“The Son of Man must be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

When the people sinned in the desert (Nm 21:5f.), Moses, who was a prophet, commanded the Israelites to mount a serpent on a cross, in other words to put sin to death (…) They had to look at a serpent because it was with serpents that the children of Israel had been struck as their punishment. And why with serpents? Because they had repeated our first parents’ action. Adam and Eve had both sinned by eating the fruit of the tree; the Israelites had also complained regarding a question of food. To move words of complaint because they lacked vegetables is the limit of complaining! This is what the psalm testifies: “they rebelled against God in the wasteland” (Ps 78[77]:17). So, in Paradise too, the serpent was the source of complaining (…) In this way the children of Israel were to learn that the very same serpent that had plotted Adam’s death had brought death to them, too. And so Moses hung it on the pole so that, when they saw it, its likeness would lead them to remember the tree. For those who turned their eyes towards it were saved, not indeed by the serpent but in consequence of their conversion. They looked at the serpent and were reminded of their sin. Because they were bitten, they repented and, once again, were saved. Their conversion transformed the desert into a dwelling-place of God; through repentance the sinful people became an ecclesial assembly and, still better, worshipped the cross in spite of it.