Everything I really needed to know about Jesus I learned in Sunday School

Last week our Sunday School lesson was about Moses and the Bronze Serpent.

Then they journeyed from Mount Hor by the Way of the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; and the soul of the people became very discouraged on the way. And the people spoke against God and against Moses: "Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and our soul loathes this worthless bread." So the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died.

Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD and against you; pray to the LORD that He take away the serpents from us." So Moses prayed for the people.

Then the LORD said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and it shall be that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, shall live." So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.
Numbers 21:4-9 (NKJV)

Now that I'm teaching the Grade 1 class, (I formerly taught Grade 5) I have to remember to keep the lesson objectives simple. For our craft, we cut and paste a serpent onto a wooden pole and Jesus onto a cross. Then as a quick game, I asked them to hold up the correct pole when ever I said "God saved the Isrealites from the snakes" or "God saved us from sin". That's basically what the lesson boils down to - just as God saved the Isrealites in the wilderness from dying from the serpent's bite, so He saves us from the death that we deserve as a consequence of our sin.

Call me a cynic, but I can't help wondering how many Isrealites died because they didn't look at the snake. I'm pretty sure I would have died. Because it doesn't really make sense. Think about it: I'm lying on the ground, feverish and convulsing from the snake venom that's coursing through my blood. A snakebite is the cause of my suffering and will soon be the cause of my death. And then along comes Moses who tells me to look at an effigy of the snake - the very cause of my suffering! - and I will be saved from death by snakebite. (Uh...yeah. Sure Moses, anything you say.) It just doesn't make sense, does it?

In fact it seems like the opposite should be true. The snake, apparently, was called "Nehushtan" (2 Kings 18:4). The word "Nehushtan" is not only a combination of the Hebrew words for "bronze" and "snake" but it also sounds much like the Hebrew word that means "unclean thing". And my intellect tells me that I have no good reason to believe the "unclean thing" will be of any help to me. In fact it tells me the opposite: the unclean thing can't be trusted.

Yet obviously some of the Isrealites believed and looked at the bronze serpent and were healed. Despite the fact that it made no human sense whatsoever, they trusted that God would be true to His word and looked up for their healing.

In the same sort of paradoxical way, Luther had this idea that the Cross turned everything that we think we know about God on its head. From a human perspective what kind of Messiah is a dead messiah? How are we supposed to trust a Messiah - killed in the most shameful way that the Romans could devise, whose followers appeared to have deserted Him and who seemed to lack the power to stop even his own unjust death sentence - to save us? Like the serpent on the pole, the Messiah on the Cross as a means of salvation makes no sense.

Yet Luther insisted that the shame and agony and senselessness of the Cross is precisely where God best reveals Himself to us. God hides himself (Isaiah 45:15) in what appears to be weak and foolish yet paradoxically this is where the very power and wisdom of God are found. God, who is all-powerful, hides Himself in weakness. God, who is all wise, hides Himself in foolishness. God, who is living, hides Himself in death. Luther called this the "Theology of the Cross".

To fully understand the implications of Theology of the Cross (if such a thing is even possible), one must first understand it's converse: what Luther called the Theology of Glory. Under such a theology, man seeks for himself the glory that belongs to God alone. Thus, theologians of glory see themselves as having the capacity to understand God - and even approach Him - apart from His final Revelation to man, which is Christ. The theologian of glory applies his human reason to understand what God is like.

This is why the Sunday School lesson is so powerful. Human reason tells us that a bronze snake on a pole is not going to save us from a poisonous bite. And human reason tells us that a dead man on a cross is no help to us either. Yet in both cases our human reason deceives us.

The children in Sunday School, whose faith God began in their baptisms, accept unquestioningly that God saves through a lifeless bronze serpent and they accept equally unquestioningly that Jesus dying on the cross saves them from death. They don't believe it because they have applied human reason, or reached an "age of understanding". They believe it because God, who revealed His greatest promise in the paradox of the Cross, gave them faith to trust that His promises are true.

Here endeth the Sunday School lesson.