The way we read it in the bible we think the Israelites are a fickle bunch. Constantly whining about their conditions. Lack of direction, wandering aimlessly around a desert, waiting for 40 years. Imagine trying to lead that. Imagine trying to inspire the people, 600,000 men and their families, imagine trying to inspire them to keep pressing on, staying righteous, staying faithful to God who was punishing them.

With the life expectancy back then, there would have been a number of people who would’ve only known this nomadic existence of moving from camp to camp. Living in tents, moving livestock to new pastures. The logistics of moving a city the size of Auckland every year or two would’ve been horrific. It’s hard enough for the city council to unify Auckland’s vision.

We automatically look at the Israelites and want to remind them of all the documented times that God revealed himself miraculously in ways that we cannot comprehend. Think about the time when they walked between the huge columns of water on either side of them when they crossed red sea on foot? What about the ten plagues they witnessed in Egypt?

There are stories of God encircling the whole camp in a ring of fire that singed the fringe tent dwellers. Moses prayed to God on the people’s request and the fire died down. There are stories of water breaking forth from a rock in the side of the mountain at the simple hit of Moses’ staff.

Battles being won while Moses had his hands stretched to heaven in prayer. Food descending from heaven in the morning 6 days out of seven, huge numbers of quails coming in from the west for food. Pillars of smoke, pillars of fire. Aaron’s staff budding flowers—flowers from a dead stick. These are far out and amazing things aren’t they. But was it enough for the people to remain faithful?

Is it enough? Is it enough for us to sustain ourselves through this life with only the occasional glimpse of the divine to carry us through? And if we find it hard, then why would we expect the Israelites to be different?

So here is an entire nation, wandering around the desert. When we read of them grumbling we are often quick to judge. Each chapter seems to introduce another bout of disgruntledness, another bout of complaint, another set of ‘what the heck are we doing here Moses?’ But with the way we read it, we can miss the time frames. The chapters are just the highlights, each incident would’ve been a couple of years apart. Can you remember the state this church was in three or four years ago?

Gerard often said that he had noticed how we had moved into a more positive frame of mind from when he first started. Three years is a long time ago, it’s difficult to remember how we felt then except in small snippets. It’s hard to remember the miracles of life as they happen when they recede into the mass of past consciousness. We can easily not forget, but we tend to either reduce or amplify the importance and significance of different catalytic moments in our lives as time moves on.

And so too with the Israelites in the desert. I’m nearly 35, what do I remember of Mt Albert’s state of mind when I was five years old? Am I trying to unify around the ethos of our church community back then? I don’t remember much. I do remember some things, but they are insignificant. So as the churn of history moves, and generations come and go, it’s easy to forget. I have no idea about the passions my forefathers and founders of this church had, and truth be known, rightly or wrongly (probably wrongly) I don’t think about it much.

I find it ironic that there is a resurgence in attendance to dawn parades celebrating ANZAC day. I can’t help but feel that the country we live in now is not the vision of the future that the soldiers died for. Yet we pay our respects…the boomer generation reacted against war, now we’ve romanticised it and we have the new generations finding some significance in these pop-ceremonies.

Long periods of time, push the passion into the past. It’s hard to know really how other generations coped and responded. I suspect that many of us don’t remember much about what drove us when we were younger. And if we do, some of us may in fact write it off as youthful zest, over-enthusiasm, naivety or any other dismissives.

How then can we blame the Israelites for wanting something more tangible when they could easily be saying whenever they complained, “it’s been over a year since we last spoke and nothing’s changed Moses, what kind of leadership is this? Your God is mocking us.”

I don’t blame them. I don’t. it’s hard to remain true to God when we have long periods of disconnection from him.

And so there’s this story from Numbers 21 that leaves me puzzled. It’s a difficult text to speak from because in and of its own it is misleading. It really is.

On the surface level we have a story about the people getting upset, God punishing them, Moses interceding for them, and God providing a miraculous means for healing. Add to this the fact that Jesus draws an analogy between himself and this snake in John 3:14 and we can treat it simply, a side comment of our saviour.

On the surface at least we see can resonate with these things. They are part of our church speak, they are part of our world view even. But there is a sense where we can ask some honest questions here.

First of all the people got upset. And I can understand that. It’s easy to complain about the mundane provision of God isn’t it. I’m sure many of us do this all the time. We can shake our fist at God for the strangest things. I’m not sure if it’s a disease of ours here at Mt Albert Baptist, I don’t talk to too many people who are disgruntled with their circumstance and then blame God for it, well not in terms of lifestyle and provision anyway. So the Israelites are upset about God’s mundane provision.

