KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 15 October
Now the serpent was more subtle
Perhaps you are familiar with the ‘rod of Ascelpius,’ the symbol for the healing arts of medicine and health care associated with the ancient Greek God of healing. The rod of Ascelpius is still used as the modern symbol for medicine. It depicts a rod which is entwined with a serpent, a snake. Here in Genesis 3 we have a snake, a most unusual snake, we might say, a talking snake, and a creature said to be “more subtle than any other creature which the Lord God had made”; in short, cunning or crafty, deceitful.
We have already encountered this story in its later development in the story of St. Michael and All Angels, the story of the cosmic battle between good and evil and the overcoming of evil by good. Why? Because sin and evil are nothing in themselves. They are entirely derivative and dependent upon that which they reject and deny. But in the Michaelmas story, allusion is made directly to this story, the originating story of human sin and evil which later takes on a cosmic dimension. Whence does evil arise? From rational creatures, men and angels, in their denial of the conditions of their very being.
And yet, there is paradoxically something positive in this story. What is it? It is about the awakening to self-consciousness albeit through deceit and disobedience. This account of the awakening to self-consciousness happens through the power of questions, five questions to be exact. First, there is the question of the serpent. “Did God say?” he asks ‘the Adam’, our humanity now distinguished in terms of man and woman, Adam and Eve. But we ‘know’ what God said. Do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. To be given such a command belongs to the essential goodness of the created order in which we are placed as in a garden, a paradise, but conditional upon our relation to the Creator in whose image we are made. We have heard and read that but how do we become self-aware? This story provides a way of thinking about human self-consciousness, about ourselves as selves.