(Audio)
For if you do not believe that I AM,
you will die in your sins.
If we don't know who Jesus is we become like the children of Israel who get tired of the desert journey and complain about God and Moses. We lose sight of the bigger plan and pilgrimage because of more proximate problems. Food and water are surely significant. But trusting in the one who made them and provides them is more important.
In punishment the LORD sent among the people saraph serpents,
which bit the people so that many of them died.
Complaints seem innocent but quickly turn deadly. Even without literal serpents, complaints themselves have the ability to poison community until it begins to tear itself apart. Those who lead us on earth are not always as good as Moses. We often feel that our desert and our shortages are bad enough to merit complaint. It is true that legitimate criticism has its place when leadership is not being carried out in a Godly way, as it often is not in our time. But before we get started on that criticism we need to orient ourselves to the identity of our true LORD and leader.
For if you do not believe that I AM,
you will die in your sins.
When we don't know who Jesus is we become desperate in our need to condemn the leaders of this world who seem, without Jesus, to be absolute. When we know the one who is the great I AM we realize that he has allowed the leaders of the world to have their power without necessarily approving it. Seeing this greater plan our criticism can be constructive rather than complaining.
How can we still see Jesus as he is when times are hard, when leaders are failing us, and we are tempted to complain?
When you lift up the Son of Man,
then you will realize that I AM,
and that I do nothing on my own,
but I say only what the Father taught me.
Let us look at the one who had the right to complain but opened not his mouth. Let us look at the true leader that belongs to what is above who bore the insults of those who belonged to what is below. His strategy for offering them the chance to repent was quite different from our complaining. Rather than spread serpents throughout the desert he bore all of the weight of our complaints on himself.
We need to gaze upon the cross, upon whom our own complaints have pierced, before we start complaining about anything else. We need to learn to see all things from the perspective of the Paschal mystery. It may mean that our desert journey passes through death before arriving at the Promised Land. But it does mean a certainty that we will arrive eventually.
“The LORD looked down from his holy height,
from heaven he beheld the earth,
To hear the groaning of the prisoners,
to release those doomed to die.”
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