon as he touched it, the scorpion stung him. Instinctively the man pulled away. But as soon as he regained his balance he stretched out again to save the scorpion. Again he was stung so badly that his hand swelled up most painfully.

A passerby who had seen all that had happened called out, ‘Only a fool would risk his life for the sake of such a creature.’ Calmly the man replied, ‘My friend, just because it is in the scorpion’s nature to sting, that does not change my nature to save.’” [cf. Celebration, a commentary on the Sunday scriptures, 2003]

Indeed it is in our nature to grumble and complain; to falter and fail, but it is in God’s nature to heal and save no matter how often we sin.

That’s a much more accurate image of the God I know!

No matter what our plight or how hard we have fallen, God continues to seek new and old ways to heal us.

We adore you O Christ and we bless you!

Because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world!

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