The Ministry of the Word at Saint Francis
Rock of ages
Preached by the Rev. Phillip Channing Ellsworth, Jr., the Third Sunday in Lent, March 27, 2011 at Saint Francis Episcopal
Church, Potomac, Maryland. Based on the lesson appointed from the seventeenth chapter of Exodus.
W
hen Jesus on the cross takes upon himself
the curse of the covenant in order that
blessing might come to us, he is not being
a kinder, gentler version of the God whom those poor,
benighted souls of the Old Testament were made to
suffer. No. That Israel’s God is willing to take his own
judgement upon himself is there in redemptive history
right from the start. It’s built into the covenant God
made with Abraham.
In that covenant [Gen. 15] God promises unconditionally to bless Abraham and to give him an eternal
inheritance. What staggers Abraham isn’t the seed
promise that God will make him the father of many
nations but the promise that God will give his offspring
the land. So God swears that promise in the form of a
covenant and Abraham falls into a deep sleep and in
a theophany God appears in a cloudy, fiery, smoking
pot that goes down between a bunch of split carcasses.
In symbolism well-attested in the ancient world and
which appears again in Jeremiah [34], God is in effect
saying, “If I don’t keep my word to give your offspring
this land as an inheritance, I invoke on myself the
curses portrayed in these dismembered animals that are
right now feeding with their carcasses the birds of the
air. I invoke on myself that.”
This story is of a piece with today’s story from
Exodus. Things in the wilderness aren’t going the way
the people want them to and they make sure Moses
knows about it. Their complaining has progressed from
grumbling when they went three days in the desert of
Shur without water to more grumbling with respect to
the manna and quail. But here at Rephidim things have
gotten to the point where they’re about to die of thirst
and “the people quarreled with Moses.” Moses responds to them saying, “Why do you quarrel with me?
Why do you test the Lord?” Moses can’t possibly meet
the need of all these people and he recognizes that their
quarrel isn’t with him anyway but with the Lord.
They’re doing more than grumbling now; their
complaint has escalated into a legal action. The word
‘quarrel’ is the Hebrew word [vayyarev] for ‘lodging a
legal complaint’. In Hebrew, this is Moses’s only way
of saying “Why did you put the Lord on trial?” Moses
being God’s man, that’s what they’re doing: putting
Yahweh in the dock.
Israel wants a trial, charging Moses with a capital
offense. That’s why Moses says, “They’re about to stone
me.” When people are stoned in the Bible it isn’t a
mob action. It’s a judicial execution. So the question
becomes, “What’s God going to do with Israel putting
him on trial?” And God answers by saying, You want a
trial? I’ll give you a trial.
G
od sets up a court. “And the Lord answered
Moses, “Walk ahead of the people, take some
of the elders of Israel.” Why elders? God’s calling a jury; the elders will assume the role of witnesses
at the trial. “And take in your hand the staff.” Why the
staff? It is, like a judge’s gavel, a symbol of authority. In
ancient Israel you could tell who the judge is in a trial
by seeing who’s holding the staff. The staff will actually
be used, in some cases, as the implement of smiting, the
judge not just hearing the evidence and pronouncing
the verdict but also executing the sentence immediately. So there Moses is holding the staff [cf. Isaiah 10, “the
rod of my anger, staff of my fury”].
Then God says, “And I will stand before you on
the rock at Horeb.” What’s this stand before business?
With the one exception of Jesus standing before Pilate,
this is the only passage in the Bible where God stands
before a man at a trial. In all other passages, men stand
before God. Those other courtroom examples include
the daughters of Zelophehad standing before Moses
because they had a problem about their inheritance
rights [Num 27]. In 1 Kings [3] two prostitutes came
to Solomon — remember the ones debating about
whose baby it was? — and the Bible says, “they stood
before Solomon.” The accused stand before the judge.
In the New Testament, John the evangelist [8] writes,
“The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought a
woman caught in adultery and they made her stand
before the group.” Standing is the posture of the person
who’s in the dock.
S
o who is in the dock at Rephidim? Who is put
on trial at Mt. Sinai? God. Who’s acting out the
part of judge? Moses. Now let’s say you and I are
in that company of elders. What would we expect?
What would I expect? Here is God in a theophany
possessing the rock, the rock symbolizing God. ‘Rock’
is one of Moses’ favorite names for God. We shouldn’t
be thinking in terms of a little stone. The word ‘rock’
is a word used to refer to all of Mount Sinai. So here’s
the rock, a physical expression of God who in the glory
cloud localizes himself on the rock. There’s Moses with
the staff, the rod of judgement. Israel, represented by
her elders, witnesses the case. As elders, what are we to
expect will happen now that we, brazen, have put God
in the dock?
I'll tell you what. We expect that God will say to
Moses, “You see that staff by which you smote the Nile
and caused it to divide, the instrument by which you
brought plagues against Egypt?” We expect God to say
to his man, “Lift the staff and point it at the elders, and
let them have the justice they deserve.”
That’s what we would expect, but that’s not what
happens. Instead God confides in Moses saying, “Lift
the staff. I’ll stand before you on the rock at Horeb.
Strike the rock . . . and water will come out of it so that
the people can drink.” It’s nearly impossible to imagine.
Here’s God’s awesome pillar of glory cloud resting there
on the rock. Moses lifts the rod. If we have any wits
about us, if we remember what that rod has wrought,
we know that when God’s man strikes the glory cloud,
everybody save Moses will be blown to smithereens.
That is what ought to happen; but it’s not what happens. Instead, when God’s glory cloud and the rock
which bears his presence are struck, God takes the
blow, and water flows out of the rock. God receives the
judgement that the people might receive the blessing.
God the Rock takes upon himself the judgement that
Israel deserved. And she gets to have a drink on the
house.
How can Yahweh be the object of judicial execution?
How can God receive the judgement that we might
receive the blessing? These are the kinds of questions
we bring with us to this altar. This is why we sing “Rock
of ages, cleft for me.”
J
esus identified that Rock with himself. In the gospel according to John, when Israel was celebrating
the Feast of Tabernacles whereby she remembered
these events, in the rites of Jesus’s day, in that eight-day
celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, they would
take water, and the priest would pour out water on the
ground, and everyone imagined that somehow it would
run out of the Temple and go all the way down to the
Jordan and ultimately into the Dead Sea, figuratively
giving life or blessing to it and causing it to sweeten.
They had this rite that they would perform whereby
God’s people would remember, O yes, this is our way
of remembering how God took care of our thirst in the
wilderness. They would do that for seven days. But on
the eighth day, the priest wouldn’t do that.
John the evangelist tells us that Jesus on the eighth
day, on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, stood
up in the midst of everybody and identified himself
as that Rock. “Jesus stood up and said in a loud voice,
‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, and let him
drink who comes to me. Whoever believes in me as the
scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from
within’” [ John 7:37].
Jesus lays claim to that old miracle, causing Israel to
kind of transpose it to a higher key and recognize that
the literal water represented spiritual water, everything
that we would ever need to satisfy our deepest longings. For that reason the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians
10 said that “Israel drank the same spiritual drink, for
they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied
them, and that rock was Christ.” As John tells the story,
“everyone who heard Jesus on that day said, ‘No one
ever spoke the way this man does.’” Amen.