Angel key

When I retired, I had my personal belongings brought home from the office, which included a steel filing cabinet.  During the years of my judgeship I made sure to keep the cabinet unlocked because I had lost the key and did not bother to have it replaced.

The men I tasked with transporting my things deemed it convenient to push the plug in to lock the cabinet so as to keep the drawers from sliding out during the trip.  Had they told me about this I would have proposed that instead they should bind the drawers to the frame with a rope.

Unable to use the cabinet, I scouted out for someone who could unlock it.  I remembered a man whom a member of my staff called on to open a safe in the courtroom, but he had flown away without leaving any forwarding address.  I thought of roaming the streets of the downtown area hoping to meet a picklock, but decided against it for fear that I might encounter someone I had convicted with breaking into a house.

In vain I tried to unfasten the lock myself using paper clips.  A friend advised that I could do it with a hairpin, which I took as a joke, because a hairpin pertains to a different set of locks.

Quite by accident, a girl who worked in a key-duplication shop in a mall referred me to a locksmith, whom I immediately contacted, and who with dispatch sent a man to our house to look into my problem. Without a word, the man slipped into the keyhole a pin bent at the end, and then a straight pin, and with just a few twists released the lock.

From his bag he fished out a blind key and, after trying it into the keyhole and adjusting its groove with a file, gave it to me, smiling.  I tried locking and unlocking the cabinet with it, and smiled.

Carefully, I strung a red cord through the eye of the key and hung it on a nail. I left it swinging, but before I turned away I looked at it again because it struck me as having the rough shape of a cross.  Well, the fact that Lent had just passed the halfway mark might have something to do with how things appeared to me.

And then I mused — could not one, with a fashionable bent, shape keys into something different from the usual, such as a snake, a favorite design among tattoo artists, which lent itself to many an egregious layout on the human body.

Quite by accident I associated the cross and the serpent, and marvelled at the synchronicity.  I had just read about them in the Gospel of John, where Jesus said, “The Son of Man must be lifted as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

We read in Numbers that, because the people had spoken against Him, the Lord sent serpents which bit them, and then, when finally they acknowledged their sin, the Lord instructed Moses to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole so that those bitten who looked on the figure would live.

Jesus referred to himself on the cross as lifted up like the serpent, and just as those dying who looked at the bronze serpent received healing, those who with faith looked on Jesus on the Cross obtained eternal life.

The bronze serpent served as key to the physical healing of the Israelites, the cross to the spiritual healing of man.

St. Augustine said, “What are the biting serpents? Sins… A serpent is gazed on that the serpent may have no power… A death is gazed on that death may have no power…”

Because of sin, death had a lock on human life. But another death, the death of Christ, unlocked it.  “In Christ’s death, death died,” St. Augustine added.

Again I looked at the key. For me, it opened not just the filing cabinet.  And the thought that perhaps the one who came was not just a locksmith made me regret that I did not offer him a drink and a biscuit. The words of St. Paul rang in my ears, “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”