Startling Simplicity
I tend to superficially over-think religious subjects. I say “superficially” because my attorney friend, Tom Eastmond, reminded me about David Hume’s “is-ought” problem, and when you get under the hood with the metaphysical uber-thinkers, it humbles you. You get that “nothing new under the sun” feeling. Someone has already seen this here thing. Someone has already “splained it” better.
But I think I’m onto something, even if I’m sure it’s not new: If the devil had a plan for destroying faith, there would be no better way to do it than forcing a believer through a carnival of charlatans and pious frauds. Orthodox Christians, after all, believe in the miraculous: the virgin birth, God appearing as man in the flesh, life after death. That faith can be tested when a false faith-circus comes to town. In the dark night of the soul, on those occasions when your life feels like a wasted, decrepit vanity, there is a peculiar evil radiating from people who peddle false miracles. If you are crying out to the the Great High Lord of the Universe, and your vision is clouded with a picture of a faith healer in a Lear Jet, set to the evil music of Bill Maher’s laughter, then you begin to get a sense how grotesque false religion really is: you can’t hear the distant, heavenly music because someone has hoisted a boom box up to your ear, demanding you take in his version of the tune.
I’m not questioning modern day miracles. I’m sure those exist. I’m talking about the sort of religious mind capable of either faking miracles or adding a secret ritual ingredient to the ancient faith. It’s certainly been a temptation as old as scripture. Religious entrepreneurs get out in front of the simplicity of God’s story and add their own franchise flavor, or they resurrect old rituals, Galatians style. When the children of Israel watched miraculous plague after miraculous plague; when they had seen the Red Sea part, they had to have—contrary to Divine instruction— a kind of false “permanent miracle,” the golden calf.
We have a weakness, as a species, for demanding the visual and the tactile. We adore our rituals, kiss our icons, lust after our temple prostitutes, and we must “see” our gods, but the single Great God of the Universe remains invisible, and the reason might be simple: His presence is too powerful for us. His righteousness and truth, if Sinai is any indication, would blow us to dust.
It’s strange then, that in the story of the bronze serpent, God tells Moses to put a bronze snake on a stick, so as to cure the complaining chosen people. God had sent live snakes to gall them and a bronze snake to cure them. All they had to do was look at it. There was no ritual washing, no blood of a bull on the right toe, no 30 point plan for righteous living. Just look at the snake, dummy.
“You’re dying of snake bites?” Moses asks. “Then look at the bronze serpent.”
“Say a prayer to it?”
“Look at it.”
“Get down on my knees before it?”
“No.”
“Offer a sacrifice to it?”
“Did I stutter? Look at it.”
(Pause)
“Hey, thanks, that works.”
Just before that most quoted verse in the Bible, (“for God so loved the World”), we sometimes forget that Jesus purposefully compares himself to the bronze serpent. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.”
God sends snakes to try His people and a single bronze serpent to cure them of their venom. Later and more broadly, God allowed His son to be the cure for the serpent-inspired sin He allowed to come into the world. A snake introduces sin to the world and a man removes its power. In both cases, a simple belief in God’s promise provides the cure. If I had to make a guess, I believe Jesus’ most common rebuke was this: “oh, ye, of little faith.”
Faith in God is at the center of everything—not faith in rituals, ordinances, icons, secret handshakes, vestments, dress codes, temples, popes, prophets, apostles, and certainly not faith in men. Vegetarian diets, wine-free vows, sacrificial tithing, red heifers being bred for another sacrifice, hand towels touched by Oral Roberts, holy laughter and slayings in the spirit are all side-shows. Whatever small merit may be in any of those things, they are filthy rags compared to the central, startling reality of faith in Christ.
Startling?
Because it’s so simple. Look at the snake, stupid, and then look to the cross.
It really is all about Jesus.
I need a good hard look at that bronze serpent right now
Praying for you, bro…
The Mishnah explains it the same way you do, https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Rosh_Hashanah.3?lang=bi (section 8): Similar to this matter, you [can] say concerning the verse; “Make a [graven] snake and place it on a pole, and everyone bitten who sees it will live” (Numbers 21:8): And is it the snake that kills or [is it] the snake that [revives]? Rather, whenever Israel would look upward and subjugate their hearts to their Father in heaven, they would be healed; and if not, they would be harmed.
