Look and live
The bronze serpent
Late in the wilderness, with the people grumbling yet again, venomous snakes move through the camp and the bites turn deadly. The cure God gives is one of the strangest in all of Scripture. He does not clear the snakes away. He tells Moses to forge a bronze serpent and lift it high on a pole, and He attaches a promise to it: whoever is bitten, when he looks at the thing on the pole, will live. The healing comes not by looking away from the horror but by looking straight at it, raised up where everyone can see. Centuries later Jesus reached back and took hold of that bronze snake to explain Himself. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, He said, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. The emblem of the curse becomes the cure. The very shape of what is killing them is what they must fix their eyes on to be saved. In the disorienting wilderness God does not heal His people by helping them pretend the wound is not there. He heals by lifting the wound up and bidding them look, and live.
“Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.”
— The LORD, to Moses — Numbers 21:8 (WEB)
“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.”
This is Disorientation, and it asks a counterintuitive thing: that you stop looking away. The wilderness phase tempts you to numb or deny the wound. The strange cure says healing comes by looking at it, lifted up, and finally by looking to the crucified Christ, where the curse itself was turned into rescue. Honesty, not denial, is the road through.
Every instinct in the wilderness tells you to look away from the wound. Numb it, distract from it, stay busy enough to outrun it, deny the bite ever happened. The bronze serpent overturns that instinct entirely. The cure is to look at the very thing that has bitten you, raised up before you, and then to lift your eyes higher still, to the Christ who hung where the curse hung. He did not spare Himself the wound; He became it, lifted up, so that one steady look at Him would be enough to live. So you are not healed by managing to forget what hurt you. You are not healed by sheer willpower over your own bitten places. You are healed by looking, honestly, at what is killing you, and finding that the One lifted up has already taken it into Himself. The wilderness does not ask you to be brave about your wounds. It asks you to turn your face toward the cross and keep it there. The looking is the whole of it.
The Church, too, is forever tempted to hide its wounds, to look away from whatever has bitten it, and to call the silence health. Scandals are buried, failures are spun, the injuries of whole eras go unnamed in the hope they will simply fade. The bronze serpent says otherwise. The Body heals not by denial but by looking honestly at its injury and lifting up the crucified Christ, who bore the curse it could never carry. The recurring upheavals that have purged and renewed the Church were never gentle on its hidden wounds; they dragged them into the light. Across history the whole Church is not saved by pretending the snake away, but by the One raised up for it.
What cannot be shaken is the Son of Man lifted up. Wounds come, and the wilderness is full of them. But the Christ raised on the cross has already drawn the curse into Himself, and that finished rescue does not move. When everything else is bitten and failing, the One lifted up for you remains.
- What wound am I working hardest to look away from right now?
- Do I believe healing could come by looking honestly rather than by forgetting?
- Can I turn my eyes to the Christ lifted up and simply keep them there?
Lord, I have spent my strength looking away from what hurts me, calling the numbness peace. Teach me the stranger cure: to look, and to lift my eyes to You raised on the cross, where my curse became Your wound. Let me look, and live. Amen.