On the Shoulders or On the Rock
Exodus 7: 1-7
If you’ve been following the story of the Exodus so far, then it will come as no surprise to you that the children of Israel wandering in the desert are complaining. This time, they want water! Once again Moses is on the spot. But God reassures him. Strike the rock with your stick, and water will come out of it. What God actually says, is: “Here, I stand before you on the rock at Horev. You are to strike the rock, and water shall come out of it, and the people shall drink.” Moses does what God says and the people drink. And Moses calls the place Massah and Meriba, “testing” and “quarreling,” because of the contentious questioning of the people, who wondered, according to scripture: “Is God among us, or not?”[1]
God tells Moses, “I stand before you on the rock.” God has separated Himself from the people, standing on a rock waving, “I’m over here!” And this, ironically, proves to them what’s always been true: God is among them. But they can’t see that God is among them until God is separated from them, until God is revealed in some kind of outside event. Only when they see God is separate from them will they believe that God has been with them the whole time.
There’s a rabbinical story: A child asks her father to carry her on his shoulders. He does so gladly. As they travel, the child sees things she wants and says, “Give me this! Give me that!” and the father gladly gives them. But then they see a stranger on the road, and she asks the stranger, “Have you seen my father?” The father in frustration throws the child on the ground, and a dog bites her. [2
Ugh. Don’t do that to your child. Don’t spoil her that bad, and don’t throw her on the ground, and don’t let her get bit by a dog. But this is not a true story, one hopes, but a parable about our relationship with God. It’s a story about a necessary psychological stage we all need to go through: separation. Freudian theory maintains that an infant believes her parents are an extension of herself. That’s what happens to the little girl in the parable: she has forgotten that her father is separate from her, and believes he’s just an extension of herself. She is all ego, and has no concept that any part of the world isn’t a part of her. This concept doesn’t really come until children start to learn that sometimes the world says “no.” That’s when they realize that the world is larger than them. That’s when they begin to notice their parents are separate from them, and that the world is larger than themselves. That’s when they discover boundaries.
We long for God to carry us the same way the father carries the little girl. But the irony is that we’d never notice God if that’s what He did. God would just be an extension of our egos, of ourselves. We’d believe the world was all about ourselves, and we’d really be right. God would just be the tool for our gratification. That’s what’s sometimes frustrating about the complaint we so often hear that if God loved us, then God would end violence, God would make peace happen, God would make the bad go away and only good would happen. That’s really us humans complaining that the universe is not all about us and our human needs. It is a very selfish, human-centered perspective.
But there’s another side to that. Infants believe that the whole world is about themselves, and that makes them quite fearful. The world seems unboundaried and limitless and frightening. It actually eases their anxiety to discover that they are not the center of the universe, that they have parents who take care of them, that they have friends who have their own needs, that they don’t have to solve their own problems by themselves. At our deepest level, we humans know that we need others in our lives. The Biblical teaching is so true: “It is not good for the human to be alone.”
The little girl sitting on her dad’s shoulders knows that same intense, existential loneliness, or she wouldn’t ask, “Where is my father?” Even though she’s riding on his shoulders, she doesn’t know it, and she feels afraid and alone. Only when he takes her off his shoulders and she sees that he is separate from her, a different person, does she realize that he has always been with her, and she is not alone.
That’s how it is for the lost Children of Israel, wandering the desert. They are newly freed slaves, and though they’ve known hard work their whole lives, they’ve never been free, and so really don’t know how to take care of themselves. They demand of God, “Save us! Feed us! Guide us! Quench our thirst!” and God carries them on His shoulders. But to the freed slaves, every question is a test, a way to prove either “that God is among us—or not.”
The word for “not” in Hebrew, is the sixteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet—ayin. Ayin means more than “not”—it means “nothing.” Either the Lord is among us—or nothing. If there is no God, then the world is just this overwhelming extension of ourselves, of our egos. There’s no higher purpose for living. There are no boundaries, nothing that isn’t us. There will be, for all intents and purposes, nothing but us. We will be deeply, existentially alone.
When I was in high school I was a regular journal writer. In many ways it formed my identity. But as I got older, I got away from it. These days, I only write in my journal occasionally. I reread some recent journal entries and guess what? I find I only write when I’m depressed or angry. It appears that the only time I journal now is when I’m in trouble! I don’t do it just to celebrate life, or my friends or my loved ones. These days, I only journal in crisis.
It is an unfortunate human reality that when times go well, we take God for granted. There’s little need for much self-reflection or personal growth, so we don’t tend to do much of it. But when crisis comes along, we’re forced out of our complacent shell. We realize that the world isn’t about us anymore. We recognize how much we need to grow—how much we need one another—and how much we need God. And so we become better people.
In crisis we have to discover God standing on the rock—God outside of ourselves—God who is bigger than us and our problems. Only a God that big can help us. Sometimes we discover God in an unexpected good thing, like water from the rock. But in Exodus, right after the Israelites receive water from a rock, they will be attacked by the Amelekites, and discover God’s support and defense of them in a calamity.
Now in either case, it’s not obvious that God is doing it. Perhaps Moses could see God standing on the rock from which water will flow. But did anyone else? Yet God was there. And likewise, and maybe more so, who could possibly see God in the attack of the Amelekites? And yet God is there for them.
When my daughter Sara Caitlin was in fifth grade, I received a call from the emergency room of the hospital. She’d been bitten in the face by a dog. In a panic, I drove the handful of blocks that separated my church in Bethesda, Maryland, from the main hospital in town. I got there slightly before Margaret was able to. When I saw my daughter, she was smiling with a nurse, but as soon as she saw me, she melted into tears, and so did I. She had bite marks at the corner of one eye and through her cheek. The doctor came in and stitched her up and here was a miracle: the on-call doc that day was a professional plastic surgeon. The surgery has healed up so well that the marks are more like beauty marks than anything else on my beautiful daughter today.
I don’t know that Sara Caitlin in any way needed proof that her parents loved her that day in the ER. But I know this: that day I knew for sure that I loved my daughter.
This ultimately is the reason we can trust God to be with us when the dog comes to bite us. It’s because God loves us. Where else would He be?