I remember the sound of water on the land. I spent a couple of weeks hiking in the Italian Alps last summer, and I remember moving through magnificent mountain landscapes, most of the time immersed in some combination of bird song, wind, and water, water everywhere—dripping and trickling between rocks, gurgling in brooks, and thundering over boulders. I remember the sound of water and the delicious taste. One moment stands out: I had crossed over a pass, my water bottles were empty, and I was getting thirsty. I followed the narrow trail down, and eventually I came to a spring whose water filled a granite trough, bigger than a bathtub, to overflowing, and I drank. And I didn’t just drink a little water; I felt like I was drinking the mountain itself. I was drinking the essence of that place and that moment, and I felt like I had never tasted anything like it before (and you can’t bottle that).
I remember how my thirst prepared me to receive the fullness of the gift. Thirst can be a blessing—but of course that’s not all it can be. Israel remembers asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” They were thirsty and an inch away from full-throttle panic. “One hundred hours. That’s … how long a human body can typically survive at ‘average’ temperatures without access to water,” writes Anathea Portier Young.
Today’s Sinai Peninsula averages 82°F in May and 91°F in June. For those same months, average high temperatures are 95°F and 104°F respectively. In such extreme heat and with exposure to sun, the timeline for survival shortens considerably.
She quotes a scholar who has written The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments: “At 90°F survival time with limited activity easily can be decreased by a factor of two.” So instead of a hundred hours, you only have fifty. Now take into account that your activity is far from limited, since you’re “walking long distances in the day time, carrying [your] belongings, tents, and small children, and wrangling livestock along the way.” And it’s quite reasonable also to take into account the possibility of higher than average temperatures when, according to the author of The Biology of Human Survival, “sustained high sweat rates can reduce estimated survival time without drinking water to as little as seven hours, or approximately the time it takes to walk twenty miles.”[1] One unusually, but not impossibly, hot, day was all it would take to finish God’s people; because at Rephidim, there was no water for the people to drink. Israel remembers asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” They were thirsty and an inch away from full-throttle panic, and we know they were not being unreasonable.
“Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart,” Moses said to them at the end of the long journey, before Joshua led them into the promised land.[2] Only in retrospect did the long way become a test. They were formerly enslaved people who had escaped the house of slavery, but they still carried Egypt as a memory in their bones, they still bore the burden of Egypt as a mental state. More than once, they weighed their oppressed but viable lives as forced laborers in Pharaoh’s brick yards against the dangers of the long way through the wilderness. Only in retrospect did they come to see the long way as a test: God was committed to their liberation, but were they?
The testimony of the witnesses about those years is consistent. “We failed the wilderness test,” they tell us. “We had doubt in our heart and fear and little faith.” The testimony of the witnesses is consistent, and they didn’t edit the desert scenes to make themselves look a little better; they didn’t cut the grumbling, the quarreling and complaining, because to them, remembering meant remembering the truth and not some white-washed fiction. “We forgot what God had done,” they told generations to come.
We forgot the miracles the Lord had shown us,
who divided the sea and let us pass through it
and made the waters stand like a heap;
who led us in the daytime with a cloud,
and all night long with fiery light;
who split rocks open in the wilderness,
and gave us drink abundantly as from the deep,
making streams come out of the rock
and causing waters to flow down like rivers.[3]
We failed the test, I hear the wilderness wanderers say, but the promises of God were still new to us then; we were still in our growing-up years as God’s free covenant partners, we still had everything to learn. We failed the test, but we began to trust the faithfulness of God, and tell it, so that every new generation would put their trust in God … and not be like their ancestors, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, and whose spirit was not faithful to God.[4]
Beginning with the wilderness wanderers, every generation passed on the stories to their children and grandchildren and urged them to remember. And they didn’t commission working groups for the beautification of the past and the smoothing of the record. They declared, we have failed again and again in our life as God’s people, but God has been faithful and true all the way. We failed to remember God’s promise and the commandments of life, but God remembered us. We failed to live as God’s people, but through our failure we came to know the wideness of God’s mercy.
In the stories of Israel’s wilderness wanderings, complaining and quarreling are recurring themes: Trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s soldiers, the people said to Moses, with a good pinch of dark humor, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?”[5] Yet soon they marveled as God made a way out of no way.
Then at Marah, they couldn’t drink the water, because it was bitter, and the people complained to Moses, “What shall we drink?”[6] And God showed Moses a piece of wood to sweeten the water.
Then they ran out of food, and again they complained, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”[7] And the Lord gave them quail and manna to eat.
Then the water gave out altogether and the people quarreled with Moses, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst? Give us water to drink.”[8]
Israel’s testimony was born in a long struggle against oppression, against hunger and thirst, against fear and despair and amnesia, the long struggle for a life of justice in covenant with God. Israel’s trust in God was found at the end of their strength, at the very edge of what they could bear: where nothing’s left to lean on but the promise of God. “Go on ahead of the people,” God said to Moses, “and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” And so he did, and the people drank.
God never failed us, the wilderness wanderers told their children. We escaped from the house of slavery. We had food to eat and water to quench our thirst. No one had more than they needed, no one too little. God was faithful, and we learned to be faithful to each other. Not that we never failed each other again; God knows we did. But in the wilderness, we drank God’s word like our life depended on it, and we have been sustained by this living water ever since. God’s presence and promise is water for our deepest thirst.
Water is essential for life to flourish. And because water is essential for all living things, and water connects all living things from the cellular level to oceans and atmospheric rivers, water is also one of our richest metaphors. And so we learn to say with the Psalmist,
As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.[9]
And at the same time, we also try to fully grasp that access to clean water is precarious for billions of people, and that the next war may not be fought over oil, but over water.[10]
When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, he asks her to give him a drink. It is wonderfully ironic that the giver of living water is himself thirsty, asking for the most basic and most precious gift. To the woman, he’s little more than a curious man without a bucket, but soon she’ll recognize the face of Christ in the stranger. He needs what only she can give, and she needs what only he can give. This is how intimately connected God and humanity are, writes Osvaldo Vena: “A thirsty Messiah and a resourceful woman … find out that they need each other,”[11] and life-giving water flows—from her to him, from him to her, and from them to us. In giving and receiving, we come to know the faithfulness of God and learn to be faithful to each other. May we drink deeply from this spring.
[1] Anathea Portier Young https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-exodus-171-7-11
[2] Deuteronomy 8:2
[3] See Psalm 78:11-16
[4] Ps 78:7-8
[5] Exodus 14:11-12
[6] Exodus 15:23-24
[7] Exodus 16:2-3
[8] Exodus 17:3
[9] Psalm 42:1-1
[10] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210816-how-water-shortages-are-brewing-wars
[11] Osvaldo Vena https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-john-45-42-3