The second thing is that the people were punished which in my mind is very tricky. God’s punishment is not something that we can easily make sense of today. Some people for instance call the tsunami ‘God’s punishment on the Muslim and Hindu nations’ — a position I am personally reluctant to take. Some people think AIDS is God’s punishment on homosexuals, another position I cannot embrace. We’ve demonised extra-marital sex so much in Christian circles now that it’s possible to view pregnancy as God’s punishment. How can a child, new life, be punishment? How can we load that parent child relationship with such negativity? It could be seen as an act of Grace, divine providence that provides a better way for love to be manifest.

The truth is that we can look at any negative thing and call it God’s punishment for such and such. It’s easy to interpret history in hindsight like this, and to find arbitrary connections between events to find the cause and effect. And it’s dangerous. Because if we want to we can find cause and effect in all sorts of places that it just isn’t there. After all, isn’t this the process that Job’s mates tried to do? Find the root of his suffering through cause and effect : and quite simply they were wrong.

It’s hard to see God’s punishment. Consequences and punishment are not to be confused and we talked in home group about this. Some people don’t experience God through church, songs, prayer, and any number of expressions of worship. So they sin in the hope that at least God will reveal himself by his wrath just like in this story.

We try to manipulate God with our sin. At home group few of us could acknowledge God’s punishment being meted out on our lives. We wanted to, but we couldn’t. All we could be sure of was the ultimate punishment on judgement day—which is so far removed from most of our daily existences (rightly or wrongly) that it doesn’t impact our daily choices now : especially since most of us believe that it’s an in or out system. There’s no punishment in heaven, so if I just believe enough for me to get there, then what else do I need to do?

If you are curious about how I negotiate my way through this, I’ll say this about the tsunami. Every tragedy does not need a theological explanation for it. This was a natural disaster, but I don’t believe that either God or Satan caused it. I think it just happened because that’s how the world is, and tragedy is part of our life cycles and so asking why did God allow it to happen is asking the wrong question. But I digress a little.

Punishment from God is not something that is easily identified on a day to day basis. Punishment in the form of death, is particularly difficult for us to accept today : God meting out capital punishment? Not even an eye for an eye here, simply : you grumbled and now you die.

I’m going to struggle with the standard answer here, that God did this because the Israelites were his chosen people and they had to be purified and tested. That God did this to prove his power…these are real people that have been killed by snake bites. This is not trivial, this is a tragedy. Just because the bible doesn’t go into great detail about it I think we can gloss over its seriousness. People died, because they grumbled. I’m not saying it’s not fair and just, I am saying I just don’t understand it.

In this particular story we can have faith that all these snakes coming and biting the Israelites was a divine act of punishment. And regardless of whether or not I can stomach it, that’s how the Israelites interpreted it and came and grizzled to Moses again : this time from a position of humility rather than Pride.

“We’ve sinned, we’ve gone against divine instruction for living right by speaking words from our own minds and wisdom. We know we have gone too far…Pray Moses. Pray that God will take the serpents away.”

Their prayer wasn’t actually answered was it. We have no record of the serpents being taken away. The suffering is still there. The suffering is still present even after their repentance, their admission of their wrongdoing. The next verse does not say anything about taking the snakes away, but it does provide a way for people to live.

So we find Moses is now being told by God to make a graven image for people to find hope in. a lucky charm if you will. A snake made out of bronze and put on a pole. And people who had been bitten would simply look at this pole and be saved from death. The people were still in their suffering, God did not take away the pain but provided healing through their faith in this piece of bronze.

It’s interesting isn’t it. It’s not that God wanted them to have this as a lucky charm, but rather that the people would be directed toward his power. Every time they were bitten by a snake they had to turn to God to live. It’s better than just removing the snakes because if God had done that, the people would’ve forgotten soon enough. When the problem’s gone, the reliance on God is less for those who are weak in faith (which I dare say, when we are honest, is most of us).

It brings me to the question that helps me understand why God doesn’t answer my prayers to take away my afflictions, “why would God take away the very thing that draws me back to him? I communicate with God more in my pain and suffering, than any other time, so why would God take that away?” So the snakes stay, their terminal bites stay terminal, but death no longer wins if people turn to God.

And by now many of you will be seeing why this is not an obscure passage for Jesus to draw from. The parallels are amazing. We are being bitten constantly by the serpents of our lives, our demons (both in the spiritual and the non-spiritual senses).

We are still stuck in this perpetual state of engaging with evil, we are still stuck in this awful cycle of suffering and affliction : God doesn’t seem to take that away very often. But God provides a way for us to engage with him. Suffering can direct us to the cross to the great act of Jesus being crucified and rising from the grave. And this is a tremendous thing. It’s a great parallel, but when we read John’s gospel we need to look more deeply at the words, because he is so intense. We can’t stop at these obvious parallels.

