Just Look at Him

In the First Reading, the Israelite people are disheartened by the lack of food and water, and they complain bitterly against Moses and God.

You might think that you can understand why anybody walking in the desert would be discouraged. But then you would have forgotten half the story. These Israelites have had miracle after miracle to sustain them. In the preceding story, God makes a rock gush out water sufficient for all of them and their cattle. Earlier, when they were hungry, God gave them manna to eat.

So what is actually hard to understand is why they don’t trust God, given all that they have seen God do for them.

But they don’t. And so, as a second-best aid to getting them to trust God, God punishes them by afflicting them with snakes and snakebites. But he sends the remedy for snakebites too. In order to be saved from the toxic snake venom, all that a bitten person has to do is look at the bronze image of a snake which Moses has put high on a pole.

Why would God choose this as the remedy?
 
Well, anybody who is willing to look at that bronze snake fixed on a pole has to recognize what ails him, not only the snakebite but also the rebellion against God. But then he also has to recognize that he was wrong in not trusting God’s goodness in the desert. That failure to trust is what the rebellion consisted in, after all.

So what is Jesus saying in the Gospel Reading when he compares himself to that bronze snake Moses set up on high?

In our disheartened condition, we think that there is nothing for our souls to eat or drink in this life, because God is hidden from us. But, in fact, God has provided what we need to live, whether we see it or not.

And what is it we need to live?  Jesus himself explains it in the Gospel Reading: what we need is him.

So Jesus is for us what the bronze serpent was for the Israelites: the remedy for what ails us, our sinfulness, our alienation from ourselves and others, our failure to believe in God’s love for us, our fatal spiritual sickness.

Eleonore Stump