The Question
War and the wilderness
From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. The people quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses said to them, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” But the people thirsted there for water, and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do for this people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord said to Moses, “Go on ahead of the people 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.” Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called the place Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”
Exodus 17:1-7
But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.
Romans 5:8, 10
So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
John 4:5-151
A voice of many crying in the wilderness: “Is God with us or not?”
This is what God’s people ask. They didn’t only ask it in our Exodus reading. No, this question lies in the hearts of God’s people across time and place, a question God’s people have asked in all kinds of droughts and famines. It’s a question we might ask not only in hunger, but, like the author of Ecclesiastes, amid decadent feasts that somehow feel like famines in their emptiness.
This is the question that tells you you’re in the wilderness, spiritually barren. Like a cold wind across years of built-up sand dunes, where suddenly your life has become too quiet, too many people missing.
But your wilderness may not be that quiet or empty. Your wilderness might look like a digital blitzkrieg. I open up my computer to streams of war, then I take a break from the big screen of my computer with the little screen of my phone, more streams of war (but apparently it’s not a war, according to the Department of War). Wilderness can be an onslaught of information, of endless scrolling, the weight of bad news getting worse, helplessness in a world spiraling out of control.
At its core, wilderness is a place of alienation from God and the world. Estrangement, isolation, distance. It is not hard to feel alienated in a cold New England winter in the woods by yourself, but we can be alienated even if we never lack people. As Carl Jung famously said, “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” Many people feel that kind of loneliness. It only makes matters worse if you cannot communicate what you really feel to God, trying to hide with fig leaves from the Maker for eating the wrong apple.
Wilderness is in far more pages in the Bible than nomadic life outside of Egypt. Tim Mackie has described the “Exodus Way” in Scripture, even before we get to the Book of Exodus. In fact, we get two whole chapters in Genesis of being fully connected, unalienated, united with God, where there is no question that God is with us, for we are fully with God as he desired in creation. But we split ourselves off from God before we could even get around to naming the zebras (they’re at the end of the alphabet).
So begins our long distance relationship from God. After that first bite of the apple, God’s very first words were calling to us humans hiding ourselves: “Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9) After breaking God’s heart, we then leave the Garden for the first exodus that we have never fully returned from. While it is a pure coincidence that the “Wilderness of Sin” mentioned in Exodus 17 shares the same word as the English word “sin,” which comes from a totally different origin, it is striking that both describe alienation.
What is a key feature of our human condition of sin, alienation, and estrangement? A word that we know too well, a phenomenon we must have named right after the zebras: war. While we get two chapters of the whole Bible where we are fully united with God, we only have three chapters before there is violence. It seems our war against God makes us at war with each other, and war marks humanity almost as much as being in spiritual exile. For the Israelites, the wilderness included war, and it includes war in our world once again.
War, even for good causes, should not be lusted after, worshipped, or championed, but mourned and respected as an awful fact of our human condition that is in the wilderness away from God’s rest. When we are barraged with information about barrages of bombs, it is not hard to wonder, “Is God with us,” along with its flipside, “Is God with them?” Is God with the ordinary people of Iran in a war they didn’t choose, like the girls killed in the primary school in Minab? Is God with our troops who have sacrificed themselves for this cause? Is God with us when we feel helpless to do anything about it?
So when the Israelites are in their wilderness, in between wars with different tribes, thirsty, and afraid, is it any wonder they would ask, “Is God with us or not?”
What does God do in response to this question? He calls on his servant. He strikes the rock. Paul would later say, “This rock was Christ,” (1 Cor 10:4), and he doesn’t mean Jesus of Nazareth was teleported into the desert; he means that Christ, the eternal Word made flesh as God’s very being, was already at work, split open to sustain and provide for his wilderness people. He did so even when they were in total amnesia about all God had done for them, and he did so even though they would go on to sin and sin some more in the Wilderness of Sin.
But there it was, living water. It was not the Israelites’ wars over tribes that liberated them. It was not their own wisdom that sustained them. It was the protection of God, the movement of the Spirit, the saving Grace before they understood how deep their need for a savior was.