Everybody in this world, without fail I would say, sees an extraordinary disconnect between the wonder of Nature and the horror of the human condition. How can there be war at sunset? How can a tender and kind woman be beaten by her partner?

How can we see the majesty of our mountain ranges, the intricacy of the delicate flowers, the complexity of the design of nature, the variety, the creativity, the splendour of so much of what we see when we get outside the city or even look at the beauty within the city by simply stopping for enough time to see the grass growing through the cracks in the pavement. How can we see this when the journalists make it easy for us to connect with the horror of our existence.

Then we simply stop and look at ourselves and recoil with dismay at how we have treated other people or how other people treat us. The disempowerment that comes from other people’s ambition, ego and insecurity that is our constant companion no matter where we walk in life, that we emulate ourselves as we try to hide from the honest truth of who we are, this stuff, this evil that we are injured by and by which we injure, this is the stuff that we know to be the serpents.

It’s not rocket science to see that there is both beauty and tragedy wherever we look. And so when we believe in Jesus, believing in a way that moves us to loving God and loving people, that moves us to draw near to God and also reach out to others—when we have a belief that moves us like this, then we will, in the spiritual sense, live eternally. We get to go to heaven. We are saved from this life of sin.

Because when we look at the cross, in the same way that the Israelites looked at an image of their afflictions in the form of a snake, we see what we did to Jesus, we see the brutality of our ambitions, the scope of our insecurity, the strength of our desire to subdue good. In the broken and bloodied body of Jesus we are reminded of what we are capable of doing, that which is so close to the surface of our masks.

So Jesus, our ultimate saviour from our trajectory toward eternal separation from God’s love, he is raised up on the cross that we might have a signpost, a focal point, an altar if you will, a reminder of God’s interaction with our world not only as healer, but also as punisher. In Jesus we see God working out the ultimate tension between his wrath and his love. His justice and his mercy : and God desires to be merciful.

Did God stop at the punishment of his people, not at all, though according to scripture they deserved it, God didn’t let the story end there. As they repented, God brought healing and hope.

But we can’t stop at being saved into eternal life. It gives us hope, but hope in the eternal not necessarily hope in the now.

If the golden ethic for life is “Love God, Love People”, then hope in the eternal, is the loving God part. And if that’s all we have then we miss out on one of the most profound gifts that God has given us.

We are the body of Christ. And we need to be aware of the profound significance of this as we move into communion. We are the body of Christ, we are the hands and feet and heart of Jesus, we are the ones who are empowered by the Spirit to remind this world of the love of God, to draw people closer to his heartbeat. In the same way that the snake was raised up on a pole as a beacon to God’s goodness and healing, how much so are we in our communities.

Yes, this body of Christ is more than just a metaphor. This is the new reality, this is the gift from God, this is why church is important, this is why we have to break down this temple, this physical structure and allow this body of people to become the new temple of the holy spirit. We’re part of a massive explosion of people, globally sharing in the privilege of being Christ's hands, feet and heart in this world, being the ones who bring the tangible love, the imminent hope, the gentle healing to this world that is self-confessed messed up.

How can we ignore this? How can we just let this truth slip us by? I suspect it’s because whenever we talk about the body of Christ we are asking “how do I fit into it?” “Why are my giftings?” which are important questions to be sure, to find out how we can serve others is vital. But do we let others serve us?

For example, I’ve often prayed, “lord give me strength and wisdom,” and I’ve sat back with one eye open on heaven, waiting for that supernatural touch that changes or stirs something within me. “Lord heal me of my afflictions,” waiting patiently, or impatiently. And I haven’t seen that prayer answered in the way I think it ought to be. I look to God to touch me, but he doesn’t.

I look to God for a feeling, something out of the ordinary, some kind of sign. I turn to Jesus and wonder why he doesn’t reach his hands out to me. And I wonder why God doesn’t answer, and I lose faith and hope in my prayers making any difference whatsoever. Until I discovered this.

You are the answer to my prayers. You are Christ’s body. You are christ’s hands and feet for me. When I pray for wisdom and strength, I get so much from those of you who I talk to. And it’s not the supernatural touch, but it is beautiful. The power of Jesus operates not just in the supernatural, I’d even be so bold as to say not often in the supernatural.

The power of Jesus operates in the tangible living body he calls his church. I find strength in you, I find wisdom in you, I find conscience in you, I find love in you, I find mercy in you, restoration in you, compassion in you, healing in you, hope in you : why? Certainly not because you are humans. No, but because you are focussed on Jesus, a Christ centred body of people mediating the love of God to this world.

And I’ve missed out on so much answered prayer because it’s been right there in front of me all this time and I’ve never even noticed.

1 Corinthians 10:16-17: the cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.