In the course of my master’s, we did a class on theology and the arts, and one thing we focused on in particular was iconography. This comes out of the Eastern Orthodox tradition: icons are two-dimensional representations of saints or special moments in their lives, which act as windows to the heavenly, in essence. And due to the density of their visual theological meaning, when one creates an icon, it is called writing an icon, not painting.

Icons are written always upon a golden background, created with gold leaf. And the dimensions of an icon usually look funny, especially with their somber faces and huge eyes, but everything is shaped in a kind of reverse perspective, so that instead of receding away as things do in reality, the icon seems to be advancing toward you. It’s strange and surreal, but how else can one represent the heavenly realm?

The idea is that the saint represented in the icon is in fact looking at you, not the reverse. It is peering at you from heaven, from the presence of God, inviting you closer to Him. I get the same feeling when I read Scripture. That it is peering into me, examining me, and calling me closer to Jesus. It’s like gazing into a mirror sometimes.

 

In Exodus 15:22-27, the first thing that happens after the Israelites cross the Red Sea is they complain. Surprising, right? They went three days into the wilderness with no water, and when they did find water in a place called Marah, they couldn’t drink its waters because they were bitter. (Marah means ‘bitterness,’ which is why it was named that in the first place.) Possibly due to something like a thirst-induced delirium, they begin to panic and complain against Moses, wondering what they are to drink. Moses cries out to God, who shows him a piece of wood (or a tree, these are the same word in Hebrew), and Moses throws the wood into the waters, and they become sweet and drinkable.

The second portion of this little pericope (story) is a little odd, because then it says that God puts them to the test and tells them if they obey His commands and keep His statutes, He will not bring the same diseases upon them as He did the Egyptians, just a few chapters earlier. He says this is because He is Yhwh who heals them. You may know this phrase as “Jehovah Rophe.” It’s puzzling, because if the Israelites are well, why is He telling them He heals them when they don’t have any diseases? Do they need healing at this moment?

There are two levels of resonance in this text, beyond the literary context. The book of Exodus is attributed to Moses by tradition, and this statement is fraught with lots of places for current biblical scholarship to jump in and disagree. There is the possibility that Moses, as we know him, did not exist, not to mention the fact that the earliest forms of alphabetic writing did not begin to spring up in the Levant until after the Bronze Age, which is when the Exodus is located in time. 

As a scholar, I can say with confidence that while Moses likely did not write down the Torah himself, if anything can be traced back to Moses, it would have to be through the oral tradition. This means that Israel only had the infrastructure in place in order to begin writing down their own history once they were exiled in the 6th century BCE. By infrastructure, I mean scribal training and physical resources, which were not widely available, only to an elite literati.

Why is this so important? What do I mean by this dual resonance? What was it the Israelites needed healing from, there in the desert? This is where I was able to add another level of resonance in my reading this morning, filtering it through my experiences in the last year.

This time of year, for most, if not all of us, is a traumatic anniversary. The experiences I had last year make it actually very painful to think about what happened a year ago. This time last year, while we were in lockdown, I went through a breakup, in almost complete isolation. It was a very unhealthy relationship, and brief as it was, I am still today sorting through wounds I received in those few months. And now, I am remembering how excruciating it was to experience such an ugly breakup while having to be isolated from anybody I love. There was no comfort at all for me. Those months made up the darkest period of my life.

I am probably not the only one who also finds it difficult to pray lately. I feel so dry and receive little joy or consolation when I am able to formulate a short prayer. I also feel somewhat emotionally dry, and haven’t been able to cry much in the last nine months or so. It’s like I used up all my tears in those months of lockdown in 2020. It’s a really foreign and strange place to be, psychologically.

By instinct, I still pray, but my prayers are like fleeting glances at the face of God, and my relationship with Him right now feels stiff and cold while I am healing. I still don’t understand why I had to experience that feeling of near-abandonment. My hope is that the total experience will be redeemed for some greater purpose in the future.

In this story from Exodus, I find my reflection there in the bitter waters of Marah. I am bitter. I need healing. I need transforming. Just as a people subjugated to hundreds of years of slavery, once freed, would have been bitter. And just as a people, subjugated once again by foreign rule, in exile from their homelands, would have been bitter as well.

God brought visible diseases upon the Egyptians by the plagues. But bitterness is inward, and while the Israelites may have been physically healthy, they most certainly were bitter at this point in their history, whether it be post-exodus, or during exile. I don’t want my pain to poison me, the bitterness I experienced to embitter me.

I look at the waters of Marah and I see my own tears. Once a few years ago, I felt God gave me a promise that what tasted bitter to me at that moment would one day taste sweet, and it came from this same story. I find myself physically in the same place as I was when He spoke that to me. I am back in the stark, sagebrush steppes of Central Washington, drinking not only the bitterness of memory, but also the bitterness of loneliness and isolation from my dear friends in Europe.

The solution is not to find new waters, but to transform these waters of bitterness into sweet, live-giving waters. The Bible says Moses threw a tree into the water in order to do that. Not only can wood be used to purify water—like Moringa olifeira seed cakes, or charcoal, both bitter things—but this tree/wood so strikingly makes me think of another tree of bitterness. The Cross.

Maybe it seems impossible. Maybe our desert thirst has made us forget the greatness we have seen God demonstrate in our own lives. But when He leads us to the waters waters of Marah, bitter though they may be, we must drink them, or else perish in the desert.

I still cling to that promise, that what tastes bitter to me—to us—now, will one day taste sweet. I am confident of that. And I am also confident that, if we choose to let Him, He will heal our souls from bitterness and create rivers of living water within us.