Hoop Snakes and Jesus

I first heard about hoop snakes when I was about 8 years old. Chances are if you are 60 or younger, you have never heard of a hoop snake. Let me describe one.

Hoop snakes grow to unbelievable lengths. Some have been known to attain lengths of over 20 feet. Their venom is especially lethal. Cattle weighing a thousand pounds or more have been known to die within three minutes after being bitten by a hoop snake.

Hoop snakes get their name from an uncanny talent known only to their particular species; the ability to form their body into a hoop by grasping their tail with their jaws. In this unusual configuration they can attain great speeds as they literally roll after their prey. I was told they could easily outrun a horse and in fact horses had been known to be killed by hoop snakes.

When I was a kid, walking alone on the dusty back roads of southern Missouri, I was always careful to walk in the middle of the road. Weeds and brush on either side could easily conceal a hoop snake silently waiting for its prey. Since there was no way one could determine from which side of the road an attack might take place, it was safer to walk in the middle where one would have at least a few feet advantage should a hoop snake give chase.

I had never actually seen a hoop snake, nor had any of my young friends, who warned me about them. But the people who told them knew someone who knew someone who had actually seen one.

Then one summer, an older friend told me he didn’t believe hoop snakes existed. I remember not being convinced. How could they not exist when someone, somewhere had actually seen one? It took some time but I finally was able to shed my delusional fear of hoop snakes.

I wonder if Jesus is just another hoop snake. We know he is dangerous because if we don’t believe in him he will see to it that we spend eternity in unbelievable agony. He makes a hoop snake look like a cuddly teddy bear by comparison. He leaves no doubt in the Christian bible what he has in mind. “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

There are of course other parallels. For example no living person I know of claims to have actually seen Jesus. We know there are people who knew people who knew people who knew people….we would have to string this thing out for two millennia to finally get to the first person who claimed he actually saw and talked to Jesus. The only person I can think of who claimed to have seen Jesus in our life time is Oral Roberts (died Dec. 2009) Some 32 years ago Roberts had a vision of Jesus. He was 900 feet tall. Many (some six billion of us) doubt the veracity of Reverend Roberts’s story. To us, seeing a guy 900 feet tall who is threatening to throw 5 billion people into hell would more likely be just a bad dream.