Lent 4

Bad breath and smelly feet.

They don’t exactly top the list of qualities we look for in romantic interests, friends or coworkers. Hence the obsession by those who possess these malodorous emissions to eliminate their social impact.

Suggested home remedies for bad breath abound. One can chew a whole clove, brush teeth twice a day with baking powder, suck the juice from a cut lemon, chew a mouthful of sunflower seeds and then drink water, swallow probiotic enzymes to balance stomach digestion, gargle pineapple juice, eat parsley, or use dental floss that has been pre-soaked with tree seed oil.

And for those who have fragrant, if not flagrant, feet, there’re plenty of things you might try as well. You can change your socks twice a day, dust your feet with absorbent cornstarch, take daily oral zinc tablets, or slather armpit antiperspirant on your soles and between your toes.

However, the most commonly suggested remedy for embarrassing foot odor is to soak one’s feet in a black tea solution for 30 minutes each morning and evening until the smell slowly goes away over a couple of weeks. You’ll need to have plenty of discretionary time on your hands, or more accurately, on your feet, for this approach to work.

There must be a better solution for sufferers of these pungent maladies. If we can put a man on the moon, view cell nuclei with microscopes, and create seedless watermelons, then surely science can offer some help for our potentially putrid parts.

Scientists have already told us that smelly feet and bad breath are caused by bacteria that proliferate in those areas of the body. And British researchers have isolated certain bacteria that

eat those bacteria which cause bad breath. These potential stink-killers grow on and consume the smelly compounds found in the mouth and on the feet. So imagine the potential commercial applications: Fill your mouth with bacteria to take care of that mouth full of bacteria. Or cover your feet with microorganisms to fix that sock full of microorganisms.

Doesn’t that sound far too close to the absurdity of the childhood nursery rhyme There was an Old Lady? One may remember that she swallowed a spider that wriggled and wiggled and tiggled inside her. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die!

It seems odd to swallow insects to kill swallowed insects. Or to eat bacteria to kill other bacteria. But consider the similar absurdity of the biblical remedy for poisonous snake bites: Stare at a snake on a stake.

That was the prescription offered Israel in today’s Lesson from the Book of Numbers.

They had been wandering through the desert on their displaced pilgrimage between Egyptian enslavement and the eventual sacred home of the Promised Land. The journey was frustrating, their homes always temporary, and the food sub-par and monotonous. Just imagine camping with your family … for 40 years!

In Numbers 11 the people were fed up with the food – tired of eating manna bread, manna porridge, manna stew and manna pasta. So they complained to Moses – “Give us meat!” – and in God’s mercy, he granted them quail for food.

Now in Numbers 21 they are complaining again: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable

food” (21: 5). But this time, instead of sending his mercy through a banquet, God sends his punishment through snakes. He’s displeased with their complaining, and we might even imagine that he’s insulted. They’re ignorant of his past and present provision, focused more on what they want God to do than on what he has already done.

Maybe snakes will give them a better perspective on manna.

And it does. Snakebites lead them to confession: “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you” (21:7). They turn from their complaints and plead with Moses to seek God’s mercy on their behalf.

Like God’s mercy through the quails, he now grants mercy through forgiveness. But the remedy for their consequences is an interesting one. Like bacteria to deal with bacteria, or an insect to deal with insects, God offers them a snake to deal with their snakes.

Moses fashions a bronze serpent and places it on a tree limb to lift up in front of the people. When people afflicted by the snakes turn their gaze upon Moses’ snake, they are healed.

While that might seem a bit absurd, it is actually quite beautiful.

God offers them a symbolic antivenom.

Moses doesn’t produce a magic snake that does the healing – a miraculous serpent like Aaron’s staff-turned-snake that consumed the staff-snakes produced by Pharaoh’s magicians. God himself provides their healing and forgiveness. But he uses this snake symbol so that his people will recognize the connection between their complaining and their punishment. It makes their forgiveness and healing an act of confronting the symbol of their sin as the means of receiving healing through that symbol.

How poignant that must have been. In their confession and repentance, God simultaneously shows them their sin and his grace. Problem and the solution in the same bronze serpent. Max Lucado says, “To see sin without grace is despair. To see grace without sin is arrogance. To see them in tandem is conversion.”

Sin and grace in one symbol. Problem and solution in one moment. A work of God in response to the sin of his people …the Cross of Christ.

For Israel, their sin and their healing were lifted before them on a tree limb. And for those who would receive the forgiveness of Christ, our sin and our healing are lifted up before us on the Calvary tree: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).

The cure for bacteria is bacteria. The cure for snakes is a snake. And the cure for death is A Death.

Our God is an artist, weaving symbol and reality together to paint the picture of his redemption story on our behalf. And like all great works of art, this redemption picture has the innate ability to evoke a response in the viewer.

For the Christian, the cross creates an intimate connection between our sin choices and the consequences they bore upon our Savior. Thus our sin and God’s grace are contained in the same moment. For the Israelites, confession of their sin of complaint involved recognizing their choice, proclaiming it as wrongful, and then turning to God’s healing symbol so that their sin and his grace would be recognized together. Christian confession is the same, and it is only redemptive when it involves those same three movements.

We pause to recognize that we have made a choice against the pleasure of our God, and there is healing in our recognition. We proclaim these sins to him in our personal prayers, in our liturgies, and in our confessions. And finally, we turn our gaze upon the reality of our forgiveness, the grace of Christ given us at the cross. Ultimately, there is healing only in our Savior, whose physical death on the cross cures the spiritual death from our sin.

The complete masterpiece of God’s redemptive work of art happens only when the completed work of Christ’s cross meets our complete submission to forgiveness through confession. It is God’s lavish grace curing our sinful choices.

That is a healing that bacteria application or spider swallowing or snake gazing can never provide. A Death to cure death. Our sin and God’s grace in one symbol – the Cross.