Merayakan Hidup dalam Anugerah Keselamatan-Nya

Bilangan 21:4-9, Mazmur 107:1-3, 17-22; Efesus 2:1-10; Yohanes 3:14-21

Pendahuluan
1. Kapan kita mengadakan pesta?
2. Apa yang harus dirayakan jika kita hidup dalam penderitaan?
3. Ada banyak hal yang membuat orang menderita: misalnya penderitaan
saya saat ini disebabkan karena apa yang saya lakukan di masa lalu. Atau
penderitaan yang bukan disebabkan dari kita.
Pertanyaan ini, muncul ketika saya pergi ke sinabung. Ini bukan karena
dosa. Pertanyaan ini juga muncul ketika saya menderita.
Pertanyaan ini juga muncul mungkin dalam diri orang Israel yang berjalan
di padang gurun. Ya, betul sih saya sudah dibebaskan, namun saya masih
menderita karena tidak lagimakan ikan dan semangka seperti di mesir
dahulu.
Tafsiran dan Aplikasi
1.
Hitung dalam seminggu lebih banyak bersyukur atau mengeluh?
1. Petani sinabung mengalami penderitaan bertubi-tubi. Apakah karena ia
berdosa?
Tafsiran dan Aplikasi
Penutup
Trudging through the seemingly never-ending wilderness, with nothing to eat or
drink but miserable manna, the people speak against God and Moses. And how
does God respond? By afflicting them with venomous snakes. The people beg
Moses to intercede, and he does, and God, rather than removing the snakes,
sends a cure for snakebite. They'll still get bitten; that danger doesn't go away,
although God does offer healing if they look in the right direction.
It would be fairly easy to gloss over the aspects of this passage that we find
troubling, and focus on God sending healing right where we need it. There's no
doubt that such is a part of the meaning of this text. But it's not all of it, and it
doesn't recognize the harsh realities that the text holds up for our attention.
What's happening in this passage is that the exodus generation is being weeded
out and replaced by a new generation. The book of Numbers is coming to terms
with the fact that the old generation will not see God's promises come to fruition.
On this long, dangerous journey, some simply will not reach the destination.
Scholars agree that Numbers has two distinct sections, marked off by two
censuses. The first census is in chapter one, in which the descendants of each of
the twelve tribes are named, up to the present generation. With the exception of
Joshua and Caleb, none of these men will live to inhabit Canaan (14:28-30). The
second census, in chapter 26, names the generation that will be poised on the
edge of Canaan when the book reaches its end.
Between the two censuses, among stories of battle and ritual regulations, the
people repeatedly complain and rebel against Moses. God's anger is kindled by
this rebellion, and God sends a plague (11:33), inflicts Miriam with leprosy
(12:10), and more than once asserts that this complaining generation will die out
before Canaan is reached (14:20-25 and 28-35; 20:12). It's as if God is picking off

the older generation a little bit at a time; Moses admits as much, when he urges
God not to kill them all at once (14:13-19).
The narrative of the snakes in chapter 21 is of a piece with these stories of
complaining and rebellion. This time, however, the people speak out not only
against Moses but against God as well. There is no water, and the manna which
God has provided for them is, as the people say, "miserable." Earlier the people
looked back with rose-colored glasses at the abundant foods they left behind in
Egypt (fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, garlic!); now they're stuck with food that
tastes like "cakes baked with oil" (11.9), and they have had enough. The people
may sound like spoiled children, but their complaints are not light; they have
been in the wilderness of Kadesh for 40 years, and they don't seem to have
made much progress.
Unlike the narrative of the flood, where God is moved by grief, here we can
assume, because of previous references in Numbers to God's anger, it is indeed
anger, inspired by the people's lack of trust that God will provide, that moves
God to send poisonous snakes. Many of the Israelites are killed by the snakes,
and the people repent and plead with Moses to intercede on their behalf. Moses
does intercede, and God instructs him to make a serpent of bronze and put it on
a pole; all who look at the bronze snake are healed. Remember, though, that
even those who are healed will not live to reach Canaan.
One of the most difficult questions that this text clearly raises is that of the
character of God. What kind of God is this who inflicts death on people for their
lack of trust? Recall that the people have been to Sinai; they have received the
law and are bound in covenant with God. Their lack of faith is, to the writers of
this passage, a violation of the covenant, and therefore worthy of punishment.
But God does also provide the remedy. It is notable that God does not remove
the snakes, but provides a means for healing in the midst of danger. God brings
healing precisely where the sting is the worst.
Another question that this text raises is what to make of the failure of the exodus
generation to reach the Promised Land. The narratives of rebellion in which God
sends disaster upon some of the people function in large part to give theological
meaning to the historical reality of the dying out of the earlier generation. The
lack of faith they exhibited in the wilderness, the logic goes, rendered them unfit
to inhabit the land. But what I find remarkable about the Israelites is simply the
fact that they go on.
How do they do this? In the midst of their desperation at a journey that was even
more arduous than they ever would have imagined, how did they go on? How
would we, how do we, go on when faced with a similar circumstance? What do
we do when something for which we have hoped and prayed and labored
recedes farther and farther into the distance? If someone never reaches the
financial security he or she has worked so hard for, if another is never able to
heal a relationship that is long broken, if I never quite become the person I've
imagined myself to be -- what then?
Again God's provision of healing in this passage is instructive. Even in our worst
failures and disappointments, God provides. God offers healing for our wounds,
relationship for our loneliness, and faithfulness for our faithlessness. God doesn't
remove the sources of our suffering, but God makes the journey with us,
providing what we most deeply need, if we but look in the right direction.

