1.
From IB: This is the
second of three such accounts of the complaining of the people about water
(cf. Exo. 15: 22-27 and Num. 20:1-13.) In
all three the issue is faith vs. disobedience.
The accounts present sin as an ever-deepening phenomenon among the
migrant people of God. In the
first account, God provides them with a law or statute by which to test their
faithfulness.
2.
The exact location of Rephidim is unknown, but near Sinai. The people's quarrel with Moses is cast as a legal argument,
challenging him to justify his leadership by providing water, contending (as
many times otherwise and elsewhere) that this incident alone justifies
questioning his having led them out of Egypt.
One would think that, in the main, they preferred Egypt to Moses, or at
least Egypt to wandering. [Moses
probably felt like pointing west-southwest and saying, "Egypt's over
there. The door is open. Go to it.”] They
threaten to stone him, a mob action.
3.
The reference could be to a particular rock on Horeb, as interpreted by
Josephus. Targ. Onkelos,
reporting on the incident recounted in Num. 21:17, relates the legend that the
rock Moses struck thereafter followed Israel on its pilgrimage to provide
water. [In I Cor. 10:4, Paul
references this moment, taking it seriously rather than as mere legend:
"The supernatural Rock which followed them."]
The place was named Massah and Meribah to signify the two ways Israel
had demonstrated its lack of faith, and came to be synonymous with hardness of
heart and faithlessness.
4.
"Israel moved on from the wilderness of Sin by stages.” Would
that it were so! That we, like
Israel, could move on from the wilderness of Sin by stages.
Like Laurence Kohlberg and the stages of moral development:
analytical, developmental, manageable (or at least coachable),
achievable... even perhaps perfectible. More
the better if the wilderness of Sin were for us some geography of the land
instead of the soul, some terrain to be traversed instead of rebellious
metastasis in the mind.
5.
But the metaphor of hardness of heart, synonymous now with Massah and
Meribah, is an apt one for the wilderness of sin.
How could the Israelites, witnesses to the ten plagues, delivered by
the Passover, hikers across dry sea, recipients of manna and quail—how could
these folk doubt Moses' leadership and "put God to the proof"?
They were, after all, participants in a spiritual migration of covenant
proportions. Human nature is ever
the same. Obedience is overcome
by contempt at the tree in the garden, contempt at the rock in the wilderness:
Give us fruit, give us power, give us water! Whatever…..
6.
"Why do you put the Lord to the proof?"
Why indeed!! Because of
this hardness of heart. This is
not mere petulance. It is revolt,
this time a revolt born of thirst, born of the reality of wandering in a harsh
climate, born in a pilgrimage easier to understand in the comfort of memory
than when in the midst of it. The
revolt is more a challenge to God than to Moses.
The moreso to God, in that
Moses has at every turn credited God for the exodus: “the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, Who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”
7.
God responds. With water,
covenant, commandments. The story
of Israel is the story of hardness of heart, in the face of covenant after
covenant, gift after gift, prophet after prophet.
Always in expectation of a messiah who, like Moses, didn't quite
measure up in the doing. Moses is
honored more in the memory than in the events themselves:
"Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children
and our cattle with thirst"?
8.
God responds, with water and commandments.
Those people, there in the wilderness of Sin, are obliged to notice.
That they fell on their faces and worshipped is not recorded.
More likely they clamored over one another to catch the water like hogs
at a trough, shoving and snorting as they groveled.
9.
The hardness of heart of our time is informed by an infection more
virulent than discontent, even the desperate malcontent of the Israelites.
From the late Arthur Leff of Yale law, [quoted by Phillip Johnson, in
"Nihilism and the Death of Law," First
Things, March, 1993], come the following observations:
"I want to believe--and so do you--in a complete, transcendent,
and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable
rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live
righteously. I also want to
believe—and so do you—in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly
free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for
ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be
perfectly ruled and perfectly free; that is, at the same time to discover the
right and the good and to create it." (italics added)
...
The heart of the problem is that any normative statement implies the
existence of an authoritative evaluator:
"Putting it that way makes clear that if we are looking for an
evaluation, we must actually be looking for an evaluator,
some machine for the generation of judgments on states of affairs.
If the evaluation is to be beyond question, then the evaluator and its
evaluative processes must be similarly insulated.
