Do Not Harden Your Hearts As At Meribah
Easter Hope and Life's Crosses
Praying the Liturgy of the Hours during Lent this year has been revelatory. Early in Lent, the Office of Readings (the canonical hour which can be prayed at any time of day and which includes a more extensive scriptural reading and a reading from an author from the Tradition) goes through the Exodus narrative bit by bit each day. What struck me as the narrative progressed was how often the Israelites “grumble” against God and Moses, mostly regarding the need for food and drink, as they journey through the wilderness after being rescued from Egypt.
By my count, there are three distinct episodes when the Israelites engage in such grumbling:
Exodus 15:22-27: Three days after having successfully escaped through the Red Sea but having found no potable water along the way, the Israelites come to a place called Marah where they find the water is too bitter to drink, and the people “grumbled against Moses.” God prompts Moses to throw a piece of wood into the water, which makes it fresh. As the Israelites continue their journey, they then come to a place called Elim, where they find twelve springs of clear water.
Exodus 16: After they leave Elim, the Israelites enter the wilderness of Sin (or Zin), where they find that they have nothing to eat. They exclaim: “If only we had died at the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our kettles of meat [“fleshpots” in some translations] and ate our fill of bread! But you have led us into this wilderness to make this whole assembly die of famine!” (v. 3). For the first time, the Israelites begin to look back to Egypt, regretting their decision to follow Moses. In response, God sends manna to be made into bread in the mornings and quails for meat in the evenings.
Exodus 17:1-7: As the Israelites leave the wilderness of Sin, they encamp at a place called Rephidim and again “quarrel” with Moses because there is nothing to drink. God commands Moses to strike a rock with his staff, causing water to flow which the people can drink. The place is renamed Massah and Meribah, which mean “the place of the test” and “the place of quarreling,” respectively.
Interestingly, the Book of Numbers (20:1-13) provides a second account of this last episode at Massah and Meribah in which Moses and Aaron incur guilt for lacking confidence in God, although it is not completely clear what they did to demonstrate that lack of confidence (many scholars point to the fact that Moses strikes the rock twice in this telling, in v. 11, as the tell-tale sign of his lack of confidence in God). It’s also the episode at Massah and Meribah that sticks in the collective consciousness of the Israelite people as the paradigmatic experience of recalcitrance; for example, it is referenced in Psalms 81, 95, and 106, even though the provision of manna comes to have greater theological significance in the Christian tradition (especially because of Jesus’ “bread of life discourse” in the Gospel of John, particularly 6:30-51).
The culmination of the Israelites’ grumbling comes with their worship of the golden calf while Moses consults with God on Mount Sinai (Ex. 32). Having already ratified the covenant with God (Ex. 24:1-11), the Israelites turn to Aaron, urging him, “Come, make us a god who will go before us.” This time the reason is not because of lack of food or water: “[A]s for that man Moses who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him” (32:1, NAB). It could be argued that the desire for the statue of the golden calf represents yet another desire to return to Egypt, where statues were worshipped as gods, although the Israelites themselves proclaim, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt” (32:4-5) a strange conflation of the saving action of God with the work of multiple gods.
In some popular tellings of the Exodus journey, the grumbling of the Israelites is almost taken as comic relief: How could the Israelites be so foolish and blind after having witnessed God part the Red Sea? This is somewhat akin to the portrayal of Jesus’ disciples in the Gospel of Mark, and to some extent the Gospel of Matthew, as consistently failing to understand Jesus’ identity and mission despite their regular exposure to his teachings and miraculous deeds.
