The Desert Rock That Springs with the Water of Life
Exodus 17: 1-7; John 4: 5-30; Romans 5: 1-11
Ralph Wood
Day Spring Baptist Church
February 24, 2008; Third Sunday in Lent
The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth was once asked, perhaps at the height of Hitler’s monstrous power, what he would say to the Führer if he had the chance to confront him. Barth’s questioner assumed that he would fire a volley of accusations: “You horrible creature! You who have slain millions of Jews and thousands of gypsies and homosexuals, what a brute you are! Not only have you ruined Germany, but you will soon ruin the rest of the world if you are not stopped! Fall on your face and repent! Command your officers to free all whom you have captured. Surrender to the Allies who have lost their own thousands in trying to halt your savagery. Apologize to the German people for having behaved like a barbarian. Reverse yourself now, Herr Hitler, before both God and man.” To the utter astonishment of his friend, Barth said instead: “If ever I could confront the Reichschancellor, I would do nothing other than quote to him Romans 5:8: ‘While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.’”
Why on earth would Barth pass up his only chance of indicting one of history’s most demonic dictators? Wouldn’t Barth have been terribly irresponsible? Would he have not lost his only opportunity of bringing the fiend to his knees? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Barth knew that if he accused Hitler of his many horrors, no matter how accurate the indictment surely would have been, Hitler would have immediately begun to justify his behavior. “The German economy was in trouble, and the Jewish financiers were draining it dry. Germany could not have a unified culture with all of these non-Aryans in its midst. The gays and the gypsies were marks of a massive decadence that had to be cleaned up.” And so on and so on. Barth knew all too well that every evil we commit, we can also justify. To accuse someone of evil is almost always to get a diatribe of recrimination in response. When we pummel them, they pummel us. But to the word of forgiveness there can be no self-defense.
When friend or enemy forgives us, or when we forgive enemy or friend, there are only two responses: we either accept or we reject. And if we accept forgiveness, it’s not because we humiliate ourselves to do so. It’s because the gracious act has enabled our gracious response. Theologians call it “prevenient grace,” the grace that comes before and makes possible our embrace of it. This is the point that we are meant to learn again in Lent. Though we deserve nothing, God provides everything: “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”—the ten most precious syllables in our mother tongue.
I. We Are a People Thirsting for More Than Water
The first lesson from Exodus 17 deals with the Israelites as a faultfinding people. They grumbled at God. They murmured and whined. They wearied of wandering for forty years in the wilderness, eating nothing but manna, even though it tasted like wafers with honey. They grew so tired of God’s way with them that they sought their own way. They would eventually fashion themselves an idol, an image of the god whom they wished they had followed: a snorting and pawing, a horn-thrusting bull, a brute male deity of sheer potency, a bovine Hitler. No wonder that Moses smashed it to dust.
Yet we must not judge the Israelites too harshly. Like them, we too want deliverance now, not tomorrow, much less sometime in the far future. God has sent us into these forty days of repentance, asking us to feed off nothing but the manna of contrition. The color of this season is purple, the hue of the bruised conscience, the tint of the battered heart. Thus should we remember that we are indeed like them, a guilty people. Like theirs, ours is a barren world, dry and barren time. A character in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) describes our state keenly: “When the water holes are dry, people seek to drink at the mirage.” I need name only a few of the mirages from which we are seeking to drink: our titillating entertainment built largely on violence and pornography; our deadly boredom during a singularly unedifying political campaign; our massive greed for creature comforts and technical gadgets, when much of the world is hungry, not only in the mean streets of America, but also in Third World countries, where millions are not only hungry but actually dying of malnutrition as well as curable diseases; and, perhaps worst of all, our moral numbness to the genocide in Darfur, the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, the endless strife between the Israelis and the Palestinians. These are the waterless mirages that Lent calls us to abandon, turning to the water that nourishes our parched lives and deserted culture.
Unlike us, the Israelites were dying of literal no less than spiritual thirst. Unlike our 40 days of Lenten penitence, they had wandered for 40 years in the Wilderness of Sinai. Having been delivered from Egyptian slavery, they had been promised a land flowing with milk and honey. Instead, they had come to a place called Horeb, which means “barrenness.” Surely God’s people had cause for their complaint, and surely we must sympathize with their lament against Moses their leader. “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt,” they cried, “to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?”
God provides Israel what it most needs—water—but note ever so well: not on Israel’s terms. Indeed, Yahweh is angry that Israel has demanded that He be demonstrate his faithfulness—as if He would not otherwise have made good on his promise. Yet such is always the nature of our complaint and such is always the nature of his grace: Despite the fact that we don’t deserve God’s mercy, He grants us an overabundance of it. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” But to remind Israel that God’s provision is always miraculous rather than something obvious and to be taken for granted—a mere matter of stopping long enough to dig a well—God has Moses strike a solid rock, the least likely place to find a hidden spring of water.