If it is to fulfill its role, the evaluator must be the unjudged judge,
the unruled legislator, the premise maker who rests on no premises, the
uncreated creator of values... We are never going to get anywhere (assuming
for the moment that there is somewhere to get) in ethical or legal theory
unless we finally face the fact that, in the Psalmist's words, there is no one
like unto the Lord...The so-called death of God turns out not to have been
just His funeral; it also seems to have effected the total elimination of
any coherent, or even more-than-momentarily convincing, ethical or legal
system dependent upon finally authoritative, extra-systematic premises."
(Johnson, op.cit)
Even among the people of God, who are born anew in the waters of
baptism, one can find the hardness of heart that denies the authority of God: this or that no longer applies.
The “wilderness of sin” is today at once both more subtle and yet
more blatant; and of a vastly greater cultural and spiritual
geography than for the Israelites.
Putting God to the proof is now fashionable as ecclesiastical
practice; we will now proceed to define what is good and what is evil.
Or at least attempt to redefine evil as good.
At this point, at least, the ELCA is concluding a study it,
having appointed a seminary dean to chair the commission.
Not having learned from Eden, and all the smarter for Enlightenment
(!), we do not still wander but rather cavort in the wilderness of Sin.
Hardness of heart has learned new strength, now masquerading as
values-formed-in-the-self, elevated to virtue in the mere declaration:
this is good, and just and caring and loving!
1.
Jesus now and again journeyed into a wilderness or two other than the
desert area in which he was tempted. Samaria
was one such “wilderness,” a place not so much of temptation as of
contempt, fixated as the natives were, on the one hand with the Torah, while
omitting the Prophets and the Writings; and, on the other, eroded as to their
ethnic purity as well as by their disdain for the temple.
The place was Sychar, kosher only for its claim of a well from Israel
himself. Jesus breaches
convention if not ethics when he converses with a Samaritan woman in public,
asking her for a drink. She
reacts properly surprised – even astounded – that a Jew should address a
Samaritan, and a woman at that! Jesus astonishes her even more by his reply:
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink,
you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
(Now, “living water” to them was, in the main “running water,”
rather than the still water of a well. But
Jesus is referring to yet a different kind of “living water.”)
The woman knows the water in the well, and it’s deep but still.
She gets in a theological point, by throwing it up to the Jew that it
was Jacob himself who gave them this water, legitimizing, as it were, the
whole claim to children status as well as access to the water.
Jesus ignores the Jacob-legitimacy-arguing-point, and takes the
discussion a step further: “Everyone
who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I
give him will never thirst. Indeed,
the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to
eternal life.”
2.
At this point the woman expresses precisely what most of us would; she
wants some of that water: “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get
thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” But Jesus throws her
another curve ball: “Go, call your husband and come back.”
Perhaps the discussion had gone far enough without chaperone.
Perhaps it was simple courtesy not to speak overlong to a married woman
without the presence or at least consent of her husband.
Perhaps, as I think, Jesus knew her domestic arrangement and used it to
press further the question of legitimacy, as well as to introduce the question
of messiah. On her reply that
“I do not have a husband,” Jesus retorts that “You are right when you
say that you have no husband. The
fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your
husband. What you have just said
is quite true!”
The woman is hardly chagrined, much less ashamed.
Rather, having perceived his prescience, she attempts to deflect his
perceptiveness by obfuscation. She
throws out the tired old question of Samaritan-versus-Jew on place of worship:
“I can see that you are a prophet.
Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the
place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
3.
Jesus does not hesitate to seize the moment:
“Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father
neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do
know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet
a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the
Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father
seeks. God is spirit, and his
worshipers must worship him in spirit and in truth.”
Now the woman is serious, theologically.
Jesus has trumped her question by invoking a kind of legitimacy that
transcends both temple and high place. She
is sophisticated enough theologically to understand that the Day of which the
prophet is speaks is the day of the coming messiah:
“I know that Messiah is coming.
When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
Meaning, also, that “maybe what you say is right, sir, but we shall
see when the Messiah comes who is right.
And who is wrong.”
4.
Could he have surprised her more, then, than he did?
“I who speak to you am he.”
Before she can respond, the disciples return and are both surprised and
not a little irritated that the Master should stoop to converse with a woman.
They insist that he get about the business of the moment; that is,
eating something that they had brought. Jesus,
in a mood and mode of eternity, contrasts their offering with his task:
“My food … is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his
work.” Then he calls their
attention to another task at hand, the harvest:
“I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields.
