Snakes on a Post (...not on a plane)

Today in church we heard that interesting little story from Numbers 21...here's the important excerpt:

⁶ Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. ⁷ The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.
⁸ The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” ⁹ So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

Now I'm not quite sure what to make of a story like this...but I think a there's truth that lies within the text, hidden, waiting to strike (like a snake?).

What does putting a bronze snake on a pole do that saves people from venom? 

How does looking a representation of the thing that hurt you produce healing?


Is this just some divine magic? Is God just providing a random ritual? Could he have told them to do just about anything (like get down on the ground and slither while making hissing noises) and the outcome would have been the same?

Maybe so, but maybe not. 

One of the principles of healing that I've learned over the years, is this:

 People often need to be able look at the thing that hurts them before they can be healed from it. 

In fact, some of us believe that one of the key elements of good psychotherapy is the process in which people take their internal torment, and by talking about it with another caring human, are able to place the things that are causing torment outside of themselves. It's a kind of psychological distancing. Writing often plays a similar function in people's lives (which is perhaps part of the reason why some of us blog). 

To be able to distance oneself, to observe and reflect upon things that are "poisoning" us, appears to offer a valuable source of healing.  

And it turns out this isn't just true for psychological issues. There's an interesting bit of scientific literature documenting the effects of people "seeing" their illnesses, or at least being able to visualize them. I'm admittedly skeptical about claims of people imagining themselves "killing" their own cancer cells as a cure. The truth is I (we) don't fully understand very much about mind and body connections in disease. But something is there. Something in this ancient Hebrew text echos through history into our own context, reminding us of the value of looking at, and contemplating the things in our lives that poison us.

The snake is often associated with evil or the devil (although they are not synonymous; the Genesis creation story never says it's the devil who tempts Eve, just a serpent) 

So when this story in Numbers 21 tells us that we should look closely at the "snakes" that bite us, perhaps the metaphor is even richer. It's not just that we need to look at our illnesses in order to heal. The truth is that we need to look carefully at the evil within us, the poison in our blood, before it destroys us. 

I think I'm mostly done with deciding what particular bible stories "mean".  This one leaves me with plenty of questions about the idea that God would send venomous snakes. But this morning as I listened, the story stirred within me a reminder to look closely at the poison inside me, to recognize that I'm snake bitten along with the rest of humanity. I prefer the idea that I could just avoid snakes and avoid getting bit. But it seems that there's far greater healing to be found in learning to recognize the source of my torment, my brokenness, and to look closely at it.