wild heart

4 Lent B 2009
(Num 21: 4-9; Ps 107: 1-3, 17-22; Eph 2: 1-10; John 3: 14-21)


Creating is costly for God.

Rabbis long ago told the story that, in the beginning, there was only God, and God was everywhere. In fact God filled all things, and there was no room for anything else. So God voluntarily withdrew and made an open place. In that open space the world came to be.

Creating is costly for God. Healing is even more costly.

Today the Hebrew Scripture tells a bizarre story of how God cures snakebite. The people of God are on their desert journey, and as usual they “grumble” and complain about not enough water and the dull food that God provided. God is stung by their complaints and sends poisonous snakes to sting them back. The people cry out and Moses prays. And God prescribes the strangest cure for snakebite—make a bronze serpent and hold it up, and anyone who looks on the snake will be healed.

The last thing in the world I want to see after a snake-bite is a snake! We could dismiss this story as a tribal tale that remembers sacred snake-images. A number of cultures, including Druid beliefs, associated snakes with healing power. But there is much more in this story than old symbols.

Every day people undergo surgery. We accept the strange notion that in order to heal a body, it is often necessary to wound it, to cut it. And those who seek psychotherapy learn that healing involves exploring their pain, re-visiting those actions and events that gave birth to their symptoms. Only by entering again into their pain do they have hope of healing.

Deep and true healing does not mean fleeing from pain, but rather entering into pain and pain’s source. In the desert the people are wounded by their alienation from God and from one another as they continue to walk towards freedom and encounter their lack of faith and trust. So facing an image of their deep pain in order to be saved from suffering may not be so strange. But what of God in all of this? Where is the God who paid a cost to bring creation itself into being?

The God who sent snakes and then proscribed a healing serpent image is not some cold punishing deity. This God who paid a cost at creation itself loves the people who journey in the wilderness—he hears their cries and set them free, feeds them and carries them. They were made and known and loved in the divine heart who made room for them. This relationship is passionate and committed, it’s a blood-bond, a covenant. Even if God is involved in their suffering, God suffers with them, God feels the pain they feel. That bronze serpent is not some clever symbol made for a people who respond to magic images. It is an ikon meant to express beyond words the God who suffers with his people’s pain. The bronze serpent expresses the wild, strange, wounded heart of the God who takes to heart the pain of his beloved people.

Jesus in John’s Gospel calls himself the bronze serpent. He is lifted on the cross as Moses’ healing serpent was lifted up. God’s wild, wounded, suffering heart is more than a bronze symbol. God made flesh is lifted and wounded and is one with his suffering people. God will be our healing and our hope for ever.

In whatever wilderness in which we walk, in whichever desert, in whatever desolate place that we God’s beloved people find ourselves today, look up. Long ago a strange image was lifted high in front of desperate people in the wilderness, and they were made well. Today look upon the heart of God, lifted up before us on the cross. Look up and know healing, hope, and new life.