After years in the desert following their rescue from slavery in Egypt, the people of Israel seem to have forgotten their dependence on God, and their need for salvation. Indeed, in the Book of Numbers, they complain against God and Moses, “We are disgusted with this wretched food!” God meant for the desert to be a place of intimacy of covenant for them, but also a place of testing and becoming. When the unfaithful are bitten by saraph serpents sent by the Lord in punishment, God ultimately has mercy on them. Make a saraph and mount it on a pole, the Lord says to Moses, and if any who have been bitten look at it, they will live. To gaze upon the saraph serpent was to accept their need for punishment, but also their own longing to be saved by the God who loved them. Over and over, the people of Israel must explicitly recognize their need for salvation. Do not forget the works of the Lord! Psalm 27 reminds us. Though the people have not been faithful to his covenant, God forgave their sin and destroyed them not.
Like the people of Israel in the desert, we too must acknowledge our need for salvation, a salvation we may unconsciously long for. And we too find salvation as we gaze upon the cross of Jesus as it is lifted before us. As Jesus reminds Nicodemus in John’s Gospel, just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. Christ emptied himself of divinity, the Philippians hymn reminds us, coming in human likeness and obedient to death, even death on a cross. Jesus’ body on the cross is the very image of our humanity, fragile, sometimes broken, subject to death. Becoming completely human, surrendering to humanity, Christ took our sins to death with him on the cross, so that he could lift humanity up through resurrection.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life. As we celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, may we remember our need and desire for salvation and the only access we have to that salvation – the cross of Christ – and confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father!
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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