Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent
Today’s first reading from Numbers is about the “children of Israel” as they are wandering in the desert. And I don’t think that the word “children” is incidental here: they begin complaining to Moses about the long journey, specifically about the food! They are tired, and they see no end in sight. In punishment for their belly-aching, God sends snakes to bite the people. This, of course, makes them repent of their complaining. The same God who appears to Moses through the burning bush then also provides the means for curing their snake bites: “Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole, and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.” The story can make God seem rather mean, but we have to understand the story in the context of the Exodus. The Israelites, a newly formed nation, have been delivered from the Egyptians by God, their Savior. They are very quick, however, to forget this liberation and the person through whom God has chosen to effect it, Moses.
Though harsh, the snakes and the subsequent antidote of the bronze serpent give us great images for the spiritual life. The snakes represent the life without faith in the saving God, a life full of distraction, pain and misery, and even death. The bronze serpent, a fixed point installed by Moses, re-orients the gaze of the people back to their God. We may not have snakes and serpent statues, but we all have things that bite at us as we turn away from God, and focal points that draw us back to him, namely the Sacraments and the Body of Christ in the Church.
The Gospel reading for today is connected to the story from Numbers through Moses. When God comes to Moses in the Book of Exodus, God gives his name as “I AM.” It is significant, then, that when talking to his detractors, Jesus gives this title to himself. It is a beautiful reminder that the liberating God encountered by the Hebrews in their Exodus is the same God we see in Jesus Christ. We are not exempt as Christians, then, from the lessons of the desert experience. Though emboldened by the promise of Easter that we see before us, we are also tempted to turn our gaze away from God in these final days, when the burden might seem too heavy to be worth it.
Let us pray for the grace to re-orient ourselves to a fixed point and bring us back to God, be it in the form of sacrament or even the good people all around us.
- Katherine Schmidt