The Healing Wounder
It’s a mystery about that bronze snake that the Bible mentions and why the symbol for the Greek god of healing, Asclepius, is a snake wrapped around a pole. I’ll bet if you look around your doctor’s office you will see a picture of it.
Why would something poisonous and treacherous become a symbol for healing? Why would the whole world look to a man hanging on a cross? What is there about looking at the very thing you don’t want to look at that becomes healing when you do?
Why is it, for example, that one of the 12 Steps of AA involves making an inventory of all the violations of your own moral values that you committed in service to your addiction? Why is it that people who have suffered some kind of trauma, such as abuse in childhood, often find it healing to go back and face the very things that they may have spent a lifetime trying to forget?
Why is it that the pattern of Christian worship usually involves our coming into the presence of God with prayer and singing and then, almost immediately, forcing us to confess our sins? Why is it that, in fact, the only way to enter the kingdom of heaven is to first of all, admit that we are sinners?
Why is it that, in order to save the world, God sent his only Son to become sin for us? That’s the way the Bible describes the crucifixion. Jesus becomes sin for us. He becomes the snake on the pole. When Adam blamed Eve for causing him to sin, Eve blamed the snake for being the cause of it all. Funny, how, from the very beginning, nobody takes responsibility for doing anything wrong. It’s always somebody else’s fault. And somebody, somewhere, always has to die for our sins – not to satisfy the honor of a pure and holy God, but to satisfy our consciences that we are not at fault.
When we look at Jesus, hanging on a cross, that is what we see. We see the guy who’s responsible for all the problems in the world – hurricanes and wars and disease. We see the guy who made the poisonous snakes and the guy who led the simple people into idolatry. We see the guy who made people the way they are – never satisfied, always complaining, even when they have it good.
But when we wake up one morning and realize that we hurt like hell and that we are dying – if not physically, then spiritually – and we realize our life is out of control because of our addictions or our bitterness or our dishonesty or our greed or our self-centeredness or any of the dozens of other forms that sin takes in our lives, and we wonder how we can be healed? How we can get rid of the poison that is killing our souls. The word comes to us. “Look at Jesus, just look at him.”
But it seems too easy, too simple; it’s what superstitious people do. It’s what Holy Rollers do. It’s what TV evangelists do. It’s what people who have a simple explanation for everything do. I don’t want to engage in that kind of superstitious idolatry. I’m too sophisticated for that. I know too much theology for that. People in my church don’t do that.
And yet, “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
“Believes . . .”
Does that mean that I have read all the books of theology and I have an intellectual understanding of who Jesus is?
Does that mean that I consciously and successfully live a Christ-like life everyday?
Or does it mean that, when I am at the end of my rope, when I am dying of the spiritual poisons that have been injected into me by the snakes of hatred and desire and even, religiosity (the snakes in the story are called literally “Seraphic serpents”), I can look to the Man on the Cross for healing and redemption?
When the woes of life o’ertake me,
Hopes deceive and fears annoy,
Never shall the cross forsake me.
Lo! It glows with peace and joy.
(“In the Cross of Christ I Glory” words by John Conker United Methodist Hymnal #295)
