In a year of suffering, hope for the future.
The Christian celebration of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is rooted in the Passover, the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. The Last Supper was a Passover meal. Jesus and the apostles gathered as observant Jews.
When Christians gather for Easter worship, they recall some of the same sacred texts that Jews did recently at Passover — the vanquishing of Pharaoh, the blood of the Passover lamb that saves, the miraculous passage through the Red Sea.
“Behold the Lamb of God” is how John the Baptist pointed out Jesus to the crowds, and they would have understood what that meant. A lamb that would be slain whose blood gives life.
There are many such continuities between the mission and ministry of Jesus and the Torah. Jesus himself speaks of the story of the serpents. It likely resonates more intensely in this year of pandemic.
During their years in the wilderness, an infestation of fiery serpents afflicted the children of Israel, and many died. The remedy was an unexpected one.
“The Lord said unto Moses, ‘Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.’ And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.” (Numbers 21:8-9)
The image of affliction would become the instrument of salvation.
Christians may well have applied that principle to the crucifixion of Jesus on their own. As it was, Jesus made the application himself beforehand: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15)
That’s why Christians adorn their churches and homes with crosses and crucifixes — the image of the one “lifted up.”
When the cult of the Greek god of healing and medicine, Asclepius, grew prominent in 5th-century BC, the Rod of Asclepius, a serpent wrapped around a staff, became a symbol of medicine. It adorns the flag of the World Health Organization
to this day, as it does countless medical societies and associations. The brass serpent of Moses is older and it is possible there is some relationship between the two.
In these days, when the entire world is eager for vaccines, the power of the serpent lifted up is clear. A vaccine, heralded by some as a sort of scientific miracle — an oxymoron with some wisdom in it — mimics the original cause of the disease. In the case of the coronavirus, the vaccine mimics the spike proteins, and the body produces the necessary antibodies. It is not altogether unlike the brass serpent of Moses. The image of affliction becomes an instrument of salvation.
At Easter, Christians celebrate salvation from something more deadly than a global pandemic. Or perhaps the original and most enduring pandemic, that of sin, which escaped from Eden and has been haunting the world ever since.
Sin — rebellion against God — is not a popular concept in an age characterized by secular relativism. The sense of sin has declined, but not so much sin itself. At any newspaper much of the daily material is provided by the seven deadly ones: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth.
A proper understanding of reality requires that we look upon the suffering and wickedness in the world around us. It does no good only to avert the eyes. But beholding the affliction, if it ends there, leads to despair.
On the cross, Christians believe what St. Paul teaches, that God made Jesus “to be sin for us” even though he “knew no sin.” On the cross we see what sin looks like, the damage it does, the pain it brings, even as we have become accustomed this year to looking at images of the coronavirus under microscope.
Yet we don’t look simply to be informed of how deadly it is. St. Paul continues that Jesus takes on the burden of sin on the cross “that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
That is Christian hope at Easter. Not that salvation comes from merely keeping our distance from evil — whether it be fiery serpents or contagious viruses — much less pretending that they don’t exist. No, rather salvation comes from beholding the affliction, entering into it, and converting it from within.
Crucifixion is not a particularly efficient way to go about executions. It was designed by the Romans for another purpose too, to be an image — a perverse icon — of subjugation, humiliation and degradation.
At Easter, in the triumph over the grave, that image becomes the instrument of salvation.
To all our readers, Happy Easter!
ON THE CROSS WE SEE WHAT SIN LOOKS LIKE, THE DAMAGE IT DOES.