Feast of the Holy Cross

Feast of the Holy Cross: The Bronze Snake

Numbers 21:4b-9

Prayer:

Heavenly Father, give us faith to receive your word, understanding to know what it

means, and the will to put it into practice. And let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer. Amen

Feast of the Holy Cross Historical Background

The Feast of the Holy Cross, also known as the Exaltation of the Holy Cross or Triumph of the Cross, has a rich and layered history that spans centuries and empires.

Origins in the Early Church

• The feast commemorates the discovery of the True Cross—the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified—by St. Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, during her pilgrimage to Jerusalem around 326 A.D.
• According to tradition, St. Helena found the cross buried near the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, and its authenticity was confirmed by a miraculous healing

Dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

• In 335 A.D., Constantine dedicated the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on September 13, and the True Cross was publicly displayed the following day—marking the first celebration of the feast.
• This event became the foundation for the annual observance on September 14, which is still honored in many Christian traditions.

Recovery of the Cross

• In 628 A.D., Byzantine Emperor Heraclius recovered the True Cross after it had been taken by the Persians during their conquest of Jerusalem in 614. He returned it to the city with great ceremony, further solidifying the cross as a symbol of Christian triumph.

Liturgical Significance

• Unlike Good Friday, which focuses on Christ’s suffering, the Feast of the Holy Cross celebrates the cross itself as the instrument of Christ’s death, resulting in our salvation.
• It is observed by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, and other Christian communities, often with red vestments to symbolize martyrdom and victory.

This feast is not just about a relic—it’s about the transformative power of the cross, turning a symbol of death into one of eternal life. (Through Jesus we can have eternal life.)

Introduction:

Who: Moses

To Whom: Israel

When: During the Exodus - Along the route from Mount Hor to the Red Sea, as they attempt to go around the land of Edom (Numbers 21:4)

Where: In the Sainai

Why: To Show Faith in God

What: Christ was lifted up like the Bronze Serpent to bear our sins.

How does Numbers 21:4b-9 relate to John 3:13-17?

The Bronze Serpent and the Crucified Savior: A Powerful Parallel

Numbers 21:4b–9 and John 3:13–17 are deeply connected through a striking metaphor that Jesus Himself uses to explain His mission. Here's how they relate:

Numbers 21:4b–9: The Bronze Serpent

• The Israelites complain against God during their desert journey.
• God sends fiery serpents as judgment; many are bitten and die.
• The people repent, and God instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent and lift it on a pole.
• Anyone who looks at the serpent in faith is healed and lives.

Theological Connection

• This moment in Numbers becomes a prophetic symbol—a foreshadowing of the cross. Jesus uses it to show that faith in Him, like the Israelites’ faith in God’s provision, is the path to life.

Summary Paragraph

In Numbers 21:4b–9, the Israelites, weary and rebellious during their desert journey, face divine judgment through venomous serpents. In response to their repentance, God instructs Moses to craft a bronze serpent and lift it on a pole—anyone who looks at it in faith is healed. This event becomes a powerful symbol in John 3:13-17, where Jesus compares His crucifixion to the lifting of the serpent, declaring that just as the Israelites were physically saved by looking at the bronze serpent, so too will all who believe in Him be granted eternal life. The parallel underscores themes of redemption, faith, and divine mercy.

Word Study:

Numbers 21:4b-9 Outline:

         *      The Brass Serpent (Num. 21:5–9): Poisonous snakes are sent to punish rebellious Israel. In response to the people’s prayer for forgiveness, God instructs Moses: “Make a replica of a poisonous snake and attach it to the top of a pole. Those who are bitten will live if they simply look at it!” (the faith is implied)

Application:

Spiritual Application: Looking Up in Faith

Just as the Israelites were healed by looking at the bronze serpent, we are invited to look to Christ in faith for healing from sin and restoration of life. The serpent lifted on a pole was not magical—it was a symbol of trust in God's provision. Likewise, Jesus being “lifted up” on the cross becomes the ultimate act of divine mercy, offering eternal life to those who believe.

This teaches us:

• Faith is active—it requires us to turn our gaze from our pain and rebellion toward God’s solution.
• God’s love is proactive—He doesn’t wait for perfection but provides a way out even in the midst of judgment.
• Transformation begins with trust—not with effort or merit, but with belief in the One who was lifted up for us.

