It’s not that time of year, but one of the most mysterious involves Jesus Christ comparing His own Crucifixion to a serpent. A serpent!

The very creature that, from the opening pages of Genesis, has been associated with temptation, deception, the fall of mankind, and ultimately Satan himself. The creature perhaps most feared by the public for its slither and venom. Why would the Son of God, Who came to conquer the devil, deliberately invoke the image of a snake to explain His mission?

The passage comes in the third chapter of the Gospel of Saint John during Jesus’ nighttime conversation with Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Jewish religious leadership. It’s there Christ makes an extraordinary declaration: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14–15).

Why would the Savior of humanity compare His coming sacrifice to an animal that, in the biblical imagination, so often represents evil?

And why, of all the extraordinary events in the Old Testament, would He choose a mysterious episode in which Moses fashioned a serpent of bronze, placed it upon a pole, and instructed dying Israelites to look upon it for healing?

The answers take us deep into the mystery of Redemption, the origins of sin, and one of the most remarkable foreshadowings of Calvary found anywhere in Scripture.

They also reveal something profound about the way God conquers evil: Christ did not simply confront it. He transformed the very instrument of death into an instrument of salvation.

The significance of what He said becomes even greater when we notice what immediately follows. John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in the entire Bible, begins with the declaration that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

In other words, the comparison to the serpent immediately precedes Christianity’s most celebrated proclamation of God’s love.

This is not an incidental reference but His explanation of why He came into the world—and how mankind would be saved.

Then comes a terrifying judgment.

Venomous serpents appear among the people. Their bites prove deadly, and many Israelites perish.

Recognizing their sin, the survivors appeal to Moses, begging him to intercede with God.

Moses prays.

But what follows is strange.

God does not simply remove the snakes. Instead, He gives Moses an extraordinary instruction: fashion an image of a serpent and raise it upon a pole. Whoever has been bitten must look upon the image.

Moses obeys, forming a serpent of bronze, and those who gazed upon it were healed.

Consider that symbolism: people have been wounded by serpents but there was healing. It’s why the image of a serpent came to be the symbol for the American Medical Association.

The representation of what has brought death became a sign through which life is restored.

It was a reversal that anticipates the greatest reversal in history: the Cross, once an instrument of torture and execution, becomes the sign of eternal life.

He was comparing two saving events: the lifting of the bronze serpent in the wilderness and the lifting of the Son of Man upon Calvary.

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