Lent 1 Midweek Vespers 2025

Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21

March 12, 2025

It’s a strange business, this bronze serpent. It seems to directly contradict the command to make no graven images. But the command was never about making no sacred art. It was about worshiping an image as a depiction of God. “You shall not bow down to them or serve them,” says the commandment [Deut. 5:7].

What distinguished Israelite worship from the pagans was not a lack of imagery, but the confession of YHWH as not being resembled by any animal or object in creation. He is not likened to a bull, or a reptile, or the sun or moon. His representative, his icon, his image in the tabernacle was a man, the high priest. Through this living man God spoke to His people.

Images were present in the tabernacle, at God’s command. The ark of the covenant had golden cherubim, whose wings covered the mercy seat. Engravers and carvers were hired for the preparation of the golden vessels, candelabra, embroidered hangings. In the tabernacle was a bronze sea, held up by twelve oxen made of bronze. Animals and vines with grape clusters were in the second temple, by men who severely and most strictly interpreted the law. It was not the image that was outlawed, but the worship of the image as YHWH. The men who spoke for YHWH were adorned in elaborate vestments rich in symbolic meaning.

Standing out in all of this was the erection of a cross on which hung a serpent of bronze. The rebels in tonight’s first reading were instructed, “Look at this, and you will live.” Were sacred properties infused into this cross with the statue of the cursed serpent? Certainly not. What happened was that God attached His word of promise there. It was not that medicine was transmitted by rays of light into the eyeballs of the repentant rebels. Now, their eyes saw what the Word said. This action of looking was really an action of hearing and believing.

It is like how we eat the Lord’s Body and Blood. While we eat with our mouths, the most significant eating is through the ear.

So this sign, of a destroyed serpent hung up as a trophy, had God’s Word of promise attached to it. It was there for the healing of the rebels, and it was a sign of the greater healing still to come, by means of another cross.

The Israelites kept the bronze serpent. Wouldn’t you? It was a sign, a trophy, a remembrance of what God had done, how He had worked through means to save His people. In your home are doubtless many mementos, objects that call to mind graduations, marriages, baptisms, trips.

Likewise they kept the bronze serpent, until it was destroyed at the order of Hezekiah, a king of Judah who did what was right in the sight of the LORD. Hezekiah “broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made; for until those days the children of Israel burned incense to it, and called it Nehushtan” [2 Ki 18:4]. (It means “bronze thing” but also sounds like the word for “serpent.”) Imagine destroying some vital part of your people’s history! But you see that the object had become a thing of worship in itself, and so Hezekiah turned the people’s worship back to YHWH. Images and objects to serve as memorials and witnesses to events, these are good, right, and salutary. When they become the locus of superstitious worship, as though some sacred property was in the object itself – well then the example of Hezekiah is salutary, that the thing be destroyed if correction is not heeded.

But the serpent was preparatory. We see this in tonight’s Gospel reading. For “as Moses lifts up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” We cannot travel in time and space to witness the event. But nevertheless to that Jesus hanging on that cross is attached the word of promise: there is your salvation.

So we make crucifixes, and put them in churches and homes and hang them around our necks as a constant reminder of what our Lord Jesus has done for us.

In my office I have some pictures of my son James. One of them is on the piano. I gathered some children around the piano recently to sing a hymn, and one of them pointed at the picture and said, “Is that your son?”

Now then, should I have responded, “Most certainly not! My son is at home! This is not him”? But this would be preposterous. For even a little child knows full well that the picture is a representation of him.

A widow once asked me if it was wrong to kiss a picture of her late husband, as she would do each night before bed. The picture represents the reality. It would be absurd to give personal properties to the picture; the picture aids the memory.

What changes everything is the incarnation of the Logos, the Word of God taking the human nature into His person. God became man. And when we make a picture of that man, we are confessing His incarnation. He is, St. Paul says, He is the image of the invisible God.

And what we see most particularly on the cross is His passion, what He suffered for us. So offer no worship to wood and paint, metal or stone. But look on the wood and paint, if it helps you, and recall what the passion of Jesus accomplished for you.

The Israelites of old looked on the bronze serpent and were healed. Cursed is the one who hangs on the tree, says the prophecy, and there on the crucifix we can see, as it were, the one who accomplished this for us. In Him is your healing. In Him is your life. Look, believe the Word, and live. +INJ+