Texts like these, which place a high premium on faith, can be dangerous. I submit that we’re meant to read them as didactic, but not in a prescriptive way: God does not intend for us to doggedly wait at the edge of dehydration for water to be drawn forth from a rock; nor are we meant to rely on Jesus as our only source of refreshing draughts.
God “has our backs,” so to speak, but only insofar as we have enough faith in heaven to do what is requisite and bring our own health about. The stories of Moses and Jesus are successful because their miracles work: Moses offers drink to all in the exodus community; Jesus convinces a Samaritan woman that he is the Jewish messiah and the one true source of “living water.” But it seems certain that these pursuits are successful because of the trust, in God, of those who invoke them.
When Moses dies, Exodus says of him that none have arisen like him, before or after. He who God rescued from death. He who was called upon to incite plagues and free Israel from bondage. He who sat with God on Mt. Moriah and received the law. He who parted the sea. He who drew water forth from a rock.
Moses’s biography is rife with miracles. Certainly Exodus still understands that his grandeur is contingent upon the favor and interaction of God; praising him always involves praising the God behind him. Moses was no magician. He was an Israelite who listened to God, and who fulfilled God’s requests; because he listened, great things happened for all of Israel.
There is a midrash which treats the parting of the Sea of Reeds as a miracle of faith. This retelling says that Moses struck his staff upon the waters as God had commanded, but that nothing happened. As Egypt was fast on Israel’s heels, Moses struck the water again, but again to no avail. The midrash says that it was not until an ordinary Israelite, staffless and noncommissioned as a prophet, waded into the sea trusting God’s promise that the miracle was effected. This Israelite was incautious; no dipping of toes or testing of waters marked his act, but simply a push ahead, until the water covered him, until at last God relented and let the people through. The moral? Have faith without signs. Know without seeing. Do, knowing that it will matter.
Moses’s staff, which was stripped of authority in that midrash, appears in Exodus 17 lauded as the staff that split the sea; it is herein used to bring water forth from a rock. Again, this act’s efficacy relies on the faith of one Israelite, herein Moses. Logic defies any declaration that such behavior works for sating thirst. The people have no reasonable reason to trust it, except insofar as God has said that this is how they’ll find their nourishment.
All of Israel was adrift in the desert, and with nothing to drink (Exodus 17:1). Its people despaired of their situation: out of slavery into certain, anguished death in the desert!, they complained (Exodus 17:3). Moses carried their complaints to God. God promised to stand before the rock at Horeb and, upon Moses’s striking it with the staff, draw enough water forth from it to quench the thirst of all the people.
So Moses does; so it is (Exodus 17:7). Living water flows forth at the will of this invisible, present, active God. The people are “saved.”
The Gospel of John also engages the notion of thirst and spiritual quenching. The miracle in exodus was rendered in literal terms: the bodies of the Israelites needed to be sustained, and this is what the miracle accomplishes, moreso than feeding faith. John is reticent to make such commitments: his chapter speaks both of bodily thirst, as Jesus beseeches the Samaritan woman to address his at the well, and spiritual thirst, which is more metaphorical and to which, the Gospel suggests, faith in Jesus is the answer (John 4:7, 14).
The Jesus in John almost disregards bodily thirst as ultimately important, seeking instead to establish that Jesus himself is the response to all true human need: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,” he says of the well water, “but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life" (John 4:13-14). Jesus nearly mocks the notion that the water he’s requested of the Samaritan woman can sustain in the way his own “living water” does: he, the messiah, alone can inspire the spirit and truth amongst a worshipful crowd; he, alone, can proclaim all truth (John 4:23, 25).
Such different insights! Read in tandem, these texts could be made to inform improper understandings of one another. In Exodus, the water Moses called forth strengthens the people bodily, and enables them to continue along their journey to promised Israel. In John, the Jesus who gives water via his spirit is less concerned with sustaining the body than he is in maintaining a direct line to God. Miracles feed the body; the messiah feeds the soul. The non-miraculous figures in both chapters benefit from the faith which draws spiritual and bodily satiation forth. God provides. God is trusted to.
I think it is best to defy reading these texts as if they belong to a contiguous narrative meant to validate the person of Jesus as the Christ. Exodus teaches us that, even when we’re in dire straits, God stands before us and answers our needs. John seems to imply that God accomplishes this most in the person of Jesus, who is aware not only of the thirsts of the body, but of those of the soul. Both belong to a story about what God has bestowed upon the world. Christians locate the greatest manifestation of this in Jesus, but how unfortunate it would be to allow our fervor over him to diminish our awe over other miracles.
“Trust.” “Faith.” What simple values are drawn forth from these miracle stories, these tales of theological clarification. And yet inspiring both virtues seems to be at the heart of each of the stories, so that adding Romans to their midst produces this insight: “we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5). Our greatest needs are to be embraced as opportunities for God to act in our lives.
We are not meant to stand at the edge of the Sea of Reeds, waiting; we are asked to dive in and trust that God will save. We would be misguided to stand at the well and shrug off Jesus’s assertions that he is a messiah simply because the messianic hopes have not been realized; we are asked to believe, and to share our belief. We are not meant to bemoan the needs of our bodies; we are meant to relinquish those needs to God, trusting that none are so great that Heaven cannot, or would not, respond to them.
Water does not always flow at Horeb. The messiah does not always sit at our wells, offering proofs that he is so. The spaces where we need sometimes do not seem to fill in. And yet, we wait. And we trust. And in the meantime, we do. We ackowledge that God saw fit to put water at places other than just Horeb, and we seek it out. We hope that God wrote divine truth on our hearts so that we can trust ourselves to know without hearing. We believe that no need is so great that it cannot be met. We use our faculties, ackowledging them as gifts.
We trust. We do. And God will.
photo credit here
No comments:
Post a Comment