Healing
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And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”
-Numbers 21:8
Long ago, before she got married in 1942, my mother was a medical assistant. I enjoyed her telling the story of how they learned to take blood by practicing on oranges. When I played in her jewelry box, I would come across an old lapel pin of a snake on a pole. I asked her what it was, and she told me it was the pin she got at her graduation from her medical technician school. I wondered, as a child, why people in medicine used a snake on a pole as their symbol.
The medical profession got its symbol from the ancient Greek the god Asclepius, who was associated with healing and medicine. And in this passage from Numbers, God used the image of a poisonous snake on a pole as a symbol of God’s healing power. A snake on a pole as a sign of healing is an ancient image known in mythology and legend. And Jesus told everyone that just as God lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, he, too, would be lifted up. Christ lifted up on the cross became a symbol of God’s healing power for Christians.
It seems strange that these images of dangerous, poisonous, painful and difficult things are used as symbols of God’s love and healing, but isn’t that the way life works? The deepest healing comes out of the deepest pain. The resurrection happens only after a crucifixion.
What ‘poisonous snakes’ in your life would you lift up in order to be reminded of how God is a healing presence in your life? It is right there in the pain on the pole that Christ meets us right where we are and offers his transformational healing.
