Came to a depressed halt in the middle of Numbers this week. I find the saga of the people of Israel coming up to the edge of the Promised Land, and refusing to go in, one of the more depressing parts of the Bible, almost as nail-biting sad as Samson, the Levite’s Concubine, David and Bathsheba, the whole book of Jeremiah, and the Crucifixion. You know it’s coming, you dread it, you steel yourself and read it anyway, you breathe a sigh of relief, you hope that next time will be easier. But of course I don’t mean you, I mean me.
How terrible, I always say to myself, that the people of Israel would come right up to the edge and peer over into the verdant and abundant landscape and conclude that God is giving them a bad deal. To reach such a conclusion after seeing so much of God, so many marvelous works, and having fallen into so much disobedience already. From the first moment of leaving Egypt, the people have been unhappy, but here they finally are. Here is all the nice food, the rest, the peace and promise. How appalling that they would look at the hills, the streams, the vineyards, and conclude that it is a bad deal, that God is trying to give them something impossible and bad.
Except that it is exactly like the unfathomable irrationality leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus. The whole wide breadth and depth of Jerusalem have the chance to peer at the Son of God in the face, to look him over and hear his voice, and they conclude that he is not a good deal for them, indeed, that he himself is not good. The violence, fear, grief, and confusion, so many thousands of years separated, almost perfectly mirror each other. Up to and including the man who goes out to gather sticks on the Sabbath. The people gather as one to stone him at the command of God. They take him outside of the camp to stone him, one man dying when the whole company is miserably guilty.
It’s a discouraging picture to examine because it is such a human picture. It is the usual and unremarkable picture of the human person coming unglued in the presence of God, devolving into a chaotic irrational mess, clinging so tightly to the idol of the self that blind misery prevents the soul from seeing the goodness of the thing right under the nose.
Indeed, these two moments cut to the heart of what it means to be human–the inborn, entrenched voracious longing to be god yourself. Such a desire, endured in dissatisfaction in the wilderness, nursed by excuses and self-justification, so ubiquitously a part of human consciousness that no one ever is able to question it, unravels under the gaze of the Almighty. All God has to do is say, come in here and rest for a while, and the human heart is thrown into a fury.
Come to me, all you who labor, said Jesus, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke and learn from me. That’s what he says. That’s who he is. He is himself the land promised, the rest you need from yourself and from everything. He is the calm in the frenzied storm of human entitlement and confusion. He is the food for the spiritually starving, the rational order of the universe for the person who can’t muddle his, or indeed her way out of an internet sized paper bag. If you go to him and look at him and conclude that he is good and that what he is offering is good, you can finally have rest. Mostly from yourself, but also from the confusion of everyone in every corner, virtual or real.
The best thing, if you’re prancing around on the edge of yourself, trying to decide what to do or who to be, beating back the fatigue and anxiety of your dry and dusty daily life, is to go to church. It’ll be fine. Go in the door. Sit down in a pew. Look at the rational and self-collecting mercy of God.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In