Nearly everything about this text feels far removed from twenty-first-century life.
It chafes against both our theological sensibilities and our scientific good sense. Surely God
does not send poisonous snakes to punish human beings for their missteps? Certainly just
looking at a bronze snake does not assuage a medical ailment like snakebite. Where is the
anti-venom? Where is the splint? And where is the God with whom we feel safe and
comfortable?
The Hebrews who wandered through the wilderness did not experience God as a safe and
comfortable companion. In the great showdown with Pharaoh in Exodus 1-14, God sends ten
vicious plagues to show the superiority of the God of Israel over Egypts gods, including
Pharaoh, who made his own claims to divinity. On the way out of Egypt, God appears as a
pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of cloud by night, a sight that incites panic in the Egyptians
(Exodus 13:21, 14:24). At Sinai, God thunders on the mountain in fire and smoke, terrifying
the Israelites (Exodus 19:18, 20:18-1). These are not the images of God that call us to snuggle
up in Gods everlasting arms, safe and secure from all alarms, as the old hymn goes.
Despite these great displays of Gods power, the Israelites do not have much confidence that
God will, in fact, deliver them into the Promised Land. It only takes three verses to move
from their songs of triumph (Exodus 15:1-21) to their first grumbling (Exodus 15:24). In this
weeks text from Numbers, the peoples complaint sounds like something that could be
attributed to Yogi Berra: Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?
For there is no food (lechem) and no water, and we detest this miserable food (lechem) (v.
5). In other words, we dont have any food, and it tastes terrible, too! (The wording of the
complaint is also vaguely reminiscent of the wonderful line from Mark Twains The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck tries to speak well of a farmer-preacher by
proclaiming that he never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too.)
In the text of Numbers 21, the utterance of the complaint is immediately followed by the
statement, Then the LORD sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the
people, so that many Israelites died (v. 6). Neither the narrator nor God ever explicitly says
that God sent the snakes because the people complained. That causality does seem to be
implied, especially because the people themselves name their speaking against God and
Moses as the ultimate source of their suffering (v. 7). The narrative specifies that God sends
the snakes, but never does either God or the narrator call the snakes a punishment; the people
themselves draw that conclusion.
I wonder if the Israelites might have fallen into the old post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy:
after this, therefore because of this. Maybe God did not send the snakes because of their
quarreling after all. Crying out to God in complaint is not usually condemned in Scripture;
there is a whole genre of psalms that centers on complaint or lament! Of course, there are
times in Scripture when speaking against God or Gods messenger does bring catastrophe.
When Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses Cushite wife, Miriam is stricken with a skin

