When we find the Israelites in the passage from Exodus we heard earlier, it is still early on in their journey.
Not long before, they had been led out of Egypt by Moses in a dramatic escape across the Red Sea, which they had seen part before them, and through which they walked on “dry land.” On the other side of this sea is a broad wilderness that Moses has told them they must journey through before finally entering the land promised to them by God—a God, we should say, that they do not yet know. While God was known to their ancestors, many generations had passed in slavery in Egypt, and those memories of God had been forgotten, until God reappeared to Moses one day in the burning bush and said he was the one to lead the people to a new land.
There had been plagues—locust and frogs and darkness and death—a dramatic deliverance through the sea, and now, when we find them, they are at that fateful moment that is a part of any true journey, when they wonder if they should have taken it at all.
I.
Ask any marathoner around mile 19 or 20 when the cramps come, and their joints are burning. Ask any parent a few hours into a Spring Break road trip with small children, when you’ve stopped six times in 20 minutes, but someone is still hungry, and someone else can’t find their shoe, and you see the billboard for Bucc-ee’s that reads: Next Buc-ee’s 256 miles, you can hold it!
Ask anyone in recovery, or in the middle of the latest round of chemo treatments.
Ask anyone working to save a marriage.
There is a point in any journey of consequence when the reasons why you started out in the first place fade, and whatever it is you left behind, or the path you could have taken instead, suddenly takes hold of your imagination.
There will always be external resistance—the miles in front of you and the aching legs, bad weather. Navigating bureaucracy and insurance companies, friends who don’t understand, or a partner whose heart is simply not in it.
External resistance will always be there; it is hard and painful, but it can be planned for. What is harder to prepare for, and, in the end, harder to face, is the resistance that comes from within. Our own shaking spirit. Our doubts. Our regrets, our anxiety. Our fear. This is the resistance that ultimately pulls us back, or paralyzes us, where we are.
II.
Tradition has not been kind in remembering these times of struggle in the wilderness when the Israelites begged Moses for food and water and even wondered aloud if they might be better off back in Egypt. In fact, their struggles are memorialized in this morning’s Psalm, number 95, a psalm that begins with praise for the God of creation:
For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
The sea is his, for he made it,
and the dry land, which his hands have formed.
But then it takes a turn with a call to obedience and remembers this moment from the Exodus as “what not to do.”
Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
when your ancestors tested me,
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
These stories of complaint from the Exodus are remembered as quintessential stories of ingratitude, in which the people of God, fresh off a dramatic deliverance, whine like spoiled children.
And of course, it is a fundamental truth of our humanity that we do not appreciate fully all that we have been given, and this is famously true of children—and yet, at least when it comes to children, the alternative, too, should give us pause. Do we truly want our children to have a full awareness of how good they have it, which would require that they be acquainted with the darker, harder realities of life in the world? Are we prepared for that?
And not just for them, but for ourselves? It’s usually the case that we struggle to savor completely the gift and grace of life on this earth, the miracle that we awoke this morning, that we can reasonably expect to wake again tomorrow, until we are faced with the reality that we may not. If push comes to shove, I’d admit I want my boys to know just enough to be grateful, and no more. But we don’t always get to make those decisions.
Scripture has tended to come down hard on these weary travelers, lifting their complaints to God. But what’s interesting about this story from Exodus 17, and the story in the previous chapter when the people asked for food and it was given, and the story in the chapter before that when they again were thirsty and God turned the bitter water sweet, is that while all this complaining wears on poor Moses, God takes it all in stride. In fact, not once in any of these three wilderness hissyfits does God react poorly to their questions or complaints.
In fact, the only time God shows any sign of becoming upset is when some of the people go out on the sabbath to collect bread that had been raining down from heaven. They find none is there, for God had told them not to collect on the sabbath, but to rest—which is to say that God doesn’t object to the people’s complaints and concerns, or even their questioning if God is with them at all, but only to their insistence that they work when commanded to rest.
III.
And perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising when we think about it. After all, their requests were pretty modest. Yes, there does seem to be a flair for the dramatic—Did you drag us out into the desert to kill us and our children?! At least in Egypt we had three square meals a day?!—But is it really so bad to ask for food and water on a journey through the desert?!
It’s interesting, there is a line of reasoning within the midrash on these passages, which is the history of rabbinical interpretation, where the rabbis choose to focus not on the complaints the people raised, but on what the people did not say to God, starting back in the beginning of the Exodus when they first grabbed what they could and left. We’re told they needed to leave in a hurry, while Pharaoh and his armies were distracted by the plague that had beset them. Famously, they were in such a hurry that they took bread that had not been allowed to rise, unleavened bread that is remembered even to this day at Passover. It says they packed these cakes because they could not wait, “nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves.” One of the rabbis notes that the people did not say, “How can we go out into the wilderness without provisions?” They didn’t question God’s initial risky ask to leave their homes and lives; they simply grabbed what they could and went.
Looking closely at the scene there at the Red Sea, the rabbis again marveled at the people’s faith. They note that the grammar is odd when describing the moment when the people went into the sea, as it was parted. It says, “The Israelites entered into the midst of the Sea, on dry land.” The rabbis ask, “Did they enter ‘the midst of the sea,’ or ‘on dry land? ‘” And answer, “From here you learn that the sea was not split for them until they came right into it, up to their noses—only then, it became dry land.”1 Which is to say that the miracle only happened once the people committed themselves fully to God, and to this journey they had chosen, which must have felt as if it had chosen them.
Is this when the waters always part, I wonder? When we’ve waded in to our noses—when there is no turning back?
We dwell on what the people said in their human weakness, hearing ourselves in their complaint—good. But the hope, I have to believe, is that we would find ourselves, too, in what they didn’t say, which is, We’re not going. We’d rather stay where we are.
And even more, what they didn’t do, which was turn around or stop in their place; settle for where they were instead of following through to the place God promised was on the other side of this long wilderness.
God knows the journey is long—and it had to be. After all, getting the people out of Egypt was just the first step in the Exodus; the real work of it was to get Egypt out of the people. To get them to leave behind the rhythms of bondage, with its endless work and the constant anxiety of scarcity, and take on a new way of living. A way rooted not in endless work, but in the command to rest, issued from a new God who promises that everything they need will be given to them if they would but trust—that the abundance of creation is available to them if they would but look.
These are hard lessons, and long. And it is not surprising that the people’s journey of coming to know this new God is marked by so much not knowing. Not knowing if the food and water will come. Not knowing if it will get there in time. Not knowing just where they are going or how long it will take to get there, will they know it when they see it? Moments of revelation followed my long periods of silence when they ask, Is the Lord even among us, or not?
IV.
And yet through it, we learn something important about this God—still new to them, and even so many generations still so unknowable to us.
Moses comes to God with these complaints, saying What will I do with these people, they’re about to stone me!
And God tells him to go out ahead of them to a large rock—a rock from the same stones the Israelites are threatening to throw at Moses in their fear. God tells Moses, You strike the rock, and from this rock water will flow for my people.
Perhaps these are words we need to hear as we meet the halfway point in this Lenten journey, or wherever we may be in the journey of our own life and life of faith—when we feel the pull of what we have left behind or the road we did not take. It is at that moment when God comes and transforms what we would fear into a pathway to new life.
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1 Shemoth Rabba 21:9, found in Avivah Gottlieb Zonrberg’s fascinating commentary, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, 205