“Steadfast Love’s At-One-Ment”
“Steadfast Love’s At-One-Ment”
Numbers 21:4-9 Psalm 107:11-3, 17-22 John 3:14-21
Year B, Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 10, 2024
Pastor Andy Kennaly, Sandpoint, Idaho
In January of 1996 I went on a two-week study tour to Western Turkey and the Peloponnesus region of Greece. In Western Turkey, along the Aegean Sea portion of the larger Mediterranean, we stayed one night at Izmir on the coast, and then went a bit inland to an amazing place that features hillside streams. Centuries of water flow have created white cliffs as minerals in the water get deposited and pools form along the white, shiny hillsides. This area was known to have healing qualities, so for thousands of years, people have come here to seek a cure for what ails them.
The area is called Pergamum, at Bergama, in Turkey, and of course, because people of the ancient world would pilgrimage there for healing, they’d spend some time there. Temples were set up, a theater for entertainment, and other services. The Asklepion healing center became rather developed. Since the fourth century BCE, The Asklepion has been known as a medical wellness center. Notice the name? The Asklepion.
That name has everything to do with Moses in the wilderness and Jesus talking about the cross. The passage from Numbers features the Jewish people who wander in the desert, and the passage from John has Jesus refer to this ancient story of Moses that involves: a snake on a pole. These biblical texts overlap with, and depend on, Greek mythology.
Ancient Greece was very familiar with a snake on a pole. One was with Caduceus, a staff with two snakes, and often a couple of wings. This ties in with the Greek god Hermes and the Roman god Mercury, both assumed as messengers between the gods and humans. But there’s another staff, the Asclepius, a staff with one snake. This one belonged to Asclepios, a god of healing and medicine. Both staffs engage legends of Greek mythology. Especially Asclepios, who was famous as a Greco-Roman god of healing who could also bring back the dead. No wonder Jesus uses this reference to Moses in the context of ancient Greek mythology that involves a messenger who can bring back the dead. Jesus sets the tone to help his listeners understand what his journey to the cross, the tomb, and beyond, would involve. He speaks about familiar themes.
We are rather distant from ancient cultures and mythologies. The stories we use get filtered through very narrow rational thinking. Our culture, for example, doesn’t like snakes.
Working at a local grade school, a month ago I attended a training that showed a computer program teachers can use with the kids to help them explore the world. One survey option invites the kids to click on the picture of which animal is the scariest. A very subjective question. You can guess which ones made the lineup, several to choose from, but once a selection is made a list appears. National averages of what all the students across the country have chosen are shown. Reptiles were also on the list. A snake was among seven or eight total choices, but by far had the most clicks, no comparison. I said to myself under my breath, “Well there’s the Judeo-Christian bias showing up.” We’ve been taught to hate snakes.
Many people assume snakes are evil, or at minimum symbolize evil. Biblical passages that feature snakes often involve some kind of difficulty, like Adam and Eve in the Garden, Moses in the desert, and Jesus foretelling his death. But our interpretations of these stories, and the doctrines that get developed based on these interpretations are filtered through modern, conceptual thinking that loses the power of symbol, the depth of imagination and story, and the creativity of a strong connection with nature. We have become separated from nature and dislodged the power of myth. Uprooted and wandering, our mind uses doctrines to attempt a patch, to fill the void.
People hearing Jesus, or the Jews following Moses, they would have been familiar in direct ways with Greek mythology. In their cultural settings snakes were considered symbols of wisdom – tricksters, perhaps, but not evil. Nowhere in the Genesis story is the snake called evil, not even called the devil or Satan. That interpretation gets layered on through bias toward snakes. Also, snakes shed their skin. They must shed their skin, otherwise, there is no growth. For ancient people, this natural process of rejuvenation and growth is symbolic of healing, redemption, and new life.
Isn’t that a compelling way to hear what Jesus says as he uses this in reference to the redeeming cross and resurrection life? A snake as a source of healing, a serpent who represents wellness, a God who only has the best in mind for God’s creation and continually calls people to let go of that which distracts from Divine purposes, to invite Originary Presence.
As legend tells, Hermes used the staff to break up a snake fight, and as the two snakes coiled around the staff, the opposing sides stopped fighting and found balance and peace. The Asclepius, the medical staff with one snake for healing, is polar opposite of modern bias and fear of snakes. Yet people tend to prefer to hold on to false images, especially in a post-truth world, where one’s perspective is totalized, allowed to override larger realities.
