Hezekiah broke the bronze serpent into pieces (2 Kings 18:3-4) because the people were
burning incense to it which you might have done if as a child you were told
the boogie man story of deadly vipers in the desert. But in the Gospel of John God
repeats the feat in a time when the poison of complaining was the contagion of religious
ritual and hearts were far from God while lips piously offered praise. Our
worship is idolatrous when it fails to understand God prefers real relationship
to ritual or when our professed love of God does not translate into a life lived
for the neighbor which is the way we love the world God so loved. Anything less
turns the cross into just another snake on a pole where darkness masquerades as
light. But whereas the image Moses fashioned became something that needed to be
broken into pieces it is the Son of God “high and lifted up” that breaks us so
that we might be refashioned to love the light and live the life that is
eternal in our everyday.
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