Ash Wednesday: snakes, crucifixes, and the eyes of Love...

My friend, artist Susan Meyer, came by yesterday with some lovely porcelain crosses she hand-paints. In brainstorming how to hang them, we came up with this chain. We love the look of the descending dove hanging over Jesus' shoulder. I kept the one pictured to the right since it accidentally blurred a bit in the process, lending a kind of mystical shroud element to the design. Susan gets her inspiration for the penwork drawings from ancient icons.

I've been thinking a lot about Jesus on the cross lately. Up until recently, I recoiled at the sight, maybe a harkening back to my Lutheran upbringing. Lutherans don't have Jesus on the cross since He is risen. As for me, it hurts my heart to see anyone that exposed and vulnerable, which I suppose is the point.

This week a dead snake on our sidewalk both repulsed and attracted me.  It was grotesque yet beautiful, not unlike a crucifix. In the book of John, just before the famous 3:16 verse there is an odd reference that used to give me the creeps. "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life."  The story John is referring to comes from the Old Testament. After being rescued from Egypt, God's people sin against Him and Moses by complaining that they had no bread or water in the wilderness. I guess they forgot God was their bread and water. God sends fiery serpents and His people were dying from the bites. Moses confesses their sin and God tells him to sculpt a serpent, put it on a pole, and raise it up. To be healed, the poisoned people had only to look at the bronze serpent. What a strange story and not the tactic I would use to win back friends. Not that I know the mind of God, but I wonder if He was making the choice they had already made more clear, to choose His way or to choose sin.

Jesus, a serpent? May it never be! (As previously blogged, Peter and I are of like mind. He said similar words  when Jesus predicted the crucifiction.) I used to avoid the serpent story obsessively for fear of the snakes in it, which to my mind have everything to do with evil and nothing to do with Jesus. But one day I forced myself to read it, not unlike those folks in the wilderness turning their eyes toward the bronze likeness on a pole, and I realized that it is fitting for the image to repulse.  In Paul's letter to the Corinthians he writes: "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." So if Jesus, who knew no sin, became sin, as far as symbols go, a serpent fits the bill pretty perfectly.

Bear with me as I ramble.  I have been musing on this for days. What astounds me is that when I have the nerve to fully face my shame, to turn my head and gaze into all my failures, meanness, faithlessness, anger, greed, lack of compassion, (the list goes on), turning fully, not stopping short to focus on my guilty feelings, when I am really brave and am ready to see my sin in all it's ugliness,  what I am met with is the face of Love.

This is what Christians all over the world remember today, some of them bearing a smudge of ashes on their foreheads. As for me, I'm going to find the perfect spot to hang my cross.