So Eve was tempted by a snake, and the snake brought death when it promised it wouldn't. There are probably many ways to phrase the preceding statement, and many more ways to complain that the situation--of Eden, The Fall, and the ensuing curses--is more complex than the statement allows.
Fair enough, but it is also only fair to contend that no element of the story of Adam and Eve ought to be made more complicated than necessary. That includes the sorry old snake. Jesus doesn't seem to have much interest in the snake. The traditional interpreters are the ones with the snake-fascination (or perhaps I should say the snake-as-Devil-fascination) and they have succeeded--in this and many other aspects--in blurring the clear teachings of Jesus.
A snake can usually be trod on--by a properly shod person. The snake-as-Devil, on the other hand, can be thrown into the tangled bin of the interpreter's fancy. Jesus as opponent of the snake-as-Devil can conjure up no end of twisted postulations about warfare and conquerings and such, though Jesus has the persistent habit of stating that the attacks of the devil can be swatted aside by the humblest of believers.
So now I want to turn to the humblest of believers and the most important thing Jesus had to say about a snake. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life" (3:14-15, KJV). (The Israelites were afflicted by an epidemic of snakebite.) These two verses, of course, are the lead-in to the evangelists' favorite verse, the famous John 3:16. It is extremely important (and extremely unfortunate) that the evangelists' deployment of this part of John be accompanied by all sorts of balderdash--aimed at convincing the humblest of believers that convolutions of mystical thought are the language of the Gospels.
In the hogwash of conventional Christianity it is unquestioned that Jesus is engaged in a substitutionary sacrifice that can only be made available to the believer through--surprise, surprise--some mediation of the established denominations. The straightforward Jesus of the straightforward Gospels must be seen in a feverish context of dragons and fiery dungeons. The straightforward words of Jesus must be twisted, and the believer must be led to expect layer after layer of obscure meanings.
And so even the meaning of John 3:16 has been obscured: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." "Gave," of course, is conventionally taken to mean the substitutionary sacrifice--and elements of that meaning are relevant to the Gospels--but it cannot be avoided that the very sacrifice of atonement ends up with God having his Son restored to him. It does not seem that God's giving of Jesus need be especially associated with the sacrifice of the cross.
God gave Jesus to the world. A moment's reflection will show that God gave Adam to the world. The very logic of Adam's existence as an independent being (framed in this blog through the roused-readied-reaped arc) entails God letting Adam go. And God gives Adam to the garden which at first he is to tend, to the woman he is to care for, and to the world that Adam's kind is to responsibly master.
The difference with Jesus is that God gives to the world a son who is perfect, who is in every essence divine. That is indeed a great mystery, but it need be no more mysterious than the fact that Jesus is the person we are to look to if we are to be saved. (And there is to be no tomfoolery about who is born in what century, or on what continent, or in what faith, or whether or not in earshot of a preacher: "...or else believe me for the very works' sake" (14:11)--and Jesus expects that nothing but common humanity is required for people to understand what life requires, and what good works are.)
So now we can understand the meaning of verses 13 and 14: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." Believers are to look to Jesus, as the Israelites looked to the bronze snake. While these phenomena--indeed all phenomena--are functions of God's grace, it is inescapable that Jesus' teachings in John 3 are about what people need to do to be saved. John 3 is a pan-denominational, secularly-oriented, religion-rejecting gospel of works; as far as religion is concerned, all it requires is that we lay ourselves open to the mysteries of life we cannot ever know, as the only wholesome seed-bed of our inclinations to execute the responsibilities that we always know.
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