disease (Numbers 12:1-16), and Gods anger is clearly described as the cause. Even so, in this
weeks reading, we, like the Israelites themselves, are left to draw our own conclusions. Is
God punishing the people with the snakes? If God sent the snakes, then surely the people
deserved it?! Otherwise there was no discernible reason, and now this God is much less
predictable, much less safe, than we ever could have imagined.
The people name their sin and then ask Moses to pray for them. This role as intermediary is
what Moses does best: facilitating communication between God and Gods people. In this
story, God does not give the people what they ask for. They want Moses to get God to take
away the serpents from us (Numbers 21:7). But the serpents do not go away, nor do they
stop biting. Instead, God instructs Moses on how to heal the people who are bitten; they are
still bitten, but they live. Deliverance does not come in the way that they expect.
As twenty-first-century Christians it may take us out of our comfort zones to imagine God as
a dangerous, unpredictable presence in our lives. Yet, if we claim that weve got God all
figured out, then we have ignored the mystery and divine freedom with which God is
characterized throughout much of Scripture. A domesticated, unmoving God does not pull a
people out of slavery, through the wilderness, and into the Promised Land; no, we need a God
who is, in those oft-repeated words of Don Juel, on the loose!
Moses serpent-on-a-pole shows up again in the Old Testament, at 2 Kings 18:4: [Hezekiah]
removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole. He broke in
pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had
made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan. The Israelites had forgotten the living, free,
dangerous God who commanded the construction of the serpent of the wilderness, and they
focused instead on a bronzed, domesticated, manufactured idol that they could see and
understand. Perhaps it is the task of preaching to break up our bronzed serpents and to turn
our attention instead to the God of the wilderness: dangerous, maybe, and unpredictable for
sure, but always present, always faithful.
Lectionary Reflections
Numbers 21:4-9
March 15, 2015
Fourth Sunday in Lent
It is hard to imagine that this weird little text would appear on any radar screen if the author
of John's gospel had not picked it up and allegorized the whale out of it at John 3:14-15.
There, in the midst of Jesus' famous retort to the clueless Nicodemus about being "born
again" (or "born from above"), followed by the most famous line in the gospel (John 3:16)
memorized by millions and misunderstood by most of them we get this note about Jesus
being "lifted up" in the same way that Moses "lifted up the serpent in the wilderness." This
will lead, says John, to this: "whoever believes in him may have eternal life." On the one
hand, that rich symbolization seems worlds away from the sympathetic magic that appears to
inform the ancient story in Numbers 21. But, on second thought, perhaps John had something
rather more similar in mind than at first meets the eye. Let's think a bit more about these
snakes and things.

The book of Numbers is an odd mlange of stories and laws and old poems, bits and bobs of
ancient texts, including tales of talking donkeys, too many quail, and the most famous
priestly blessing of them all. Still, it is hardly in the top ten of Hebrew Bible favorites, and
this text for today would not have been found in most lists of the top one thousand. But John
dragged it out of a well-deserved obscurity. Surely the story here comes from a very different
time and place in which you and I find ourselves in 2015.

Previous

Of Snakes and Things: Lectionary Reflections on Numbers 21:4-9

Let's Not Talk About That (Adultery)! Reflections on Exodus 20:1-17

A Covenant for All: Reflections on Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16

God's Bow in the Clouds: Reflections on Genesis 9:8-17

The Occasional Danger of Trusting a Prophet: Reflections for Transfiguration Sunday

An Answer to a Hard Question? Reflections on Isaiah 40:21-31

Here is the story: the Hebrews, upon their escape from Egypt, have gone into the wilderness
between Egypt and the land of YHWH's promise, and have grumbled and complained to
Moses about lack of food, lack of water, lack of the lovely amenities they remembered in
Egypt, however false those memories were. In reality, they had "bricks without straw," while
they pined for the so-called "fleshpots" and "full-belly bread," neither of which had actually
existed for them. As they plunge deeper into the Sinai desert, and its forbidding and
seemingly endless landscape of dust and more dust, they leave Mount Hor, located apparently
on the northern border of Edom, on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, going "by way of
the Sea of Reeds" in order to skirt the land of Edom. This is of course geographical nonsense,
unless the location of the Sea of Reeds has shifted much further east, which is quite possible
since we have absolutely no notion of where this fabled sea might be. Putting aside the
absurd geography here, the one salient point of the story is rather that "the people became
impatient on the way" (Num 21:4). Ah, now here are the Israelites we know! Whiners one
and all, they wish they were anywhere but where they are.
They cry to Moses, "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?
There is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable fare!" Note the hilarity of this
sentence. There is supposedly "no food," but the fact is the food they do have is "miserable."
Their refined palates are weary of quail, quail, and more quail, and manna, manna, and more
manna. There are only so many ways that quail may be prepared, and though manna is very
nice in its way, it presents little variation for the educated tastes of God's chosen people.
Enough of quail; down with manna! A taco would be nice, or a well-cooked falafel would
suffice.
Apparently, YHWH was not impressed with these demands for an expanded menu, because
instead of a nice rare cut of beef, what they get instead are "seraphim snakes" that bite the
ingrates so that many die. The translation "poisonous serpents" of the NRSV is an attempt to