II. We Are a Well-Watered People
The question is not whether the Horeb event, like most other biblical events, can be proved or disproved with the tools of science and history. Be assured that St. Paul employed no such addle-pated literalism when he interpreted this story. The real question, as he understands, is not whether it happened but what does it mean? Paul asked the question that almost all of our ancestors in the faith asked: Where is Christ mysteriously figured in this event? How is the whole pattern of salvation already present here? Listen to these words to the church at Corinth in order to distinguish between an apostle and a professor:
I want you to know, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea, and all ate the supernatural food, and all drank the supernatural drink. For they drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ. (1 Cor 10: 1-4)
How remarkable! The crossing of the Red Sea was Israel’s baptism. The daily manna on which Israel fed was the body of Christ. The water that gushed from the side of the rock was the blood of Christ. And the Rock that Moses struck was none other than Christ himself! And that’s not all. Christ the new Moses was not only leading Israel under the guise of the old Moses; he was also following them like the Hound of Heaven, making sure that they arrived in the Promised Land of salvation. Other ancient commentators also link the day-cloud and the night-fire to the Holy Spirit’s guiding presence. Thus are we Christians none other than the original Israel in contemporary form as the ecclesial people of God! Yet we know it only because our foreparents in the Faith were not afraid of allegory. Indeed, it was their spiritual meat and drink. They read Scripture through types and anti-types, through foreshadowings and fulfillments, through analogies and likenesses—not to play a mere game but to make us messengers of the good news that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”
Our lectionary texts make a similar link between Moses’ striking water from the rock at Horeb and Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob. It may have been the well where Jacob met his long-awaited wife Rachel and drew water for her. Except here the roles are reversed, though the gender difference remains at the fore. The nameless woman is startled that Jesus would approach her. Ancient rabbis did not speak to women in public, especially not to despised Samaritan women. What is going on here? We must not jump too quickly to a figural reading of this encounter. For it’s blazing noon, Jesus has traveled far, and he’s both weary and thirsty. He wants a deep drink of refreshing water from this well that is no mere cistern but an opening to underground springs. So must we remind ourselves that the needs of the world are not only spiritual but also physical. Jesus warns sharply against our not feeding the hungry, not giving drink to the thirsty, not visiting the prisoners and the shut-ins. We do not belong to Christ’s people unless we do these things, as Matthew 25 makes clear.
Yet we must also be clear about the Source and Motive for our ministry. The Samaritan woman learns it slowly but clearly. She thinks Jesus is a prophet because he knows that she has been married five times but is now living out of wedlock. Thus has she has added adultery to her outcast character. Yet Jesus does not scold her—either for failing to recognize that he is more than a prophet, or for living in a state of sin. Instead, he reverses roles, from having been the one who asked to the one who gives. Those who drink of the water that I give, says Jesus, shall never thirst again. Only later does Jesus inform her that he is the long-expected Christ, the Messiah of Israel. We are not told what the Samaritan woman does, but we can surmise the outcome. Having asked for and received the living water, she will go and do as she ought concerning her marital scandal. So must we. No matter how arid our culture, no matter how great our guilt and thus thirst, we must cease trying to drink at the mirages. For what else is the water of life than the Cup of our salvation that we receive at every Lord’s Supper—the outward and public sign that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us”?
III. We Are Meant to Serve as Living Water for Others
With every divine blessing comes a divine command. There is no cheap grace, no quenching of our thirst that doesn’t prompt us to quench the thirst of others. Salvation is free precisely because discipleship is so costly. Because we pay nothing for it, we give everything in return. Francis Cardinal George, the archbishop of Chicago, put the matter well when he said, “Our job as Christians is to spend our lives trying to convince people that suffering and death are good for you.” This surely is the heart of Christ’s promise to the Samaritan woman. Those who drink from his cup shall gladly suffer and even die in order that others might not suffer and die of physical or spiritual thirst.
What would it mean for us, in this time and this place, to become springs of water welling up to eternal life? Remember that, for Jesus, “eternal life” does not mean pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by. It means God’s Kingdom beginning here and now, even as it shall be made perfect and complete there and then. Let two examples suffice, both of them personal and local. I know that preachers aren’t supposed to use personal illustrations, but then I’m not a preacher! And I have permission to use these stories.
Celina Varela, as her name indicates, is Hispanic. Her parents worked very hard to see that she receive a good education. She did. In fact, she finished at the top of her class at Truett Seminary, where I had the honor of teaching her. With such a fine academic record, Celina was poised to pursue virtually any kind of ministry that God might lead her to, perhaps to some prestigious place where the salary would be commensurate with the title of her position. Thus would she “make her parents proud,” as we like to say. And yet the Christ standing at Jacob’s well led Celina to drink a different cup of water. He led her to get rid of all the possessions that would not fit into her second-hand clunker, and to strike out for Chicago. There she lives communally with a mainly Mennonite group called Reba Place, an inner-city ministry that seeks to bring living water to the down-and-out of Chicago. Her parents understand, I might add, that Celina is paying them the highest possible tribute to their having reared her to be a servant of Christ: in doing this kind of work that the world doesn’t bother to notice.
Matt Waller is also a Baylor alumnus, the son of Baptist missionaries to South America, an honors graduate who could have easily made his way to graduate school or to a well-paying job in the business world. Instead, Matt has spent his time teaching the poor people of Bolivia and now Ethiopia how to dig wells, so that they might literally have fresh water to drink. Instead of grumbling about the low pay and the hard conditions, Matt has recently written to say that he almost feels guilty about having so great a privilege. I quote him: “At the moment, this trip is almost purely selfish. I love the well drilling, the tangible hard-day’s work, the rural setting, [the] rural people, and so forth. I don’t think that I could say, in good conscience, that I’m making any sacrifices. I grew up in a third world country, and I’ve missed the lifestyle…. Surely the yoke is too easy, the burden too light, for this experience to be a sacrifice.”
Neither Celina nor Matt declared: “I’ll serve You well, Lord, if You in turn will reward me well.” Instead, they drank from the one Cup that requires no such tit-for-tat. It has made them into springs of water welling up to eternal life. Thus do they teach us the message of Lent: to by-pass the mirages, to tap the Rock from whom our salvation springs, to heed the good news that “while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”