As today’s Gospel opens, Jesus is describing his destiny by a rather strange comparison. He is comparing himself to the symbolic bronze snake which, during the wanderings of the Israelites through the desert of Sinai, Moses lifted up on a pole for them to look at. To grasp what is going on we have to think about what could be symbolized by snakes.
On the whole most people do not care for snakes, despite the frequent beauty of their skins. Nasty, creepy-crawly things, they tend to say, even if in my home island (Britain) we have only one poisonous variety and that is not lethal except perhaps to small animals and children with certain allergies. However, these unpleasant associations were not the main things that came to mind when people in the ancient world thought about snakes. There snakes were symbols of healing. Why was that? The general habits of snakes were no different now from then. But what impressed people was the way snakes could shed their old skins and appear all glistening, decked out in new ones – an instant skin graft that combined wound repair with cosmetic surgery in a single action. The snake thus became a symbol of healing and so, as can happen after some operations we undergo ourselves, a new life, a new start.
In this context, the meaning of Moses’s gesture is plain. It was a sign of hope to the sick, the footsore, and the weary in the wilderness, and especially to those who, on top of everything else, had just got snake-bite as well. It was a striking episode as well as a strange one because for the snake-bitten the occasion of suffering was also the symbol of its overcoming.
And that is what made it in the Gospel a perfect image of the Passion, which is the life-giving death of the Lord. Jesus is saying that the Cross on which he is going to be lifted up, the instrument of his suffering and death, will be the means of our liberation from spiritual suffering and unending death – just as the venomous snake, by its ability to get rid of an old skin and appear all arrayed in a new, is a symbol of healing and new life.
This reminds us that the trial and execution of our Lord will not be a regrettable accident cutting short an otherwise promising career. It was for his Passion – his ‘hour’ – that the Word incarnate entered our world. That is why in the Church of the Byzantine rite bishops don’t have the tops of their episcopal staffs shaped into crooks like Latin bishops do. They have them made into the likeness of a snake instead.
It is from the death of Christ and nowhere else that the fullness of revelation and grace come to us.