square the deadly bites of the story with the appearance of the seraphim snakes. In reality, the
word "poisonous" usually refers to "fire." That would make the image something more like
"fiery monster snakes," since seraphim, as usually portrayed in ancient texts both in and
outside the Bible, are giant creatures with sharp teeth and claws, possessing bat-like wings.
Reread Isaiah 6 with that picture in mind, and you will see that the servants of YHWH are
hardly chubby-checked cherubs.
The dead Israelites and the nasty biting seraphim snakes are more than enough to convince
the people that perhaps their culinary demands have gone too far. "We have sinned," they
scream at Moses, "by speaking against YHWH and against you. Pray to YHWH to take away
these seraphim snakes from us!" Moses does so, and YHWH's response to Moses is: "Make a
seraph, and set it on a pole; everyone who is bitten shall look on it and live." So Moses,
"made a snake of bronze, and put it on a pole. Whenever a snake bit someone, that person
would look at the snake and live" (Num 21:7-9).
There is much of anthropological/sociological interest lurking in this strange text. We first
have the question of just what is being talked about when the words "seraph," "snake," and
"bronze" are used. The first word of this list, as I have said, often means "monster," and is
connected with the Hebrew word for "fire." The second is the typical Hebrew for "snake" (see
Gen 3 for the most famous example), while the third is a word that is quite close in sound to
the word for "snake." "Snake" is nachash, while "bronze" is "nachoseth." Snake images are
ubiquitous in the ancient Near East, and they were often formed with bronze, hence their
close connection in the iconography of this tale.
Then too, as is more than obvious, the story revolves around the power of sympathetic magic.
One can be saved from the fiery snake by "looking at the bronze fiery snake" on the pole;
what may kill you can also give you life. In this case, it could well be that the ancients knew
that the poison from a snake could kill, but an extract of that same poison can provide the
antidote for the potentially deadly bite. It was hardly only we moderns who had learned to
"milk" a rattlesnake in order to find the cure for its own bite.
And so how does that inform John's allegory of Jesus "being lifted up" in the same way that
Moses lifted that bronze snake in the wilderness? At one level, Jesus, hanging on his cross of
death becomes the way that we, doomed to die, may believe, "look on him," and gain eternal
life. Raymond Brown spells out the implications of this reading very well: "The first step in
(Jesus') ascent is when he is lifted up on the cross; the second step is when he is raised up
from death; the final step is when he is lifted up to heaven" (146 in Brown's commentary The
Gospel According to John). In other words, Jesus is "lifted up" to the cross, from death, and
to heaven, and that "lifting up" is reminiscent of Moses' lifting up the saving pole of the
bronze snake.
I readily admit to finding all this interesting in a historical sense; there is nothing more
pleasurable than chasing around an obscure idea through an ocean of Middle Eastern texts
and images. But can I preach this? Does this inform my modern faith? Perhaps there is more

here than an allegorization of an old story of sympathetic magic. What of the notion that we
can live more fully if we face squarely those things that can kill us? Are there ways that that
which can kill can also give life? Facing my own demons, whose desire is for my death, may
offer to me a fuller and richer life. Let me offer one example.
I know I have deep within me bigotries of countless kinds. I am sixty-eight years old, and
was raised in a time of "legal" segregation of the races, both African-American and Latino/a
in the Phoenix, Arizona of my youth. I first went to school with an African-American student
when I was a senior in high school, age 17. I am astonished when I consider that, given the
world I now inhabit. As a result of that history, I still have a deep fear and distrust of AfricanAmericans. I am not at all proud of this fact, but I must face the truth of it. My wife was for
three years one of the pastors of an African-American church; she and I were two of only five
Anglo members of this 2000-member congregation. I was the only Anglo member of the
male chorus. Did this cure my bigotry? It did not at least not completely. It helped me,
nudging me toward more openness, more willingness to see my fellow congregants as
friends, rather than as completely different and thus strange, and unlike me. What I thought
might kill me became for me the way toward my healing. But I have still much looking at the
bronze serpent to do if I am to continue my healing. Does my story in any way resonate with
yours?
I am grateful for this odd narrative; it has led me to a very different reflection than I thought
it might. Old texts are sometimes like that. All the more reason to read the whole Bible, even
the odd bits; God may still speak in ways you were not completely ready for.