The serpent in the wilderness is a reference to Numbers 21. The refugees from Egypt, already weary from their long wilderness migration, have been denied passage through Edom and are dejectedly detouring around it. They’ve been eating nothing but manna for ages, and they’re beginning, not for the first time, to question their leadership and the wisdom of leaving Egypt. If St. Benedict had been around, he might kindly have warned them that grumbling divides and corrodes community and that the journey to freedom requires patient acceptance of hardships. But any divine attempt to warn the people verbally through Moses would have fallen on deaf ears since the wisdom of God and Moses is precisely what the people were questioning.
I’ve certainly done the same, ignoring the still, small voice in my awareness until the signs that I needed to change my ways became painfully clear. Second-guessing divine instructions is as old as human nature, as old as the serpent in the garden. Perhaps that’s why the not-so-subtle sign God sends the migrants in the wilderness is a plague of poisonous serpents. That’s painful and clear enough for them to get the message; they repent and ask Moses to intercede for them.
God then tells Moses to make a serpent of bronze and raise it up on a pole where it will be visible throughout the camp; anyone bitten can recover by looking at it. Why doesn’t God just remove the snakes? Perhaps to reinforce the necessity of attending to what we might prefer to ignore. To heal from what ails us, we must actively acknowledge it.
Just as any bitten Israelites could save their lives by looking up at the serpent effigy, John’s gospel says, anyone can receive “eternal life” by “believing” in the One who has been “lifted up.” Scholar Gail O’Day holds that for John, the “lifting up” of Jesus encompasses the entire sequence of crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. “Eternal life” is not an idyllic afterlife but a present life infused with divine indwelling. And “believing” is not passive assent but an active practice. Perhaps the active practice of “believing” in the One who has been crucified and lifted is to embrace the dynamic of falling and rising, of letting go in trust and receiving in trust.
Letting go in trust and receiving in trust was a struggle for the migrant Israelites, who had to learn it again and again. With our own experiences of existential threat from human conflict and environmental dangers, we find a trusting stance no easier now. Yet this practice is what Paul’s letter celebrates as “faith.” It was Abraham and Sarah’s letting go of the future they expected and accepting a journey into uncertainty that opened them to receive the gift of a seemingly impossible posterity. It was Jesus’ letting go of life itself that opened the way to the Resurrection and the descent of the Spirit among us. The fullness of a Spirit-infused life awaits us when we let go of what we think is ours, open ourselves to unimagined pathways and seeming impossibilities, and accept grace and guidance from beyond ourselves.
This is much easier said than done. Like Nicodemus, we may doubt that anything beyond our understanding is possible, and we may not feel safe entrusting ourselves to the unpredictable wisdom of the unseen. At times, I can feel my whole being close down at the very thought. Jesus says, “no one can see the reign of God without being born from above,” and when I’m thoroughly shut down, ensconced in self-numbing habits, my eyes are closed to the miraculous. Like Nicodemus, far from being “born from above,” I can’t even envision what that means.
Perhaps that’s why the lectionary for the next few Sundays is crammed with miracle stories, to revive our capacity for wonder and awe. This might also be a good time to search our memories for moments that felt like the inbreaking into our own lives of a greater Reality. I’ve witnessed teaching so apt, and heard music-making so transcendent, I was sure a more-than-human Source was involved. It was like seeing a kite carried on the wind: you don’t see the wind (or where it comes from or where it goes, as Jesus says), but the kite’s dance is irrefutable evidence of it.
In moments like that, I do have a sense of what “from above” might mean. In even better moments, I feel in sync with that “above,” inspired and guided by it. That’s my best guess at the meaning of “born from above”: aware of being inherently part of something bigger, something sacred, a realm soaked in divinity, the reign of God.
That sense of inclusion, of expanded identity, infuses today’s readings in another sense. The movement to embrace Gentile converts shaped Paul’s emphasis on faith over ancestry, law, or geography. We see this expansion again when Paul says Abraham and Sarah were promised “the world” rather than just a specific region as their inheritance. The inclusive universality of God’s love is an essential strand in the Gospel message. It will recur in next Sunday’s story of the Samaritan woman at the well.
In effect, the movement here is from scarcity to abundance. A sense of scarcity shows in the Israelite’s complaints about their food and in Nicodemus’ certainty that there’s only one way to be born, that our identity and options are narrow, that there are no second chances. Abundance is offered in the hope that comes with being born again, from above (the Greek means both again and from above). There is abundance in the invitation to broaden our belonging, in the freedom of the wind of Spirit to blow where and in whom it chooses. Abundance overflows from the Creator who, in Paul’s words, calls into being what does not yet exist, who is able to give life even to the dead and grace even to the ungodly.
It’s ironic that Lent, a season known for self-deprivation, should deliver a message of abundance. Yet that’s what these readings offer, along with a call to be actively receptive, to choose to open to grace. May we receive the grace to make this choice when it frightens or overwhelms us. May we feel the wind in the music and join the dance.