Tuesday, March 15, 2016

What to Make of It?

Tuesday of the 5th Week of Lent

In a nutshell, chapter 21 begins with the Israelites bargaining with God for a victory over the King of Arad.  All goes well (if murder and plunder=well;).  But despite the win the people start whining again.  Always the same thing…they look back at their slavery in Egypt and long for the supper table.  This time God is fed up.  He sends killer snakes to poison them.  They realize their sinfulness and ask Moses for help.  God tells Moses to a make a “serpent of bronze” and mount it on a staff.  All the people have to do is gaze on it and they will live.  Thanks God!

I trained a lector once who said that she could only read from the New Testament.  She simply couldn’t get her head around the vengeful, bargaining, all-too-human God of the Hebrew Scriptures. And I get it.  Just read this chapter in the Book of Numbers.  But it is an ancient heresy.  Around 144 in Rome a fellow named Marcion had the same idea.  The wrathful Hebrew God must be a lower entity that the God of love and mercy that Jesus comes to reveal.  The heresy was rejected.  There is but one God. 

The revelation in the scriptures is about God AND God’s people.  It is a revelation about a relationship.  Who are we vis a vis God?  The Holy Story appears to me as a wrestling with that question.  It is an unfolding story.  God stays the same but we humans are constantly in travail…and our texts reveal that travail.  So when I approach stories like this one I wonder where the movement is.  Where is the chipping away at this wrathful, bargaining, image of God?  

This one is lost on me!  But I’m not alone.  Here is an excerpt from John C. Holbert, the Lois Craddock Perkins Professor Emeritus of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology:

Well, that's the story. Are we now more enlightened about it now that we have looked more closely at it? Perhaps. We can now see that it is a part of that tradition of the wilderness where the Israelites are impatient grumblers thoroughly dissatisfied with Moses and with YHWH. Both Moses and YHWH become in their turn angry and frustrated with these ingrates and move to punish them in many and various ways. That seems clear enough.

But is that all? What about the magic of the copper viper pole? I am inclined to leave it as is, a piece of ancient necromancy best left in the distant past. And though John's gospel lifted it up allegorically to refer to Jesus' saving power, I remain suspicious that such textual use can finally be useful to us in our time. We need no magic poles to teach us that Jesus brings to us snake-bitten moderns a power and grace that only he can provide. Numbers 21:4-9 is quaint but less than efficacious as a necessary element in my Lenten journey. I leave the story and its fiery snakes far behind with few regrets.

(for the whole commentary click here)

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