Without denying that this characterization is a genuine aspect of the narrative, I think we should take the recalcitrance of the Israelites more seriously in theological terms. After all, as I already noted, the incident at Massah and Meribah remained a touchstone for later generations of Israelites attempting to make sense of their relationship with God in their own time. And I’m likewise reminded of Søren Kierkegaard’s mockery of those Christians of his own day who claimed that, unlike the disciples, they would have remained faithful to Jesus and wouldn’t have abandoned him at the cross. Kierkegaard recognized that the encounter of God in the form of a finite human being, and in particular one undergoing suffering and dying, posed a real, existential challenge to the disciples. In a similar way, the difficulties faced on the Exodus journey posed an existential challenge to the faith of the Israelites. As Moses himself asks when begging for mercy for the Israelites after the incident with the golden calf, “Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent he brought them out, that he might kill them in the mountains and wipe them off the face of the earth’?” (32:12). How did it make sense for God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt only to let them die in the desert?
I think when seen in this light, it is easier for us to relate to the grumbling Israelites on their journey. Even though we may have experienced God’s saving grace and the power of God’s love in our lives, perhaps on multiple occasions, with every new challenge, crisis, or emergency we face on life’s journey, we have a tendency to turn to doubt and fear. It’s as if every crisis requires a new negotiation with God to ensure God’s loving concern for us. What God has done in the past is never quite enough for us to completely trust God the next time around.
How do we break from this tendency? A few weeks ago, in another post on prayer, I described what I called the Problem of Divine Benevolence, one of three problems I noted with the way many of us typically think about prayer (what I called the “common-sense view of prayer”) and perhaps our relationship with God in general:
Christians agree that God is perfectly good. But if so, what sense does it make to say, as the common-sense view of prayer seems to do, that God would not will what’s good for us until persuaded to do so? The common-sense view of prayer seems to suggest that God is indifferent to our plight and only responds to our needs in a reactive way. But that seems like the opposite of the God of Love we find in the Gospels. On the contrary, our starting point should be that God always desires what is best for us, and indeed knows better than we do what that is.
If we truly believe “that power belongs to God; and that to thee, O Lord, belongs steadfast love” (Ps. 62:11-12), then we need to start thinking less in terms of life’s challenges or “crosses” as episodes we have to regularly negotiate with God, and instead think of our lives more in terms of the unfolding of God’s love. Part of what makes this difficult is that, whereas God ultimately provided water for the Israelites at Massah and Meribah, often the crosses we bear in life, like illness, damaged relationships, or violent conflict, have no immediate answer. We simply bear them, and sometimes are broken by them. The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich’s famous statement that “All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well” may seem like a mockery when we experience this absence of an answer.
For Christians, Easter Sunday is our assurance that, indeed, “all will be well.” By rising on the third day, Christ decisively defeated the power of death and sin in the world, and through our baptism, we are invited to share in that victory.
This doesn’t mean that Christians are exempt from bearing crosses; on the contrary, Jesus makes clear that being his follower will mean taking up our cross. What being a Christian means, in light of Easter Sunday, is that even when we bear crosses, even when they seem impossible to bear, we can have confidence that Christ bears them with us and that, ultimately, we are in God’s loving hands. Even if my prayers appear to go unanswered, I really have no reason to fear, since it simply means God’s loving providence is unfolding in a way I don’t yet understand. If my prayers are answered, I should take that as evidence of God’s ongoing faithfulness, something I should take to heart on the next occasion hard times loom on the horizon.
God’s care for the Israelites was embodied in the covenant God made with them, a point God makes as the people arrive at Sinai:
You have seen how I treated the Egyptians and how I bore you up on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now, if you obey me completely and keep my covenant, you will be my treasured possession among all peoples, though all the earth is mine. (Ex. 19:4-5)
The well-being of the people of Israel was not something that needed to be constantly negotiated with God; it was something God had promised. In the same way, Christ’s death and Resurrection established a new covenant in which we can place our trust, without need for grumbling.
Coming Soon…
I’ve been a bit out of touch with goings on in the world of Catholic news for the past few weeks, but there have been some recent announcements about which topics will be covered in the second session of the Synod on Synodality later this year, while other topics have been assigned to commissions. I will take a look at these developments in an upcoming post. Stay tuned!