That Serpent: Homily for Thursday, September 14, 2023

Homily given at Christian Brothers College High School, Town and Country, Missouri. Readings for Today. Listen to our other homilies. That Serpent Transcript We have to read the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, from the eyes of the New Testament. Because as Catholics, what we believe is firstly that salvation was offered to the Jews, and then we were grafted onto the vine of salvation.  It's not that everything that God said in the Old Testament is now something we don't have to worry about. We do. But we believe that we have found the fulfillment of the first promises of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.  And so when we hear in this reading, this first reading about Moses lifting up a serpent, the serpent should catch our attention. The serpent was the source of our sin. The source of the salvation for the people was a serpent mounted on a pole.  The source of our salvation is the Lord Jesus mounted on a cross. Jesus dying a death of really very great evil. dying a death that represented all of our sinfulness, taken upon himself. But as the gospel reminds us, all done because he loves us. He doesn't go around seeking to condemn us, he goes around seeking to love us, to offer us again and again the gift of salvation. This is the reason why we celebrate the feast of the exaltation of the cross, because in seeing what it is that Jesus has done for us on the cross, it becomes not a sign of shame, but a sign of our salvation.