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OUTSIDE EDGE (3): Snakebite Serum |
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First published in the Baptist Times - OUTSIDE EDGE column - 17/12/09
I was always puzzled by the fact that the Israelites were chastised by God for making a golden calf in the desert, yet were later commanded to construct a bronze snake. The first was a false focus; the second brought healing from snakebite venom.
The snake episode started with the Chosen People - the ‘good guys’ - voicing venom against God and Moses, before ever the venomous snakes came out of the woodwork and starting biting them. Perhaps the snakes were symbolic of the dangerous rebellion that the good guys had been harbouring, and they were healed of their venom only when they looked towards the harmless symbolic snake which had no bite in it.
Certain symbols in our society seem to bring out of the woodwork an unchristian venom, harboured in the hearts of people who may otherwise regard themselves as the ‘chosen’ or the ‘good’ people.
We can agree we’re all sinners, not saved by any virtue of our own, and capable of any degree of evil but for the grace of God. But it’s more comfortable to believe it in a general, hypothetical sort of way than to read about some chilling crime and know that we’re equally capable of inhumanity to human beings.
Death Row is one of those powerful symbols that bring out some extreme reactions in apparently harmless, law-abiding people. The recent case in Ohio of a prisoner whose execution failed has produced an astonishing range of vituperative public comment from ‘ordinary people,’ most of whom would describe themselves as ‘good people’ - or even ‘chosen’ Christians.
Prisoners given the death sentence in the US may be kept in solitary cells for months or years while legal appeals are prepared. Even when a death date is set and the prisoner is taken to the execution chamber and the lethal injection is about to be administered, it can be called off at the last minute and the prisoner taken back to the cell and kept on hold for another indefinite period. Some prisoners are subjected to this procedure a number of times, like Russian roulette.
In the recent case, the prisoner had run out of appeals and was taken to the execution chamber but the executioners could not find a vein to inject. They kept trying, over and over again. Increasingly distressed, the prisoner tried to co-operate, to get it over with. They tried to kill him; he tried to die. This went on for two hours, till the team desisted and applied for a future date to repeat the process.
Public fury erupted against him, the government, the system. To supporters of the death penalty (the majority of American voters), the certainty of justice - worse, the certainty of death - had been challenged by somebody they regarded as less deserving and less human than the rest of them.
He was not one of the ‘good guys,’ not one of the ‘chosen’, yet he achieved something unprecedented in the whole history of legally killing people convicted of killing people illegally.
In their view, he is guilty of the ultimate crime - he lived.
As New Testament Israelites, our symbol of deliverance from the venomous snakebite of sin is not the bronze snake in the desert but the cross on the Hill of Capital Punishment.
But there are three crosses on Calvary - and on any other Death Row.
One holds the innocent victim of wrongful conviction, one holds the guilty soul who clings to Life, and one holds the mocker, who kicks a man when he is down, whether guilty or innocent.
When we Chosen People, freed by grace from sin’s exile, find venom spilling out of our desert-souls against God who unfairly loves the undeserving, we have a choice of which of those crosses to focus on.
Only one carries the snakebite serum.
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