A few years ago there was a movie entitled “Snakes on a Plane.” That plane must have been flying over Moses and the children of Israel in Anthony van Dyck’s painting “The Brazen Serpent,” based on Numbers 21, because if you look up into the skies, you can see that the snakes are falling from the skies, perhaps as a way of understanding the line “then the Lord sent firey serpents among the people”. You can view the art here at the Museo del Prado https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-brazen-serpent/4bc2120c-fa25-4b35-af7c-dda70e463a0d
Of course, snakes don’t have to fall out of the sky to be “sent by God”. God made the world and all that is in the world, including snakes. All He has to do is command them to come out. Even if we take the “sky snakes” to be what happened, that’s not the most important thing in the story – which is thankfully evident in van Dyck’s painting. The most important thing in the painting is the snake on a pole, the thing that everyone is looking at, even being made to look at.
In the painting we see Moses holding the stick with the snake. We know that he’s Moses because if you look closely, his hair is up in to little “horns” on top of his head, sort of like the boss from Dilbert if you remember that comic. This tell-tale sign of Moses comes from a bit of a mistranslation of the text of Exodus 34 where Moses comes down from the mountain with “rays of light coming from his head LIKE horns”. It’s a handy thing to remember when you’re viewing art and you see Moses looking rather billy-goatesque. Next to him is probably Aaron.
On the other side of the snake is, well, us. There’s all sorts of “us” in there. Some of us are reaching out to our rescue (i.e. guy in blue), others of us are being carried to our rescue, unable even to lift our head on our own to look at the snake (i.e. guy in white), still others of us are simply huddled down at the foot of the pole, naked and pleading, and finally, some of us are leading other people to the snake to receive healing.
Each of us probably play each of those roles at different points in our lives. Yet, the good news is the same, the good news is that God has provided a sign for us, something that we can look to, something that we can be made to look to, and something that we can bring our friends to look to – because in that sign, there is healing, even from flying snakes.