In the midst of the journey across the wilderness, out of slavery Egypt and towards a land of freedom, the resolve of the Israelites is tested, even broken. They are struggling and suffering, and soon they encounter the deadly threats that surround and infiltrate them. There is much that threatens to tear them apart, and there are risks they are not prepared to take. Death could be hiding, in the form of a poisonous serpent, around any corner, behind any rock.
This creates division and fear, and makes it impossible to keep going. The people halt in protest. Moses sees how far they have all gone astray.
So Moses carefully crafts the image of a deadly serpent, and places it on a staff. Here, the image is contained, it can be controlled, it is no threat. Lifting up the staff in the wilderness, people can look directly at that which threatens to destroy them, and in the process of this confrontation, be healed. Those who have been bitten will not die. Those who are possessed by fear are set free.
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The Scottish philosopher David Hume spoke about what he called “moral taste”, which is how our sense of pleasure or pain, attraction or disgust, points us towards our sense of what is right and what is wrong.
Hume is not, however, making a simple appeal to our impulses. For Hume, moral taste is something that can, and must, be cultivated.
It is so easy for our impulses to be unformed, reflexive, and to either overstate or understate our true moral sense of the things that happen in the world.
I think about death and statistics, and how easily we lose sight of the real weight of even one death. This week, we saw the assassination of American far-right political agitator Charlie Kirk, who memorably spoke about how occasional deaths were an acceptable price in exchange for the right to possess guns. That is easy to say about an anonymous, hypothetical death somewhere far away. His wife and his children would no doubt give anything to have him back.
The Qur’an, the holy book of our Muslim friends, says that when you kill a person, it is like you kill the whole of humanity, maybe even that you destroy the whole world. It ends an entire universe of experience, and whatever you can do to prevent that is like the salvation of all.
It is easy to hear about deaths in Gaza and to let ourselves move on to the next thing on our agenda. There is, of course, so very much to do. To spend time in the presence of a deep confrontation with the reality of death, with how many whole worlds, whole families, and lives have been destroyed, may well move us to feel the real, deep revulsion that is our conscience.
So it is with Pride this weekend, that we know that there are many in the world who might find it easy to dismiss the ways that other people live their lives as disgusting, off-putting, wrong, and therefore immoral; and yet we also know that to spend time in the presence of others, we often discover their humanity, and the ways in which they are more like us than we have imagined. Our reflexive judgements of others often do not survive encounters with the reality of their lives.
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To look upon the serpent on the staff is to be healed, and to be set free of the fear of that which must be avoided, denied, suppressed, and repressed. For the Israelites, being able to contain and look at this object of fear allows them to begin again to move away from slavery and towards their liberation. It is avoidance itself that bolsters fear; think of the child who is afraid of the monster under their bed, and so who does not look. In their averted gaze, and in the covers pulled ever more tightly over their body, the monster only grows more powerful, more terrifying, and more real. We can live whole lives avoiding monsters of our own imagining.
In our Gospel, we hear that we face the Cross in the same way as the Israelites faced the bronze serpent that was lifted upon the staff in the wilderness.
It is death that we face on the Cross, and more than that an instrument of torture and humiliation. We see in the Cross the ways in which we fear that we may be destroyed if we step too far out of line, or if we run afoul of State power. As the Israelites are told that they must not be afraid, but proceed, so we are told that we must not restrain ourselves from love, nor cower to avoid death, humiliation, or all the powers of this world, but always proceed towards our liberation, towards the Promised Land in which all are whole, and none are made to suffer.
This is the message of Holy Cross Day, that if we look at the worst that the world can do, we will overcome its power over us, and discover our freedom to go in the ways that God has called us.
This is also the message of Pride. To come out to oneself or to others is to admit what we were always trying to keep just outside of view, that thing which we were afraid would somehow unmake us or destroy us, or cause all the powers of the world to come crashing down upon us. This is what allows us to become unstuck and to actually move once again towards our freedom and our wholeness. To live in fear and to make ourselves small is not to live with reality.
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When we can face things as they are, and ourselves as we are, we will find that we are not ruled by the imaginations and expectations of others, nor by the powers of this world who would seek to divide, control, and devour us; instead, we are claimed by the God who has always made us and loved us, and who calls us to engage with one another deeply and truly, and to see our goodness, and to be moved by our conscience to action. God calls us not to easy reflex, nor aloof indifference, but to deep encounter with the human person, Creation, and the Holy in our midst.
May you let yourself see the world as it really is, and know yourself as you really are, and not give your life over to things that are passing away. May you let yourself be moved to action by those things which attempt to destroy those who are made in the image of God. May you not fear that you are alone, or broken, or unworthy, but always know that you are claimed as God’s own, and that your life is a gift of whole worlds, and that you are truly precious in God’s sight, no matter what. May you look deeply at that which you fear will destroy you, and discover that God has already assured you of your salvation.