Every member of the mammal class fears the snake. Covering something in scales is the surest method of clothing a monster. Give the thing the mandate to slither, and its very mode of locomotion makes us shiver. Perhaps it is this absolute otherness of the snake which makes it our enemy by default. 

Or, perhaps, only in a fallen world does otherness equal antagonism. 

That we know of, everyone who’s ever followed Jesus is a mammal. Hair-covered, live-birthing, milk-producing, soft-shaped mammals. It’s unlikely, then, that as one of his followers, I would be alone in recoiling every time Jesus tells me to be like a snake (Matthew 10:16). I do so even more when he proclaims himself—as Savior—to be as a serpent (John 3:14).

The scaly comparison even goes against my seemingly Bible-conditioned instincts. The good guys are wool-covered sheep (I would even accept the feathered for the sake of purity-white doves), but snakes? That harkens the imagination to a certain forbidden tree and its diabolical occupant. 

Jesus knew that.  He knew Nehushtan’s muddled history—how that bronze serpentine replica Moses made for the healing of snake-bitten Israelites became the object of idol worship years later. He knew that the very cunning of the snake which he urged his followers to emulate was the characteristic trait of that old serpent in Genesis 3. Despite all this, he wasn’t afraid to use snakes to make his point. Indeed, because of this, he powerfully reclaimed this God-created, God-designed animal—an animal thought of as a monster—to make his point.

The possibility remains that the scary wouldn’t be evil up close.

One Halloween, my older brother trick-or-treated wearing an unsettling off-brand mask of Frankenstein’s monster. Post-Halloween however, the rubber face became known as that of “Frankenbuddy.” Both the name and the make-believe world it accompanied should’ve belonged to a Disney Channel original film: Frankenbuddy was a friendly if off-putting monster who entered the human world through my closet. He invited me to come to his world, a place of stormy nights and damp castles and ghoulish companions like himself. If I could overcome my initial reservations toward Frankenbuddy, I could see his world as an exciting place where those whom I thought of as monsters could become friends. 

Halloween can be alluring for various reasons; at least one healthy reason is some version of this idea—that the monster could be your friend. That, approaching the scary, the possibility remains that it wouldn’t be evil up close. Rightly understood, this desire is a fundamentally Christian one, an impulse of the redeemed imagination that Halloween can help cultivate. 

Monsters can be made of whatever is rare or poorly understood by the majority of one’s own culture. The word “sinister” literally derives from “left-handed;” if we need a better example of how the merely different and unfamiliar can be condemned as the evil, we need not look further than this word!

“What God has made clean, do not call common.”

To some of the Jewish Christians in Acts 11, the Gentile convert Cornelius seemed sinister. Indeed, following a millennia-old tradition where the outsiders were largely understood as evil simply by nature of being outsiders, many Jewish Christians struggled with their evolving understanding of the faith’s inclusion and integration of all nations. And to be clear: for the Jews, the Gentiles’ national difference was not equated with wrongness arbitrarily. To be a Gentile meant you were really under the dominion of lesser and false gods, and everyone who wasn’t a Jew (either by birth or conversion) was a Gentile. Jews were the woolly sheep of God’s pasture; every other creature that moved about outside the flock was covered in the scales of Gentilehood. 

So it was that the Apostle Peter was called to share God’s good news with a Gentile by a heavenly vision complete with reptiles. “Unclean,” Peter countered to God. “What God has made clean, do not call common,” came God’s justifying reply.  And upon seeing God’s seal of righteousness on Cornelius’ Gentile household by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, Peter concludes in his report to his Jewish Christian comrades, “If then God gave the same gift to them as he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could stand in God’s way?”

We see elsewhere in the New Testament that becoming a Christian does not entail the jettisoning of one’s culture of origin in exchange for Jewish culture (Galatians 5:2-6; Romans 14:5-6). At the same time, we witness converts radically dispossessing the corrupted elements of their particular culture’s sins (Acts 19:19).  But foreign cultures themselves, even religiously derived elements of those cultures, are not seen as a threat to the Kingdom of Christ (Acts 17:22-31). Rightly understood, they are to submit to and find their fulfillment under Christ’s kingship. 

Because the demonic authority of every one of the false gods of the nations has been disarmed by Jesus (Colossians 2:15), every culture now brings its treasures to him as their king (Isaiah 45:14; 60:11; Revelation 21:26). At his arrival, even the astrology of the wizards of Persia bowed the knee to Immanuel. 

That the monster can be your friend is no more radical to trick-or-treaters today than a Samaritan being your neighbor was to Jews of Jesus’ time. 

All across Scripture, God sees distinctions, barriers, and obstacles, and He glories in reconciling the unreconcilable. 

Jesus’ earthly mission embodied this. He made saints out of the scandalizing company of prostitutes and tax collectors. He made whole, laughing families out of parents weeping over dead children. He made one living people of the splintered bloodlines of the diseased human tree (Ephesians 2:14-18). It was in a world of “selves” and “others,” of “insiders” and “outsiders” that Jesus founded his Church. That the monster can be your friend is no more radical to trick-or-treaters today than a Samaritan being your neighbor was to Jews of Jesus’ time. 

God redeems the broken relationships of in/out, of self/other, alive/dead. Bringing opposites together into relationship is characteristic of Him on a fundamental level from the very beginning. Reconciliation of opposites is also accomplished in His most defining act: Jesus’ death on the cross. At no less a cost than God becoming man, than man becoming snake, than righteousness becoming sin, was our race reconciled to our Creator. 

This redemption is the cosmos’ greatest reversal; to see its realization in my life can mean no less than welcoming the outsider in. When I see God’s Spirit indwelling the reptiles, the monsters, the “sinister,” I am to respond like the Jewish council to Peter’s report on Cornelius in Acts 11, who “had no further objections and praised God.” When the witch of En-dor slaughters a fattened calf for the sparing of her life in the name of Yahweh, who will I be to stand in her way? When a Samaritan sorcerer repents of worshipping the false powers of the world, begging the saints’ intercession, who am I not to pray for his conversion? 

“Sheep” and “reptile” alike, it is upon Christ lifted up like the snake in the wilderness that we all look for our redemption. In the family of God, the only scales which need to fall are those from my eyes.