As is typically the case, I found this post to be well-written and challenging. I hope you don’t mind if I add a somewhat lengthy reflection of my own.
What I took your main point to be is that as personal faith in Christ is the sine qua non of our salvation, any other demands that organized religion purports to impose on us – in terms of ritual, liturgy, authority, etc. – are unnecessary and perhaps illegitimate distractions (“filthy rags”, so to speak) which separate us from this central truth. I hope that is a fair paraphrase of your argument.
Of course, everyone should condemn reliigous charlatans of any type; and to the extent that they employ
false rituals and claims of authority to advance their fraudulent ends, we should condemn their use as well. But I cannot see how we can accept the proposition that all ritual and all claims of authority are illegitmate and unnecessary in the context of Christian worship. In fact, I would like to suggest that the story of Moses and the bronze serpent makes the opposite point.
As is clear from the relevant scriptural passage, the Israelites had already confessed their sin – and
expressed their faith in God’s power to heal them – by asking Moses to pray on their behalf. God could have directly answered the prayers of the faithful by healing them, but he deliberately chose to interpose a specific ritualistic act – gazing upon the elevated bronze serpent – as a condition of being healed. This was hardly out of the ordinary, as God routinely imposed visible. physical conditions on the graces he bestowed on the Israelites. For example, Moses had to strike the rock to bring forth water, or keep his arms elevated for the Israelites to prevail in warfare.
Moses learned the hard way that he was not free to dispense with or alter ritual commands that God had
imposed on him. When Moses was instructed by God to bring forth water from the rock a second time by speaking to the rock – and Moses disobeyed by striking the rock instead – he was punished harshly.
We also know from scripture that the obligation to perform these rituals, and the effect they had on real-world events, were independent of a believer’s faith or intention. On the first Passover, God knew where the faithful Jews lived, but only those Jews who put the blood of the lamb on their lintels were spared the death of their firstborn. It was both a necessary and sufficient condition. As scripture makes clear, the whole point of this exercise was to create a ritual for future generations to observe –and one which was in the fullness of
time to become the central mystery of Christian faith.
Jesus himself insisted upon ritual. He was without sin but submitted to baptism to demostrate its ritual necessity for everyone else. He observed all of the rituals required of an obedient Jew of his day, even the ones he condemned as empty and hypocritical, to underscore that the duty of obedience to prescribed rituals transcends one’s personal evaluation of their worth or efficacy. Almost every miracle our Lord performed had a physical, ritual component – such as the changing of water into wine, or the rubbing of mud in a blind man’s eyes.
Consider the washing of the feet at the Last Supper. Peter at first refused to participate – not because he
didn’t believe that Jesus was Lord, but precisely because he did helieve and considered himself to be unworthy to have his feet washed by Jesus. Our Lord could have been satisfied with this sincere and
vigorous expression of faith, but instead he told Peter that this ritual foot washing was an essential and non-negotiable requirement for his salvation. And just to make clear that it was meant to be a ritual – and not an actual cleansing – Jesus declined Peter’s request to be washed all over his body.
All of this is to say that I believe we need to be discriminating in our condemnation of religious rituals, and the people who practice and abide by them. Rituals are obviously of great significance to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which consider some of them to be sacraments instituted by our Lord as essential channels of grace. No one outside of these churches are obliged to accept this undertanding as true, but
surely we must concede that there is a reasonable basis for their adherents to do so even if we think they are mistaken.
Of course, most Evangelical Protestants have a different view – but it hardly means that they are in theological or practical conflict with the Catholics and Orthodox, who share a common understanding of the primacy ot faith. Catholics and Orthodox merely understand that they are also commanded to enter into a prescribed ritual relationship with our Lord.
Here is a provocative question: Isn’t this really a form of Pascal’s Wager? In the next life, the members of the sacramental churches may discover that these rituals were unnecessary, but it is hard to see how it can be held against them that in good faith they did more than they were required to do. On the other hand, those Christians who have rejected the sacraments, rituals, authority – and in fact the very existence of a universal, heirarchical,and apostolic church which can be traced back to the earliest days of Christianity – must run the risk of learning that they have failed to do all that was demanded of them.
That’s a difficult question,and one that I am completely unqualified to answer, but I am sure that it is
worth at least some reflection.