by CCW | 3 February 2013 15:30
Serpents in the wilderness; the serpent in the garden. Dust and death. And yet something redemptive and healing. The story of the Fall is a story told in the form of myth let conveying great truth. O felix culpa! O blessed fault! as the theological tradition puts it. And as for snakes and serpents, they, too, serve an arresting and symbolic purpose. I am always amazed at the cultural cross-overs and coincidences of images. The staff of Ascelpius is the symbol of the medical profession to this day. It is a serpent entwined about a rough wooden branch. The serpent as a sign of healing.
And in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, a serpent figures there, too. Gilgamesh, having learned that there is no permanence from Utnapishtim, returns to Uruk, wiser to be sure. He has been allowed to return however with the plant of rejuvenation called “the old men are young again,” an ancient form of Viagra, I suppose. On the way homeward, he stops at a refreshing spring to go for a swim, leaving the plant on the bank where its odour attracts a snake who immediately eats it. A just-so story, told to explain the phenomena of snakes shedding their skin and growing a new one, it also illustrates the fatalism of that ancient culture. Gilgamesh loses a gift for his city simply through a kind of accident and not through any fault of his own.
How much more different is the biblical account of the serpent in The Book of Genesis! The serpent is said to be “more subtle than any other wild creature.” And what does that serpent do? It asks questions. Such is a feature of human rationality. The serpent is a symbol of an aspect of our humanity, for good and for ill. What kind of questions?
Questions which seek to know and understand better? Or questions which seduce and deceive, questions which insinuate doubt and which put the Lord to the test? The questions of the serpent lead to the explicit act of human disobedience, the eating of the forbidden fruit by Adam and Eve. The rest is all history – the history of human suffering and misery. The fault lies with us; the serpent as an aspect of our humanity in its capacity to turn away from truth that is given and proclaimed. In this remarkable story, God, imaged like a lord taking a stroll in his garden, asks questions of Adam and Eve. No questions are asked by God of the serpent; there is only the divine justice which sentences the serpent to what his questions really imply – a turning to the ground and away from God. “Upon your belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat all the days of your life.” Just so, the serpent creeps upon the ground and exists in part as the symbol of enmity between our humanity and nature and even more, between us and God; the source of all our woe. The creeping serpent.
Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, recalls another serpent story, one from the fourth Book of Moses, The Book of Numbers, which chronicles the adventures of Israel in the wilderness. It might better be described as the book of kevetching, the book of murmuring or complaining because that is mostly what the people of Israel do. At one point in their complaining to God and to Moses, God sends “fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died” (Numbers 21.6). Moses intercedes to the Lord, who then directs Moses to make a fiery serpent, a serpent out of bronze which is to be set upon a pole so that “if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live” (Numbers 21.9).
In a profound image, Jesus connects that episode to himself. “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me” (John 12.32). In a most remarkable sermon on this passage from Genesis, the great 17th century Anglican preacher, John Donne notes that “the creeping Serpent, the groveling Serpent, is Craft; the exalted Serpent, the crucified Serpent, is Wisdome.” The creeping serpent; the exalted Serpent; the crucified Serpent. It is altogether a question about the direction of our reasoning – downward or upward? The story of the Fall awakens us to self-consciousness and challenges us about our thinking and living.
In a provocative image, Donne criticizes our all too-worldly ways which are about turning to the dust or ground, reminiscent, too, in ways of the Eucharistic Gospel for today about the sower and the seed which challenges us about what kind of ground we are.
All your worldly cares, all your crafty bargaines, all your subtill matches, all your diggings into other mens estates, all your hedgings in of debts, all your planting of children in great allyances; all these diggings, and hedgings and plantings savour of the earth, and of the craft of that Serpent, that creeps upon the earth.
To be the good ground requires a repudiation of the creeping craftiness of our earth-bound reason.
“But crucifie this craft of your,” he says, for it is our craft; the Genesis story of the serpent is inescapably about us. “Bring all your worldly subtility under the Crosse of Christ Jesus, husband your farmes so, as you may give a good account to him, presse your debts so, as you would be pressed by him, market and bargaine so, as that you would give all, to buy that field, in which his treasure, and his pearle is hid, and then you have changed the Serpent, from the Serpent of perdition creeping upon the earth, to the Serpent of Salvation exalted in the wilderness.”
It is a powerful indictment of our humanity in every age and certainly with respect to the preoccupations and concerns of our contemporary culture and yet it offers the power of redemption; there is the hope of transformation from the creeping serpent to the exalted serpent in whom we find salvation. Donne sums it up this way.
Creeping wisdom, that still looks downward, is but craft; Crucified wisdom, that looks upward, is truly wisdom.
It is all a question of the direction of our thinking, a matter of heart and mind, of courage and prudence, we might say, but only as transformed by the divine charity of the crucified Christ.
The story of the Fall convicts us of our failings and shortcomings, in short of the sin of acting against what in some sense we are given to know. We were given a commandment after all, the commandment not to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” In disobeying we discover its truth, that we shall die, but we also discover ourselves as self-conscious and reasoning beings. There is, we might say, a fall upwards into reason, even if in the form of contradiction. Before the Fall, as Augustine puts it and as echoed in our reformed traditions, our humanity was able not to sin (posse non peccare). After the Fall, our situation is not able not to sin (non posse non peccare), but in the redemption of Christ and in the fullness of salvation? Then we shall be able not to sin (posse non peccare), and, ultimately, not able to sin (non posse peccare), for Christ is in us and we are in Christ.
It means looking to Christ and letting his Word live in us. We shall be reminded of the dust of our mortality and sin, the dust of the creeping serpent. “Remember O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return.” But the journey of Lent, for which these gesima Sundays prepare us, is about going up to Jerusalem, going up to what God ultimately seeks for us. It means looking upwards to the crucified Serpent, looking to what Christ seeks for us. It changes our outlook, from looking downwards to the dust to looking at our humanity redeemed in Christ. And it changes then how we go about our lives in this world, letting the charity of Christ move in us, the wisdom of the crucified that overcomes the craft of the creeping serpent.
Fr. David Curry
Sexagesima Sunday
Morning Prayer, Feb. 3rd, 2013
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