Exodus 17:1-7 Commentary

Pastor’s Cut

It is almost too bad that we are expected to preach this text to our congregations because, really, this is a story for pastors.  Pastors following God’s guidance (wishing the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night was still a thing) in order to get God’s people where they are supposed to go.  Pastors eager to provide for God’s people — usually because we love them but sometimes just because their criticism stings more than we let them see. Pastors who see and experience the people’s need alongside them.  After all, Moses didn’t have a secret flask of glacial ice-melt water. He was thirsty too. He was cranky too.  He didn’t know how to meet their need. He knew the need and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.  So he takes it to the Lord in prayer.  Perhaps it is a prayer every pastor should have framed on their desk (facing them, not where visitors can see it): “What am I going to do with these people?”

And God doesn’t leave Moses hanging.  God provides.  He doesn’t just guide Moses to a trickling brook to share with the people.  God provides through Moses.  Moses gets to do something really cool, resonate with God’s previous provisions “take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go.” He hits the rock, it cracks open and water gushes out and Moses does this “in the sight of the elders of Israel.” Not a bad day’s work. And then he still gets to call out God’s people by naming the place after their bad attitudes. Massah = testing. Meribah = quarreling. The whole thing is deeply relatable. So there is a part of me that wishes we could hoard this story but, since we can’t, here are some thoughts for presenting it to God’s people.

Murmuring Stories

This week’s Lectionary text is the third in a sequence of three so let’s back up a bit.  Exodus 15 is largely made up by and known for Miriam’s song of praise for the people’s deliverance from slavery and, most recently, through the Red Sea on dry ground.  But, tucked in at the end, is the story of God’s people wandering into the desert for the first time.  It’s an unfamiliar terrain and their bodies are probably still jittery with the adrenaline of fleeing slavery, being chased by a pounding army, stepping out into a rushing river that is no longer rushing and is not even a river — at least for the moment.  And when the waves crash down behind them, sweeping away soldiers and chariot, they are free. Which is also an unfamiliar terrain.

Out in the desert, they can’t find any water.  They come across a pool but its water is bitter.  Barely have they hymns of praise faded off their lips when the people turn to Moses, murmuring (or grumbling) against him:”What are we supposed to drink?”  Moses takes this to the Lord in prayer and is given a stick to sweeten the waters. And, in this moment, God issues a promise to the people: if you listen and obey, if you keep my commands, “I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, who heals you.” After that, God guides the people to Elim “where there were twelve springs and seventy palm trees.”

Just after that we have a familiar Sunday School story about God’s provision of manna and quail for God’s people so they don’t need to be hungry and, perhaps more importantly, so they can unlearn the self-dependence of slavery and relearn to trust God’s goodness to them and on their behalf. And now this. The story of God’s provision of water again.

A Reluctant Leader

The text is poetically uncertain about the recipient of these complaints.  Robert Alter demonstrates the evident Hebrew parallelism in verse 2:

“Why do you quarrel with me?

Why do you put the Lord to the test?”

Moses expresses himself similarly in the earlier water story (chapter 15) and, in both cases, “the poetic parallelism becomes a vehicle for expressing the inseparability of Moses’s leadership from God’s.”

Despite that expressed confidence in his leadership, Moses’ reality has always been far from confident.  As a young man, he tried to stand up against injustice, which ended in violence and his flight to the wilderness. After decades of humble shepherding, God meets him in the burning bush and Moses’ first thought is about his own weakness.  As Alter observes, “from the very beginning, at the burning bush, Moses had been doubtful that the people could trust him and accept his leadership. Now he felt something like desperate fear—that the people will actually kill him.”

Rather than shielding Moses from them, God’s instruction is to walk right past, or through, the grumbling crowd. “Passing before the enraged people would be rather like running the gauntlet.” They can identify the staff in his hand as one that wrought destruction in Egypt.  But here it is used to their benefit and Moses, the reluctant leader, is the one who uses it.

Lectionary Connections:

Psalm 95 is a song of praise to God for God’s great works of creation and providence. “The sea is his, for he made it. And his hands formed the dry land.”  We are under the care of God who holds the waters in the palm of his hand.  What is more, the psalm makes a direct reference to our Hebrew Scripture by chiding the people NOT to test and grumble against God as they did in Meribah and Massah.

But, because we are consummate testers and grumblers against God, we find ourselves in need of the promises of Romans 5.  What Moses could only do in part — representing the needs of God’s people to God — Christ did completely by meeting those needs in his own death and resurrection. “But God proved his love for us in this, while we were yet sinners [that is to say, grumblers and complainers] Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8; paraphrase original).

And then, in the delightful back-and-forth at Jacob’s Well, we see how Christ—the living water—is not just for God’s people, Israel.  Or, perhaps, it is better to say, the water gushing forth from the Rock flows to all the nations, including the excluded, forgiving the sinner, redeeming the ashamed, granting power to the powerless.

With all this talk of water, it might be a good Sunday to remember baptism, which is a sign and seal of all we’ve discussed here.

[Note: For the Year A Season of Lent and leading up to Easter, CEP has, in addition to these weekly sermon commentaries, a special Lent and Easter Resource Page with links to whole sermons, commentary on Lenten texts, and more.]