the snake of God

I was reflecting on Paul's line to the Corinthians that "knowledge puffs up, but love builds up."

It occurred to me that in South Africa we have a very poisonous snake: the puff adder. When provoked, it puffs up.

Did Paul have a snake in mind when he turned that phrase? After all, it was precisely a kind of "knowledge" that the snake offered the woman in Genesis 3.

When the woman was given to the man as his helper, the text says that they were "naked together and unashamed." Following the snake's deception, however, the woman and the man sew clothes as a barrier between them. Moreover, the helper becomes a subject to a husband who will act as lord over her. Nakedness turns to hiddenness, intimacy to estrangement, mutuality to dominance.

But God is more clever than the snake. God uses the snake to accomplish God's purposes. When a deadly plague of poisonous snakes broke out against the Israelites in the wilderness, God commanded Moses to make a snake of bronze. Whenever anyone who had been bitten looked upon the snake, they were healed. Jesus applied the story to himself. "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up so that all who believe in him might have eternal life." And just as Aaron's staff-turned-snake swallowed up those of Pharaoh's magicians, so the knowledge of Christ overcomes the knowledge of the world.

Consuming the knowledge of the world breeds selfishness. The man and the woman, different one from the other according to the Creator's design, willingly enter into covenant as one flesh. "For this reason," for the sake of being joined to another in love, "a man shall leave his father and mother." Together they are naked, sharing all things. But confronted with the knowledge of the world, they seek to satisfy desires peculiar to their creatureliness. "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired in order to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate." As each pursues his or her own desires, the woman and the man erect between themselves a "dividing wall of hostility", sew "clothes of fig leaves" to hide from one another.

What can return two human beings, infected with the venom of divisiveness, sated on the desires of the self, "puffed up" with the knowledge of the world, to their primal nakedness?

Perhaps it is the sight of One who was lifted up from the earth, naked before the world on a cross: the vision of One who has not withheld, but given himself for love of another.

-Joe

Texts referred to or quoted in this entry: 1 Cor 8:1; Gen 2:25; Gen 3:7; Gen 2:18ff., 3:16; Num 21:4-9; Jn 3:14-15; Ex 7:8-12; Gen 2:24; Gen 3:6; Eph 2:14