I spoke last Sunday on John 3:14-21 where Jesus alludes to a small and seemingly insignificant story in Numbers 21:6-9. He compares Moses lifting up the image of a serpent, in order to heal Israelites who were bitten by poisonous snake, to his own being lifted up on the cross.
I suggested that Jesus emphasized, though, that his being sent and lifted up is because God loves the world and not to judge it (John 3:16-17). Jesus seems to contrast this with the way God is presented in the wilderness story. That story seems more about judgment because God sends the vipers to kill the people, and only after being petitioned by Moses does he make the concession of offering a cure.
This raises a question: if the wilderness story needs so much correction and qualification to be an allusion to the work of God in Christ, why did Jesus draw the parallel at all? Would it not have been simpler to use a different story explicitly involving love?
To see why Jesus makes the comparison of of the cross with snake snake, we have to understand the logic of sympathetic magic. A basic definition would be any primitive or magical ritual using objects or actions resembling or symbolically associated with the event or person over which influence is sought. The term was first used by James George Frazer in The Golden Bough (1889).
Perhaps the most iconic example of this type of practice is the voodoo doll. A small image or doll is made of a person, and this is believed to be magically “connected” to them and can be used to afflict them. This type of belief is ubiquitous in ancient and even some cultures today.
We see this logic showing up often in the stories of Israel. When the Philistines are suffering with tumors because they have Israel’s Ark of the Covenant, they make golden replicas of the tumors and send those as an offering when they return the ark (1 Samuel 6:1-5), hoping to appease Israel’s God.
The prohibition of Moses’ Law against eating or drinking blood wasn’t for dietary or health reasons, but because of the common belief that one would be gaining the strength of the animal from which the blood was taken. They were to let God alone be their strength.
The same logic is behind Moses making a bronze viper and putting it on a pole. Sympathetic magic, as practiced in animistic cultures, always grasped a certain truth: the solution is somehow prefigured in the problem itself. This is why Jesus chooses the story. Somehow the problem itself is how the problem will be addressed and ultimately solved.
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. Galatians 3:13
For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21
The Christian understanding of the cross is rooted in this understanding. By dying Jesus saves us from death. By going to the place of the dead, the gates are broken down and the dead released (1 Peter 3:18-20). Humanity is rescued by God taking on our humanity.
Jesus uses this story of Moses raising up the serpent, though he adamantly states that this is not about an angry God judging people, but a loving God rescuing humanity. Jesus realizes that he must become the personification of human sinfulness and bear it to its end, in order to change the story.
By being identified with sinners as if he is one as well, Jesus redeems sinners. Was Jesus a sinner? No, but he adopts the posture of one. He dies rejected by the religious establishment and political powers, accused of blasphemy against God and sedition against Caesar.
Apparently forsaken, Jesus descends to the depths of the grave only to defeat sin and death from within. He becomes “sin” to save us from sin, a viper to heal us of the viper’s poison.
Traveler's Journal 