Personal Reflection

When life feels like a wilderness—confusing, painful, or full of regret, this passage reminds us that healing doesn’t come from fixing ourselves, but from looking up. It’s a call to shift our focus from the bite to the cure

Illustration:

Imagine a field hospital set up in the middle of a war zone. Soldiers are being rushed in, wounded, and dying from snake bites. The medics have no antidote, no medicine—just one strange instruction from the commander: “Tell them to look at the bronze serpent hanging on the pole.”

Some scoff: “That’s ridiculous! I need real help!” Others, desperate and dying, turn their eyes toward the serpent—and live.

Now fast-forward to today. Humanity is wounded—not by snakes, but by sin. The cross stands like that bronze serpent, lifted high. And God says, “Look to Jesus. Believe. And you will live.”

Just like in the desert, healing doesn’t come from effort, ritual, or logic—it comes from faithful obedience to God’s provision. The cross is our desert hospital. It’s not flashy, not always logical—but it’s the symbol of Christ’s death, the only cure.

Sermon:

Except for just a few women—one of whom was his mother—and the one disciple, probably John—the followers of Jesus scattered and were nowhere to be seen. So, how close do any of us want to be? We’re lucky. We know what’s coming—the disciples didn’t; we have a few weeks to decide—the disciples had only a few hours.

You know, we Christians—we’re a funny lot. We’re all about being saved and singing those hymns that talk about being saved. We love those beautiful worship services that just thrill our hearts with beautiful music and inspiring images.

Those trumpet fanfares on Christmas Eve and Easter morning; the singing of the Hallelujah Chorus; the glowing candles—they’re just so inspiring. Is it any wonder that the attendance in church increases on those two days?

But then we come to Lent and Lent leads to the Passion and to Holy Week and to Holy Thursday and to . . . Good Friday. When was the last time you saw a packed church on Good Friday? Worship attendance just plummets. Why? I believe it’s because we’re afraid of the cross; we don’t want to be too close, because the cross is dark, and like most children, we’re afraid of darkness. But that’s okay, it’s okay to be afraid of the cross; to be afraid of darkness as long as we don’t ignore the cross and the darkness.

Think about today’s Old Testament and Gospel Lessons. It isn’t often that we get a direct reference to the OT lesson in the Gospel. But today we do. And it’s an incredible reference.

You absolutely cannot miss the connection—the metaphor in the Old Testament lesson. My Old Testament professor always cautioned us to be careful when we read the Old Testament. “Be careful,” he said, “that you don’t read the Old Testament with a New Testament point of view,” meaning that the Old Testament has to be read in light of the culture, history, and literary construct of the time in which it was written. You must be careful not to read it simply as the prologue of a more important work, but rather as a body of work that has its own importance, its own message. It’s a book of history and of prophecy and of wisdom that tells of God’s Promise to God’s people. Of course, as Christians, it’s almost impossible not to read the New Testament Gospel as a fulfillment of the Old Testament Promise.” And boy is that ever true of the Old Testament and Gospel Lessons today.

Think about the story in Numbers. The People are out there in the wilderness, basically, they are like children wandering in darkness—and they’re afraid. The story says they’re “impatient,” but the reality is that they are afraid—afraid of the unknown. So, they begin to speak out against—to criticize—God and Moses. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread, and there is no water; and our soul loathes this light bread” (Numbers 21:5). Talk about whining!

God has delivered them out of slavery. God has saved them from sure death at the hands of the Egyptian army. God has provided food and water—maybe not a feast of great food and wine, but certainly better than the bitter water of slavery. They’re acting like children . . . do you remember having your kids in the back seat of the car on a long trip? “I’m hungry . . . I’m thirsty . . . are we there yet?” One starts poking the other, and pretty soon, you’ve got a civil war going on while you’re trying to take the family for a nice vacation. Finally, God says, “Don’t make me pull this car over!” No, wait, that’s what I always said.

No, what God does is a bit more extreme. God sends these poisonous serpents to bite the people. And just like the kids in the back seat of the car, the People realize they’ve pushed Dad—God too far. So, they begin to apologize and ask for forgiveness.

And like any good Dad, God forgives. But look at how God does it. God has Moses raise up this bronze serpent on a pole so that whenever a person is bitten, all they have to do is look at the serpent and they’ll live.

Now, consider the way today’s Gospel lesson begins, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” This is not one of those subtle metaphors that needs to be puzzled over. This metaphor just jumps out and grabs you. And yet there is some puzzling that needs to be done here. Why is John comparing Jesus to a serpent? Doesn’t that seem a bit strange?

