20 March 2018

Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

After the children of Israel murmur against God, they get a taste of their own poison when they begin to die from the venom of the snakes in their midst. After Moses intercedes from them, God offers the people, through Moses, a path to healing. Since God can act any way that God wants, the way that God chooses to act is important, because it reveals who God is. In this instance, God does not simply heal the Israelites at Moses’ request. Rather, God instructs Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and raise it up on a pole and have the people suffering from the effects of their own evil contemplate what God has Moses set before them. Only when the sick Israelites look upon what Moses has raised up on the pole will they be saved from death (Nm 21).

Jesus makes several references to this incident, including in today’s gospel ( Jn 8; cf. Jn 3). The pole that Moses raised for contemplation saved the Israel from the consequences of a particular instance of disobedience, but in the passion Christ himself will be “affixed” to a pole—the cross—and that pole will be raised up so that, contemplating what we have done to Christ, we might turn from our evil ways and so be saved by his grace. Before Christ can be raised up from the dead, he must be raised up on the cross, and if we do not have the courage to contemplate Christ’s love on the pole upon which he was raised, we may not be able to see Christ raised from the dead either. Let us then contemplate this pole that bears our Savior, for he is lifted up for all the world to see, so that in seeing Him, the one true God given for us, we might—by God’s grace—give ourselves to him in return and so be saved.