Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent: Snakes on the Plain

Readings: Numbers 21:4-9; John 8:21-30.

Few would accuse David R. Ellis of mis-selling his 2006 film Snakes on a Plane: the combination of snakes, an enclosed space and vulnerable human beings is certain to produce an action thriller. From behind the safety of the ‘fourth wall’ of the screen, of course, we can chuckle at the ridiculous ways the passengers respond to the serpentine threat (dare I suggest the film was also intended as something of a dark comedy?)… but if a snake were to transgress that boundary we can be sure that all laughter would cease and we too would inevitably be caught up in the panic. Indeed, it’s easy to sense the panic of the Israelites in today’s first reading, trapped as they are on a plain and surrounded by venomous serpents, how could they not be filled with gratitude for God’s provision of an antidote, the fiery bronze serpent crafted by Moses and lifted up as a sign of salvation and hope? 

Thankfully, we’re fairly unlikely to find ourselves surrounded by venomous snakes of the literal variety. Nonetheless, we too are surrounded by the chaos wrought by the first serpent, the tempter of Genesis 3, through whose enticements suffering, sin and death first entered the world. If we could take a step outside the ‘fourth wall’ and view the cycle of sin and suffering from God’s perspective, I imagine that at times we’d look as chaotic as the panic-stricken passengers of Snakes on a Plane. But try as we might to avoid getting contaminated by sin (like the passenger “Three Gs”, who refuses even to touch another person without sanitising his hands), we are inevitably bound up in a world scourged and damaged by our sins and those of our fellow sojourners. Whereas the passengers try to simply hide themselves from the threat (Flynn announces “We need to put a barrier between us and the snakes!”), what is really needed is not only an anti-venom but an ultimate defeat. Salvation must break in from outside the cycles of sin, but it must also break out from inside: what is needed is the incarnation, God’s entry into human history without contamination by sin, opening the life of God to man and the life of man to God. 

Indeed, as St. John stresses in today’s gospel, God – who stands over and against all the chaotic structures of sin and human disorder – has intervened to lift up for humanity a definitive sign of salvation: his own crucified son, a sign that both points forward to the life of the world to come, and makes that life possible by opening up for us a route out of self-destruction. Whereas the Israelites cast their eyes on the serpent made of molten precious metal, we look to a crucified man as the sign of our hope: the crucified God-man, lifted up before our eyes on the cross, rejected and despised, devalued and discarded. 

Jesus’s description of his death as a ‘lifting up’ simultaneously connects the crucifixion to the Israelite’s sign of salvation whilst pointing forward to Christ’s ‘lifting up’ at the resurrection and the consummation wrought by the ‘lifting up’ of the ascension. Whereas the serpent is repeatedly lifted up, Christ is lifted on the cross but once, a single and unrepeatable offering that is re-presented each time the priest ‘lifts up’ Our Lord in the celebration of Holy Mass, an oblation that makes possible the many resurrections of the world to come. “The Glory of God is a man fully alive”, as St. Irenaeus said. But the paradox of faith is that in order to have our eyes opened to that reality, we have to first fix our eyes on a man fully deceased.