Late in the wilderness years, on the detour around Edom. The complaint that triggers this is the pettiest in the Pentateuch and the most human: "we are disgusted with this wretched food." They are objecting to the manna.
What happens
"With their patience worn out by the journey, the people complained against Theos and Moses… In punishment Yahweh sent among the people saraph serpents, which bit the people so that many of them died. Then the people came to Moses and said, 'We have sinned… Pray to Yahweh to take the serpents from us.' So Moses prayed for the people, and Yahweh said to Moses, 'Make a saraph and mount it on a pole, and if anyone who has been bitten looks at it, he shall live.' Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole, and whenever anyone who had been bitten looked at the bronze serpent, he lived."
What to notice
Note first what Yahweh does not do. The people ask him to take the serpents away — a perfectly reasonable request, and the one he refuses. The snakes stay. What is provided is not the removal of the danger but something to look at while it is still there. Then the object itself, which should be more startling than familiarity allows: Moses is commanded to make a metal image of a living creature and mount it for the people to look at, in a legal system whose second commandment forbids exactly that. The text does not comment. The Hebrew is playing throughout — saraph means "burning one," the same noun as the seraphim of Isaiah 6:2, and the object is a nechash nechoshet, a serpent of bronze: the words for snake and for bronze are near-homonyms, so the cure is a pun on the affliction. And the mechanism is worth stating plainly, because the Gospel will use it: the remedy is an image of the thing that is killing them, rendered harmless and raised where everyone can see it. They are not asked to do anything except look.
Seventy-two verses of national history told as a warning — the longest of the historical psalms, and the bleakest. Its refrain is that Israel forgot, and forgot again, and forgot after that.
The selected verses
Psalm 78:1–2."Hearken, my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable, I will utter mysteries from of old." Psalm 78:34–35."While he slew them they sought him and inquired after Theos again, remembering that Theos was their rock and the Most High, their redeemer." Psalm 78:36–37."But they flattered him with their mouths and lied to him with their tongues, though their hearts were not steadfast toward him, nor were they faithful to his covenant." Psalm 78:38."Yet he, beingmerciful, forgave their sin and destroyed them not; often he turned back his anger and let none of his wrath be roused."
What to notice
Psalm 78:2 — "I will open my mouth in a parable" — is quoted at Matthew 13:35 to explain why Jesus taught the way he did. But the honesty of Psalm 78:34–37 is the reason it is here today. "While he slew them they sought him" — the repentance is real and it is also entirely a product of the emergency. Then: "they flattered him with their mouths and lied to him with their tongues." The verb pathah in verse 36 is the one Jeremiah used of Yahweh in Jeremiah 20:7 — to seduce, to talk round. They tried it on him. And then Psalm 78:38, the hinge of the whole psalm and of this feast: ve-hu rahum yekhapper avon, but he, compassionate, covered over the guilt. After four verses of documented insincerity, the mercy is not conditional on the sincerity improving.
Almost certainly a hymn Paul is quoting rather than composing — the rhythm and vocabulary differ from his prose — dropped into a letter as the ground for a very ordinary appeal: stop competing with each other in Philippi.
What happens
"Though he was in the form of Theos, he did not regard equality with Theos something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Because of this, Theos greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend… and every tongue confess that Jesus Messiah is master, to the glory of Theos the Father."
What to notice
Two words control the descent. Morphē — form, and not appearance: the shape a thing actually is. He was en morphē theou; he took morphēndoulou. The same noun both times, which is what makes the sentence dangerous and precise. Then schēmati heuretheis hōs anthrōpos, "found in the schēma of a man" — the outward figure, the word we have met twice this month, at Romans 12:2 and 1 Corinthians 7:31. Harpagmos, in Philippians 2:6, is one of the genuinely unsettled words in the New Testament: it can mean a thing to be seized, or a thing already held and exploited. The grammar permits both and the theology differs sharply; the hymn does not resolve it. Then the turn, and the word this feast is named for: ho theos auton hyperypsōsen — Theos super-exalted him. Hyperypsoō occurs nowhere else in the New Testament — the ordinary verb hypsoō, to lift up, with hyper welded to the front. And the response is Isaiah 45:23, where Yahweh says "to me every knee shall bend" — applied to Jesus without a word of justification.
The end of the night conversation with Nicodemus, at the point where dialogue dissolves into monologue. The passage contains the most quoted verse in the Bible and, immediately before it, the one that gives this feast its logic.
What happens
"No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternallife. For Theos so loved the world that he gave his only Son… For Theos did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him."
What to notice
Hypsōthēnai — to be lifted up. John uses it of Jesus three times (John 3:14, 8:28, 12:32), and at John 12:33 tells us outright what he is doing: "He said this indicating the kind of death he would die."The verb means enthronement and it means crucifixion, and John will not choose between them. The lifting up on the cross is the exaltation; there is no interval in John's telling where one becomes the other. Which is why the serpent is the right analogy and not merely decorative. What Moses raised was an image of the death loose in the camp; what is raised on Golgotha is an execution — the ordinary, industrial Roman method of killing a provincial. In both cases the instrument of death is put up on a pole and looked at, and the looking is the cure. And John 3:17 should be read whenever John 3:16 is: "Theos did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world." The Greek is krinē, to judge. The sending was not a judicial act.
The Son of Man lifted up, in a verb that means both gallows and throne
The feast is called the Exaltation of the Cross, and every reading is a variation on lifting something up. But look at what is being lifted in each case, because that is where the day gets strange.
Numbers sets the pattern and the problem. Israel asks for the snakes to be removed and is given a snake instead — cast in metal, raised on a pole, made the object of a long look. The cure is a picture of the disease. Nothing about the danger changes; the desert is still full of serpents and people are still being bitten. What changes is that there is now somewhere to look.
John says the cross works the same way. Roman crucifixion was not a symbol; it was the state's instrument for killing people like him, chosen for its visibility. And hypsōthēnai refuses to separate the raising of that instrument from the raising of the man to glory. In John's grammar the worst thing that could be done to a body and the enthronement of the Son of Man are the same event described once. Which is why Philippians can run in one continuous motion from the form of a slave through death on a cross to the name above every name, with only a dio — therefore — at the joint.
And Psalm 78 is the day's honest floor: the only reading with no lifting in it at all. It describes people who repented under duress, said the right things, meant almost none of it — "they flattered him with their mouths" — and were forgiven anyway. The psalm is here to prevent the day from becoming a story about a well-executed gesture of looking. The Israelites who looked at the bronze serpent were, on the psalm's own account, the same people who lied to Theos with their tongues. They looked, and they lived, and their hearts were not steadfast.
Which brings the day to its uncomfortable core. The instruction in Numbers is not repent adequately; it is look. The instruction in John is not understand the mechanism; it is that the thing be lifted where it can be seen. The minimum action in both texts is turning your head — and the reason that is enough has nothing to do with the quality of the looking and everything to do with what is on the pole.
A Question to Sit With
They asked for the serpents to be taken away, and that request was not granted. What they got instead was an image of the very thing that was killing them, put somewhere they could see it — and looking at it was the whole of what they had to do. I have prayed the first prayer many times, and I recognise the disappointment of not having it answered. What I do not often do is the second thing: look steadily at the shape of what is actually hurting me, instead of asking for it to be gone. What is on the pole in my life right now, and when did I last look directly at it?