From Mount Hor the children of Israel set out on the Red Sea road, to bypass the land of Edom. But with their patience worn out by the journey, the people complained against God and Moses, “Why have you brought us up from Egypt to die in this desert, where there is no food or water? We are disgusted with this wretched food!”
Just fed up! A long road to a promised land with no water and meager bad-tasting food. The impatience of unmet expectations would make anyone complain. So, we hear in the book of Numbers (NM 21: 4-9) today how the punishment for the complaining children of Israel came in the form of serpents which bit them so that many of them died. God gets the blame for this punishment, but I wonder if the serpent bites might not have come from their own bitter complaining and loss of hope. The ‘poisonous serpents’ of their impatience, lack of trust and failure to see the God who is leading them into unknown territory sends them spiraling into death and self-destruction. So they pray through Moses that these serpents be taken away from them. Under God’s direction, Moses mounts a bronze serpent on a pole for all those who had been bitten by serpents to look upon and be healed.
Many times I’m afraid that we just don’t want to be healed. It seems too painful to actually take the medicine. Especially when the medicine seems to taste as bad as the very thing for which we need healing. We don’t want to face up to the cause of our predicament. In narrow-mindedness and often blindness we complain about our situation, because frankly things are not going quite as we expected them. And we certainly don’t want to accept that the only way we are going to get through this situation is to face head on and indeed march straight through exactly what we find distasteful. We have to look upon the serpents that have bitten us in order to begin to receive healing. It can be a very painful paradox to embrace!
The evangelist John (JN 8: 21-30) offers another story of failure to see healing that is offered because of mired misunderstandings.
Jesus said to the Pharisees: “I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come.” So the Jews said, “He is not going to kill himself, is he, because he said, ‘Where I am going you cannot come’?” The very sin that the Pharisees will “die in” is the sin of blindness, the failure to see the great gift offered by our God in the person of Jesus the Christ. They so misunderstand Jesus’ mission of love and redemption that they think he is going to commit suicide! Finally, their rigid misunderstanding brings them to the very brink of their failure when they ask him:
“WHO ARE YOU?”
And it is from this question, that Jesus, reveals his identity as it would be framed in the rigid mindset of these people who will not see the serpents of blindness that have bitten them so treacherously:
“When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me.
As in the case of the children of Israel, it will take the terrible misunderstanding by the Pharisees (read us) concerning Jesus’ identity to reveal exactly Who he is. It will take the placement of Jesus on the cross of our bitter complaining and violent ingratitude to allow us to first see that which needs healing and then to actually begin to receive the gift of healing.
Healing is painful. Cures do not come easy. The grace though IS the truth that healing is always gift! Could this be what Jesus is so desperately trying to explain to us in His life, death and resurrection? Can we begin to fathom in our hearts that we have a God Who is Love come to earth just to embrace us? For some strange reason, it takes us being bitten by sometimes self-directed projects of pain as well as the inexplicable mysterious suffering that we all must endure in order for us to see this Love. Paradoxically, we have to be bitten so that we can receive the gift.
Life bites us in so many ways, but it is how we treat the bite that either allows for us to be transformed and healed or to become complaining and sick. As much as we may want to figure out why this or that happens to us, or why we find ourselves in this particular predicament, the more important aspect may be that we realize, appreciate, and take advantage of the ever present opportunity to be healed. And this healing comes from Love itself, which means that it comes from Christ – it comes from the body of Christ – all of US! In this way we are not alone, so that what Jesus is telling the Pharisees in today’s Gospel is exactly what we are offered…
The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone,
Inasmuch as Jesus’ personal relationship with His Father gave him the strength and trust to Love, so it is with us.
In the beautiful 1995 film The Cure, written by Paul Emmons, an 11 year old with AIDS is befriended by his next-door-neighbor, and the two boys run away to seek out a cure for the sickness. The film intimately shows how it is precisely the cure of companionship in their journey together that graces the lives of not only the two boys but all those around them. The real sickness of loneliness, misunderstanding and bigotry are healed in the brokenness of these lives.
There is as yet no cure or vaccine for the coronavirus. But, perhaps the depths of the suffering in our lives and how we respond to it will be part of whatever cure we need. How can we allow each other to heal the bites in our lives? Will we begin to see where we may in fact do the “biting?” If so, then we can begin to see another way of lifting each other up in Christ. We will be able to look upon our failures and shortcomings and see that these are shared sins, which can be healed in God through our compassionate interactions with each other. In caring for each other’s wounds, we participate in the constant embrace of the wonderful mystery of Love Who is our God!
Peace,
Thomas
(Written April 4, 2017)