They are ripe for harvest. Even
now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal
life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.
Thus the saying, ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true.
I sent you to reap what you have not worked for.
Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of
their labor.”
There they stand, with the bread in their hands and their teeth in their
mouths, speechless to the Lord of the harvest, as he speaks of the kingdom in
this unlikely hamlet in Samaria. Can
anything good come out of Nazareth? Can
anything good be done in Samaria? Or,
for that matter, said in Samaria.
No wonder Thomas could later say, “Lord, we do not know where you are
going. How can we know the way?”
Trust at least this: on this day the disciples had the opportunity to
understand better the meaning of “For God so loved the world, the kosmos.”
It included even (gasp) Samaria – and even Samaritan women of ill
repute, given living water and all that.
Repentance was not a concept foreign to them.
Inclusion in the Kingdom of those both alien and illegitimate
was. Could the “ripe fields”
include even the blighted soil and corrupted women of Samaria?
The bastards (and bitches)
of Beth-el? Apparently, yes.
5.
The woman, for her part, had heard enough to return to the heart of the
village and announce Who it was that she had stumbled upon, with only slight
exaggeration: “Come, see a man
who told me everything I ever did.
Could this be the Christ?” It
is possible that the village rushed out to Jesus to hear him unpack, in
perhaps lurid detail, everything she had ever done.
But it is more probable that they accepted her testimony (!) on the
face of it, on grounds that anything and anyone who could disturb her callous
promiscuity must have something going for him.
Even, perhaps, the messiah himself.
Yes, that’s it. The
village probably knew that if this gal had been led to repent, it must
be the messiah himself. As
in, when hell freezes over…..
At any rate, “many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him
because of the woman’s testimony.” (!) So when they came out to him, they
invited – urged – him to stay with them.
And he stayed two days, “and because of his words, many more became
believers.” Fields ripe for the harvest, and all that, in the barren,
sour soil of Samaria.
6.
The living water of baptism, the water and the word, are to us sign and
sacrament, promise of new creation and life eternal.
What Nicodemus pondered and the woman at the well desired you and I
carry as adoption—reborn as children of God.
We are also, always and ever, semper penitens—penitent before
the Lord our Maker. The old and
rebellious being resides alongside the new creation, within us and through us.
This paradox is no mystery. Even
the worst rejoice to know that the Savior now knows us, through and through.
Even the best walk precariously, if bravely, along the line between
self-righteousness and prodigality. Perhaps
even pride. The commandments we
have. Baptism and forgiveness we
have. Rebels in need of
repentance we remain.
7.
We are also, need we be reminded, called to the harvest. We are called to proclaim Law and Gospel, repentance and
forgiveness, the Good News of Jesus Christ.
As Jesus observed of Samaria, the fields here are ripe for harvest.
But one needs to be careful of his tools, his implements, as it were.
Many are the congregations who are building programs and “family life
centers” that start with recreation, offering up “contemporary services”
that utilize songs of praise that are, compared to Bach and even Fanny Crosby,
fluff. The sainted Lou
Smith reported that he used the term “roadblock” during his Winter, 2002,
presentation at Concordia Seminary, Fort Wayne.
It brought more than just chuckles.
Curious, he asked why that might be.
It turned out that then-newly-elected President of the LCMS, Gerald
Kieshnick (sp?) had been asked as to his view of the “evangelical
catholic” stance of the Fort Wayne faculty.
They are, he said, “roadblocks.” (i.e., liturgical and theological
roadblocks and critics to the uncritical entertainment evangelism that has, as
more than a few Missouri pastors report, come upon the Synod like a plague.)
We dare not trim or thin-down the content of the message to make it
attractive to the cultured despisers or, even, the uncultured indifferent.
8.
Jesus was not exactly gentle with the woman at the well.
Five husbands, indeed! And
a live-in lover now. The
spiritual search for “something higher than myself” has some merit, but
one suspects that the “self” silently retains judgment rights as to the
content of, and allegiance to, the “something higher.”
Not so with brothers and sisters in Christ: the center of our faith is
not our spiritual, inner, seeking self, but Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
If we cannot or do not reap, at least we are called to sow.
What we sow is what we have received, not what we tailor to the
sensibilities of postmodern culture. What
we have received is the Good News of Jesus Christ, in Whom is life and
salvation. And who calls us to
repentance.