Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross

Our first reading comes from the book of Numbers and describes an incident that happened to the people of Israel while they were on their sojourn to the promised land. The Lord had been leading them through the desert and sustaining them throughout this journey of theirs. They get bored with the food that God has provided for them in the form of manna and quails. Elsewhere, in the book of Exodus, we also hear that they wish to return to the slavery of Egypt. This is such an excellent image for the power of sin over us. When we have been walking along the path of righteousness – it can seem boring to us, compared to the excitement that comes with a rock n roll life of sin. This is the power of the evil spirit which seduces us with the lie that our lives will be more fun and more exciting if we follow our carnal desires.

We are told that the Lord God sends serpents to punish the Israelites. The snakes sound like a terrible punishment from God, like God was angry with the Israelites and wanted to make them suffer for their sins. But actually, the snakes are just a symbolic instantiation of the very simple and plain fact that sin is poisonous to us. When we sin, it’s like we’re getting bitten by a snake, and the worst thing is that we do this willingly. If the slavery in Egypt starts looking attractive to the Israelites during their sojourn in the desert, the snake bite wakes them up to the fact that the slavery of sin is poisonous to them and the attractiveness of slavery is just an illusion – just like the attractiveness of sin.

This is the point of fashioning a bronze serpent. When Moses raises up the bronze serpent, it is to serve as a reminder to the Israelites of the effects of their sin, the effects of their failure to trust in God. At its heart, a lot of our sin comes down to a failure to trust God with our happiness. This was the heart of the sin of Adam and Eve. God had provided everything they needed to be happy in the Garden of Eden and had given them a warning about eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. God did this for their own good, knowing that if they transgressed this law, they would lose their joy and their innocence. The serpent then got Adam and Eve to doubt the goodness of God and undermined their trust in God. If they both ate from the forbidden fruit, it was because they didn’t trust God when God said it would bring them harm. If they both ate the forbidden fruit it was because they thought that there was more joy to be had from it than from the rest of the fruit God had given them. Similarly, the Israelites in the desert begin to doubt God’s goodness, and instead of believing that God is leading them to the promised land believe that they are being led to their death.

When we lose our smile, when we let the harshness of life obliterate its gentle sweetness and begin to complain, we have let sin poison our heart. It is salutary to realize how toxic complaining can actually be. Perhaps in our entourage there is something who is always complaining, and always has something negative to say about others. Think of how toxic this person is to you and to themselves. Perhaps they don’t realize it themselves, but people will start to want to avoid them because they are so negative. They will find that they cannot stand to be near bright sunny people who are filled with hope and will prefer to eschew the company of such people, preferring the echo chambers of like-minded people who share their negative perception of the world. Sometimes the only remedy for such a person is to hold up a mirror to them and show them how poisonous their complaining and negativity have become. This is the function of the bronze serpent. When the people of Israel look upon it, they are reminded of how toxic it can be to lose a spirit of gratitude, of how toxic it can be to lose trust in the fact that God is guiding us towards a fuller life. Seeing the toxicity of sin can be the motivation that we need to return to God and to return to a spirit of gratitude for life.

But realizing the toxicity of sin is only half the story of salvation. The other half of the story is God’s love, God’s forgiveness and healing. The bronze serpent only really gives testament to the first half of the story. In the parable of the Prodigal son, it is this half that is represented by the son realizing the error of his ways as he sits with the pigs and longs to eat their food. The second half of the story of salvation is when the son is embraced and welcomed back by his Father. The bronze serpent as a symbol gives no testament to the love of God. There needs to be a lifting up of another symbol to give witness to God’s love and that symbol is the lifting up of God’s son on the cross. It is this symbol that witnesses to God’s love for us and the lengths that God is prepared to go to get us back.

The cross is the perfect symbol of salvation because it witnesses to both halves of the story of salvation. On the one hand, the cross contains the same salutary warning that sin is poisonous to us. When we look at the cross, we see the effects of our sin: an innocent man was caused to suffer because of the greed and envy of the chief priests and Sadducees. The best person to have ever lived, the Son of God no less, was cut down in the prime of his life because his teaching and praxis was too much of a threat to the power and status of the ruling class in Jewish society. But the cross is more than just the serpent, because the cross is more than just a symbol of the poison of sin. It is also the symbol of God’s response to that poison, that God responds with love. When we are bowed down and brought low by the poison of our own sin, God comes to us in love. Jesus has shared our sufferings and leads us out of them.

Through the cross, Jesus also images for us the right way to respond to times of desolation, suffering and hardship. Instead of losing trust in God and complaining like the children of Israel, Jesus remains committed to trusting that God will bring something good out of the tragedy that has befallen him. We must not think that Jesus had perfect knowledge of how God was going to turn the tragedy of the cross into the means of our salvation. Jesus, as a human being like us in all things but sin, had to trust that God would in some mysterious way use the cross to redeem humanity. The message of the cross is therefore that there is no situation too messed up for God to redeem. If God could take the worst tragedy of our human history – the killing of God’s own Son - and transform it into the locus of our salvation, then nothing is beyond God’s redemption. All that is required on our part is to remain faithful and trusting in God’s power to save, even when there seems like there no light at the end of the tunnel.

Questions for reflection

1. Do my complaints against what is not going well in my life display a lack of trust in God?
2. How do I react to the negativity that I find around me, in friends, family members and in the media?