Series: Lectionary Notes
tl;dr: Water is important and God loves everyone, even when we think they're enemies of God.
There's not as much standing out to me this week as the absolutely loaded texts last week. We do get a major motif of water. We also continue with some themes from last week like the role of faith and the expansion of God's love to include those outside of the Jewish people in God's Kingdom.
Exodus 17:1-7 and Psalm 95
I'll group these two together because the Psalm is referencing the events of the Exodus text. The big theme here is that people are often not grateful, to God or others. Not long after God has done lots of miraculous rescuing Israel, the Israelites are complaining.
I will note, though, that their complaints seem a bit more valid here than in some other texts. I know there is at least one other place where they say they have no food and also they hate this food, which seems like an intentional way to say that they were being ungrateful even when things are actually fine for them. This time, though? They actually don't have water. It explicitly says that they don't have water to drink. That's a pretty big problem. People need water, and frequently. You can survive longer without food, and you can survive a lot longer with only boring food like manna every day. But no water is a death sentence in a short amount of time.
Water is also often considered part of having a home. If you don't have a water source, you do not settle there. For a bunch of people who just left what was their home, then the promise of a new home takes them out to somewhere that by definition cannot possibly be home because it doesn't even have water, I can understand the frustration.
So you know what, I'm on the side of the complainers on this one. If your leadership and your god takes you out into the middle of nowhere and sets you up for almost certain death, it's pretty reasonable to be a little annoyed by that and to start asking for that water immediately, before people start dying.
Moses comes across as the actual whining villain here to me, going to God and complaining that they are upset with him, rather than pointing out that uh, hey, we could use some water to not die. God comes out a little better, quickly offering a solution to the actual problem of the lack of water, although it still kind of feels like something that God maybe should have thought of beforehand.
I know this text is traditionally preached as being proof of how Israel could so quickly forget that God cares about them, and the psalm leans into that, but that's really not working for me this week. I want to lean in to the theme of the importance of water instead.
Romans 5:1-11
I do love this text, even if does carry some baggage that sometimes it gets illustrated penal substitutionary atonement style with a giant gap between us and God. I actually think it undermines that framework a bit, because that framework is often presented with a starting point of how much God hates you in your sin and cannot stand being around you.
This text is precisely the opposite. No matter how much we have messed up, no matter how much we have made ourselves enemies of God, God remains consistent in extreme love to the point of a brutal death on a cross.
That is what saves us, giving us the endurance to get through tough situations. These aren't just first world problem tough situations, either. As I touched on last week, the audience of this letter would be mostly poor slaves at the heart of the oppressive Empire. Their situations were about as tough as it gets. It is into those kinds of situations that Paul writes that God continues to love us and save us from.
Maybe you could even say that it is the kind of extreme situations like not having any water to keep a massive group of people from dying. If we want to tie this back into the first text, maybe the emphasis really needs to be on God's provision rather than on Israel's complaining.
John 4:5-42
This text could go in a few different directions, but I'm going to stick to a couple of the themes that have already come up.
One, water is really important. Water is absolutely essential to life and a sense of home.
Two, God's love breaks down barriers. Samaritans were seen as enemies, maybe like the ones mentioned in Romans. Like Paul in last week's Romans text, Jesus maintains the tension of two things here:
- "Salvation is from the Jews." That part of the story of God is essential and it is from there, that marginalized group of people, that the story continues. We can't simply erase it in declaring Christianity a replacement.
- But the time is coming where God's love and salvation expands beyond Jews.
Jesus demonstrates some of that expansion by revealing who he was to the Samaritan woman. She then expands it from there, preaching it to others. That's our call, too, to keep expanding that love.
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