So GOD sent poisonous snakes among the people; they bit them and many in Israel died. The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke out against GOD and you. Pray to GOD; ask him to take these snakes from us.” Moses prayed for the people. GOD said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it on a flagpole: Whoever is bitten and looks at it will live.” – Numbers 21:6-8 (The Message)
Today is All Saints Day. That of course means that last evening was All Hallow’s Eve, the night before All Saints Day and better known as Halloween. Halloween has become many things: candy, costumes, horror movies, parties, and so on. There is a too often overlooked connection between the night of frights and the celebration of the saints. The “saints” refers to all of us in the church. We are called by God and set aside to live lives of faith and trust in God. In so doing we are made holy and so are rightly called saints. All Saints Day then, is first of all a reminder that we are all called and made into saints through the Holy Spirit, and so the community of the church is a community of saints.
In order to become saints – that is, people who trust in Christ – we must first look at and overcome that which scares us. Fear prevents us from trusting God, but having an object for our fear allows us to face that fear and move to trust. This is a fundamental biblical insight, and we can see it at work in the reading from Numbers today. The people of Israel are in the wilderness, following Moses. As they wander, they begin to grumble. Is the Promised Land really such a great place? Are they actually heading there? Can they really trust that God is leading Moses? Their anxiety is incredibly high, because their future is uncertain. They don’t know what will happen. The anxiety of uncertainty makes it impossible to trust. Anxiety about the uncertainty of life creates fear in their hearts about what will happen, and fear is the opposite of trust.
Trust is giving oneself to God’s leadership, while anxiety and fear come from trusting in ourselves and whether we can handle the challenges in our life. Anxiety about what might happen kills us, because it causes us to constantly worry about every detail rather than trusting that God will lead us. In response, God teaches them a lesson about the dangers of giving in to anxiety. God sends vipers. This a lesson about anxiety because the problem with snakes is they are underfoot and hidden. You can’t see them, and they strike when you step too close to them. When you know that there are poisonous snakes around, you worry about every step. You live in fear that with each step you take you will be bitten and die. You are completely consumed by fear and anxiety. This external reality of the vipers matched the people’s internal state of anxiety – that with each step they were being led to their death. They were consumed by their fear, so Moses prays and confesses their failure to trust God.
The answer that God gives seems bizarre. God says: “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” Why would this totem of a bronze serpent be God’s way of bringing healing? Again, the people’s problem was anxiety. They were anxious because of the uncertainty they were facing – uncertainty of being in the
wilderness, and uncertainty about whether each step they took might bring them death. The difference between anxiety and fear is this: anxiety is about uncertainty. It has no clear object but rather is a general sense of dread. Fear has a clear object – it knows what is causing the fear. When we know what we fear, we can give that over to God. We can say, “God, I am worried about this thing, help me to trust you to get through it.”
The bronze serpent gives the people a clear object to focus their anxiety. They can look on the snake statue and know that they had been anxious about the uncertainty of what might happen, but now they can see clearly what was causing that anxiety – the vipers. This changes their anxiety to fear, and they can lift that fear up to God. They look on the bronze serpent, trusting that in doing so God will heal them. Through looking at the serpent, they go from anxiety to fear to trust. They are learning to trust God. Through looking at the serpent, they see their fear and they see that God overcomes their fear.
Halloween, at its root, is a reminder to look upon the things that scare you. By transforming your general anxieties into concrete fears, we can look upon them and overcome them by entrusting ourselves to God against them. To look at death, monsters, and other deep fears and recognize that God is with us and can overcome these things is to remind ourselves to put our trust in God and not in our anxieties. In doing so we become saints. When the night of fright is over we can face the day as God’s saints.