Why did God do this? Because our entire time away from him, God has been trying to get us back in his arms. His “where are you?” is still echoing as he seeks us, and his living water has never stopped flowing. You might think of the love of God in Jesus Christ like one of those “endless stews” you hear about on the Travel Channel (when we still had that) or YouTube now, when restaurants have the same broth going for decades upon decades that just keeps getting ingredients added in, perpetually serving people over and over. This is the love of God, a never-ending pot of life-giving, life-nourishing, sustaining water mixed in with the flesh of Christ, eternal life.
Jesus hints at this to the woman at the well. She was a Samaritan woman, an enemy to the Jews, an outsider also living in the wilderness along with her people. She comes to the same well that God brought their shared ancestor Jacob to all those years ago. And she encounters Jesus. She is just as confused as Nicodemus was when he snuck to see Jesus in the middle of the night,2 and just as confused as Jesus’ disciples in broad daylight,3 but unlike these men who puffed themselves up on their piety, this Samaritan woman is the only one who is offered living water by Jesus and actually drinks from it without waiting to fully understand. How could she understand? How could we? But in encountering the living water, even though she didn’t fully understand, she dropped her jar to be a jar of Christ’s water, sharing it with her town, becoming known as the “first evangelist” in Scripture. For something in her knew in that moment, even if she couldn’t fully explain it, that God was with them, even their enemies.
War continues to rip people apart. We are still enemies to each other, which shows we are still enemies of God, as we have been from the third chapter. We continue to be enemies to God when we continue to be enemies to each other. Perhaps this is why the greatest commandment is two in conjunction: love God and love neighbor. And you don’t need me to tell you that we don’t always do either so well.
But—and here we get a great “but” of grace—as Paul says, “While we were still enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son.” (Romans 5:10). God did not wait for us to be at peace with him or each other. While we were still enemies, Christ died for us. God did not wait, and will not wait, for this war to end. He will not wait for leaders to come to their senses. He will not wait for wicked men to be good. He will not wait for humanity to stop being awful, or else I imagine he’d be waiting forever.
God does not wait in vain. But “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8). While we were asking, “Is God with us or not?” he said again and again and then once and for all on the cross, “Yes. Believe it or not—and you often won’t believe it—I am with you.”
He has always been our water in the wilderness, even when we did not know it. He is water even in the brutal wilderness of war that too many people we have prayed for in recent years have known. I guarantee you that the people of Iran who are caught up in this war are being given grace by God. They are receiving in ways that may be totally foreign to us and in horrible moments most of us will never have to experience, because his grace is hidden in the cracks of tragedy and human depravity. That’s what he does: he is a grace-giver to those who are dying, a helper in times of trouble, with them and us in life and death. They may not know God like we know God, but neither did the Samaritan woman, and at any rate, many of us who follow and claim Christ have no better love of God or neighbor than anyone else.
But Christ died for us all. He did not wait. He struck the rock—he struck himself—so that the living water of grace is offered to all of us. He offers us living water to be transformed by his glory when we lack it. This living water is a river from the desert all the way back into the garden of God’s true rest, the intimacy of his being that all humans call home. We drink of it not by proofs, signs, or AI, but by faith.
While we are in the wilderness, if there is anything we can do to drink from that living water, to grab the hand reaching out to us, it is to grab the cup God offers through prayer. It is to keep praying to extend that cup back out to our neighbors and to do so in our actions. When we pray for everyone in war, we may not know exactly what all we are praying for, especially if we are praying for both sides of a conflict—can one pray for our own servicemembers and for Iranian mothers grieving their children? It depends on what we pray for. If we pray for domination, conquest, victory, and the triumph of our violence, we cannot pray for everyone. But we can pray for everyone when we pray prayers of mercy. Prayers of mourning, for a quick end to war, for the innocent, and even prayers for the guilty who truly need Christ’s mercy.
So, back to the question: “Is God with us? Is God with them?” There is only one answer. For while we were thirsty, God offered us living water. And while we were still sinners, still enemies, still wielding death upon each other, Christ died for us all. May you drink from his waters of mercy, and when you get a cup, run to share it. Amen.
The full lectionary reading is John 4:5-42, which I encourage you to read, but is quite long to reprint here.
John 3
John 4:31-34