How appropriate…almost as if it had been planned…this week, in response to last week’s focus on anger, we continue our journey through Lent by turning our attention to the question, “How shall we be healed?”
This is certainly not the first time of late when the question of healing has faced us from the scripture readings. Remember the several passages during last season—Epiphany, when we focused on the light and illumination that comes to us from the life and ministry of Jesus. Repeatedly we read of Jesus busy healing—a man born blind, a woman with a fever, a leprous man, and crowds of other people who were ill. Yet, in today’s gospel passage, there is not even an obvious mention of healing. In the very familiar reading from the gospel of John, there are no sick people lining up in front of Dr. Jesus. We hear no disciples question Jesus about his healing practices. No suspicious religious or political leaders plot to end the healing ministry of this man from Nazareth. Rather, we hear the ultimate antidote for all our soul’s healing…and, no surprise, that antidote is love.
My copy of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, given to me in August of 1974 as I was heading off to college and signed with love from each of my loving parents, defines antidote in this way: “a remedy to counteract the effects of poison…something that relieves, prevents, or counteracts…”
Antidotes—“remedies to counteract the effects of poison” permeate the ancient world and even find their way into scripture. The snake on a pole that we read about in the passage from the book of Numbers, provides an antidote to the lethal bites of the poisonous snakes in the desert. This story is the last in the long parade of complaint narratives—where the Hebrew people are making their long journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Palestine. No doubt the desert is hot…the food unappetizing…and the water supply sparse…and they use every opportunity to remind their leader Moses that they are not one bit happy with these insufferable conditions. In today’s passage, the people are being plagued by poisonous snakes common to that desert region, and whose killer bites enflame the insides of the victim with a burning fiery sting. When they complain to Moses, Moses prays to God, and God responds with one of scripture’s first antidotes: “Fashion a fiery snake like the poisonous serpents plaguing you, put it on a pole, and when victims gaze upon it, they will not die.”
Such sympathetic magic was well-known throughout the ancient world, and, interestingly, the central symbols of today’s magical story make their way into modern western medicine in the image of the pole and serpent still widely used by medical professionals. Not only is the obvious reference to this biblical story, but serpents in the ancient world were revered for their healing powers. Perhaps it was in the shedding of their own skin on a regular basis that inspired people to shed whatever symbolic underclothing girded them in their illnesses. Perhaps it was the snake’s way of hissing that invited the ill to use their own breath to expel the toxins inside. Perhaps it was the slithering or the hiding in enclosed crevices that offered the ill person permission to hibernate and cloister in a restful place until the illness passed. I think it was no coincidence that the scripture author uses the image of snakes—both as symbols of dangerous poison and as symbols of dynamic healing. The image would have immediate and deep communication value in the ancient world from which it emerges.
And though we are separated from this story by several thousand years, the meaning is not lost on us. We read and immediately want such a talisman for our own physical illnesses and for our own spiritual wounds. “Give US a snake on a pole, God…” we cry out from our pain.
I remember that it was as a small child that my deepest spiritual pains first began. My Dad, in response to the horrors of what he had experienced in some of the bloodiest battles of World War II, had become dependent on alcohol to numb his memories. When he and my Mom were married just after the war, they drank socially, but as the stresses of family life intermingled with his difficult memories, alcohol became more and more of a crutch. I barely recall his actual drinking—he all but stopped when I was a young child—but the effects of it are burned like a fiery snake into my memory. One night, after work, he came home drunk and out of control. He threatened violence. I can remember hearing my two parents arguing loudly, as I hid in fear in the back of a large coat closet. The memory is brief but deeply embedded…and to this day, when someone threatens violence toward me or another, my urge to run and hide is visceral, an instinctive move to self-protection.
How many times in life have I longed for my own version of the snake on a pole…yet, ultimately, it is not talismans that healed those deep wounds for me.
The antidote for my healing has come over long years, and it is no snake on a pole…it is, purely and simply, love that finds its way to wrap around the wounded child in that closet of old, and assure her that she is loved.
And so we turn to experience the power of love as expressed in the gospel passage we heard read this morning. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness and the people were healed,” proclaims Jesus, “so will God’s love lifted up through me become your healing power.” This love of God, embodied (but not exclusive) in Jesus, is accompanied by light and truth that is every bit as effective in the healing processes of our own wilderness times as was that snake on a pole in the ancient desert. This I have come to believe, as I have invited into my own wounds the love that encircles us each day. There is no conflict too immense for love’s power to heal it. There is no relationship so damaged that love cannot bind up its wounds. And there is no hiding place so deep and so darkened that love’s light cannot permeate it with healing power.
One year to the day before The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis motel, he had been invited to speak to an overflow crowd at The Riverside Church in New York City. In that groundbreaking speech, Rev. Dr. King spoke of the war in Vietnam, breaking his own silence on the issue. He spoke of how we, as people of faith, could end it. Surprisingly, he did not mention protests or parades or articles or books or even snakes on a pole as antidotes to the seething conflict. Dr. King, instead, focused on love…
“When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: ‘Let us love one another; for love is of God and everyone that loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever loves not knows not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwells in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.’
Let us hope that this spirit [of love] will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation…We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now…”
Dr. King, I believe, is right.
Ultimately, friends, it is love that shall heal our deepest wounds…the wounds we each carry from childhood, the wounds we inflict on one another intentionally and unintentionally, the wounds that living life in this world inevitably bring and lay on the altar of each of our beating hearts. And love will effect that healing in love’s own good timing. For me, it was years before I could metaphorically leave behind the fears of that childhood closet. Love, and only love, will heal those deep wounds we all carry. Anger may motivate us to act, to decide, to embark. Yet, as much as I believe in the reality and power of anger to transform and motivate us toward action, so all the more have I come to believe in the absolute and unwavering power of love to heal. Love of self…love from trusted others…the love of God that weaves through all of life and living…
Someone asked me this week if community had any intrinsic value and if community held any power to heal us. I believe our scriptures this morning offer two distinct and clarifying responses to those important questions. In point of fact, holding up a talisman in the desert of our souls will bring no healing. Holding onto love, like a sailor holds to the ropes in order to steer the vessel, holding onto love will, eventually, bring healing to our souls, our minds, our spirits, and even to our memories.
While I certainly remember being that little 4 or 5 year old cowering in the back of the closet, I am no longer wounded by my father’s inability to love at that time in his life. He more than made up for it later on…and even if he hadn’t chosen family over the bottle, even then, I believe that the love I have experienced in countless ways throughout decades of participation in loving Christian communities, that love would have been enough to bring healing salve to my old wounds.
God so LOVED the world…not to condemn it to the fierce actions of its own unbridled anger. God so LOVED the world…that light has dawned. God so LOVED the world…that illumination brightens even the deepest corners in the sequestered places of our souls. God so LOVED…that what is true is more healing than what is false. And what is true is that God so LOVED…that we may be healed in that love, and we, in turn, may offer reflections of that divine love to others. No talismans are needed here…let our antidote be love and we, too, shall be healed.