That’s the other part of these passages, idolatry, holding on to what is false in favor of actual truth, a truth that can set you free. It seems even Christian doctrine can become a substitute for a living relationship with God. Doctrines can become idols. There are many doctrines and dogmas that shape Christian history around this, including the Doctrine of Original Sin, and the Doctrine of Discovery, both of which were formed to support the Empire of their time, and both have very destructive effects as they use judgment and guilt to punish and kill.
One word used in the Doctrine of Original Sin is Atonement. That word helps us see the interplay between one interpretation and another, and shows side effects of doctrines and unexamined beliefs that become empowered. Atonement.
Atonement is what many Christians assume is at the core of accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior. The Hebrew Scripture story from Numbers shows us a pattern that gets more developed in the Gospels, and this doctrine.
The text from Numbers shows us a typical flow often assumed to be normal. God does something amazing, people rebel and reject God, God punishes the people, then the people repent and want to embrace faith again, so God gives them a redemptive path forward. In this particular tale from the biblical narrative, people get bitten by snakes that God sent as punishment for their complaining, but God also has Moses make a bronze snake on a stick that saves those who look at it.
But as time goes on, over centuries, the Jewish people end up making offerings to the snake on the staff, they burn incense to it, which is idolatry. Something that started helpful ends up replacing God as a graven image. Rather than remind the people of God’s salvation and healing intent for their wellbeing, they changed the image to something that needs appeased and has power over them, and they live in fear. Eventually, about a thousand years later in one of the Jewish reform movements that bronze snake on a staff is broken into pieces and removed. And now even Jesus makes reference to it.
Many Christians believe the world is an evil place, judged and condemned by God. The Doctrine of Original Sin holds that Jesus puts himself on the pole in place of the snake, and, in place of us. Jesus takes our punishment as his own. Atonement, in this sense, is described as substitutionary. It’s also penal, because it deals with the penalty of sin. Penal substitutionary atonement doctrine says Jesus does something that God requires to make us worthy enough to be saved from this evil world. Like the Greek gods of early civilization that need an intermediary or go-between because a gap is assumed between the divine and the profane, Jesus becomes a bridge, the escape plan to get to eternity in heaven. Jesus raises the dead. This traditional doctrine is alive and very active in our post-modern times, including all the misinformation about the world being evil. But this works for millions of people.
If we keep the spelling of Atonement as it is but add a couple dashes and emphasize the pronunciation a bit, massage the pronunciation, an alternative orthodoxy emerges. Now we hear and see At-one-ment.
At-one-ment attempts to clear the cultural clutter of doctrinal debris and ancient idolatries. At-one-ment reminds us of what we already know deep down in our own soul. There is no gap. God is here and even lives within us. We are originally blessed, loved and known from eternity, even before we took form, shaped in and through Christ as God’s very image and likeness, born into a larger world that reveals through matter spiritual realities and truths, God’s love made known.
God does not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save it through him, and Jesus reminds us of what we’ve forgotten, calls us to live into the image we so easily tarnish, and heals us from the sin that sickens us and gives us wholeness of spirit and wellbeing of soul. Our story is restored, our relational connections re-unified with all there is, seen and unseen.
To live into wisdom, we need to learn how to receive the light and find balance with its opposite as we hold polarities in unified fields. What helps us is to remember God’s love for us and for the world, to claim God’s saving actions and re-member, as in embody, re-member the At-one-ment we are created to share. We come alongside the Psalmist to “give thanks to the LORD, for [the LORD] is good, for [the LORD’s] steadfast love endures forever. We are called from the sickness of sinful ways and the affliction of iniquities to live with gratitude and thankfulness in joy that cannot be taken.
As we journey through Lent and toward the light of Easter day, may God help us shed skins of confinement to live and grow and have our being as blessed by God. May the Spirit help teach us deeper Wisdom of living Presence. May Christ make us new creations to live into At-one-ment as we follow Jesus on a path of redemption and deliverance from our own, heavily defended egocentric delusions. Mercy and love call us to walk with Christ as our larger Self finds life to the glory of God, now, and forever. Amen.