What we must do is look just a bit further into this lesson from John, and we begin to get some hint as to what’s going on in this metaphor. Think about what I said earlier concerning wilderness and darkness. Here’s where John starts to make the connection. In the Old Testament, we have the People wandering in the wilderness and the people demand, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?”

But at this point in the story, the wilderness itself is a metaphor. At this point in their wanderings, the “wilderness” is not just a physical location; it is also a spiritual location. God has only just begun revealing God’s self to them—The People are in the wilderness—in darkness—concerning their knowledge of God. So, when God instructs Moses to raise up the serpent on the pole, so that the People might be healed, God is revealing another aspect of God’s self—God’s mercy. God is casting light into the darkness—the spiritual wilderness—of the People.

And so, it is with the Lesson from John’s Gospel. In verse 3:19 and verse 3:21, John reveals, “that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil…. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be revealed, that they have been done in God.”

The light that has come into the world is Jesus. He is the light that guides us out of our wilderness of darkness; the light that is our salvation. But how is that salvation achieved?

Early believers didn’t want to be close; it was horrifying. The teacher they loved was hanging up there, bloody, dying in agony—an agony beyond anything we can imagine. Death on a cross was possibly the most degrading, horrifying, ugly, most excruciatingly painful form of execution ever devised by humans. It defied all logic to believe that the Son of God could die on a cross. In fact, St. Paul is incredibly clear concerning the meaning of death on a cross. In Galatians 3:13, he writes, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” Now, if we take that small section of a verse out of context, we might completely miss the real point of the Gospel, as many have done in the past. You see, those words are only part of verse 13. The whole verse reads, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us. For it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’,” And that’s the point! That’s actually the connection to the Old Testament.

We ask, “Why is John comparing Jesus to the serpent in the Old Testament lesson?”

Because just as those serpents were sent as a curse to the People there in the wilderness—in darkness—so too did Jesus become a curse. . . a curse for our benefit.

Just as that curse in the Old Testament—the serpent—was lifted up on that pole, so too was Jesus—our curse—lifted up on the cross.

Just as the People in the Old Testament lesson had to but look upon their curse lifted up on the pole to be healed, so too do we have to but look upon our curse—to believe—for us to be healed and to receive salvation.

How close do we want to be to the cross?

You see, we can’t get from Christmas to Easter without going through Holy Week. And that means we have to go through the cross. We have to fully understand what John is saying to us in Chapter 3, verse 16:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

For God so loved YOU that he gave his only son so that you who believe may not die but have eternal life.

That’s why we get close to the cross. We must understand that what’s up there on the cross is our curse, our sin, our evil. Jesus takes on our curse, our sin, our evil, and dies up there for us. And when we are baptized, when we are marked with the sign of the cross, we, too, die to that sin. We get close to that cross the moment we are baptized—we are marked with it for all eternity, for in being marked with it, we have all eternity. . . We have eternal life. But we cannot get there without the cross. All that wonder and beauty and joy of Christmas and Easter? It’s all meaningless unless we go through the cross. Just as the People in their wilderness of darkness looked on that serpent and were healed, we need to look on that cross and know that because of what Jesus did on it, we are saved.

Conclusion:

As we leave this moment in the wilderness and stand at the foot of the cross, the message is the same: look and live. The Israelites didn’t earn healing—they received it by trusting God’s provision.

Today, we don’t earn salvation; we receive it by believing in the One who was lifted up for us.

The bronze serpent pointed forward to Jesus, and Jesus points us upward to grace. In a world full of venom—bitterness, sin, despair—God has raised a remedy.

Not a symbol, but a Savior. Not temporary relief, but eternal life.

So, if you feel wounded, weary, or wandering, don’t look inward. Don’t look around. Look up. Look to the cross and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And you will live.

Prayer:

For the healing of the nations, O God, you raised up your Son on the wood of the cross and exalted him as the Lord of all creation. Grant that all who believe in him may have the gift of eternal life and share in the glory of your kingdom, where you live forever and ever. Amen.

Intercession:

In the cross, our need meets God’s redemption in confidence and hope,
we bring the prayers of our hearts for the transformation of the church and the world.

Prayers of the People, concluding with:

Accept our prayers, God of mercy, in union with Jesus the Christ, who offered his life for our salvation upon the wood of the cross and who now reigns with you in eternal glory
forever and ever. Amen.