(We're going straight through the Bible. We've done this once before and it took us almost ten years. But having reached the end we've gone back to the beginning and are doing it again.)
In Numbers 20 the Israelites come to the desert of Zin and find no water. They complain. Moses makes an appeal to God. The Lord tells Moses: "Take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock can drink.” After chiding the people for their lack of trust, Moses strikes the rock. Water flows forth and the people and animals drink.
In the New Testament Paul makes reference to this event. In 1 Corinthians 10 Paul writes:
For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.
What does Paul mean when he says the rock that gushed forth water in the desert of Zin "was Christ"?
Scholars will point out that 1 Corinthians 10 is an example of Paul's typological reading of the Old Testament. Paul regularly looks back upon the stories of the Old Testament and finds symbolic correspondences with the new reality revealed in Christ. In the passage above from 1 Corinthians 10 the Israelite passage under the cloud and the Red Sea parallels Christian baptism. The mana they eat and the water they drink in the desert provide spiritual sustenance, the same way Christ, who is the Bread of Life and the Water of Life, provides us with spiritual sustenance. Another famous place where Paul deploys this typological reading is in Galatians 4 using Sarah and Hagar as symbolic types of Law and promise.
Paul's typological approach has been much commented on. And it provided a model for the church fathers who frequently applied typological readings to the Old Testament. In fact, Ambrose's typological reading of the Old Testament was one of the big factors that facilitated Augustine's conversion to Christianity. Augustine had been struggling with the Old Testament. Ambrose's typological interpretations of the Old Testament stories gave Augustine a way to read the Old Testament that satisfied is intellectual and moral doubts. Given all this, it's curious how unfashionable typological readings are today. Paul read Scripture this way. Ambrose, Augustine, and the church fathers read Scripture this way. But modern pastors, preachers, and teachers avoid typological readings. Modern readings of the Bible, as taught in most seminaries, are governed by (and I'd say terrorized by) historical-critical methods which are rooted in an Enlightenment epistemology. Word studies and historical analysis are the norm today, not searching for symbolic correspondences.
You could argue, though, that people like Jordan Peterson are reintroducing typological approaches to Scripture. Peterson reads the Old Testaments stories as Jungian symbols and archetypes, windows into psychology and the human predicament. Which is a critical difference. The typological readings of Paul and the church fathers were Christological. The symbols pointed to Christ. Peterson's readings, by contrast, are psychological. Paul says, "This story is about Christ." Peterson says, "This story is about the hero archetype."
Having said all that, the point I made out at the prison took us in a different direction.
Specifically, yes, you could say that the rock of Numbers 20 was a symbol and foreshadowing of Christ. We can establish a typological correspondence. But what if we read the correspondence ontologically? That rock was--literally--Christ.
There is Biblical warrant for this ontological claim. All things were created by Christ and in Christ all things hold together. This would include rocks. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, Christ plays in ten thousand places. Given this stronger ontological understanding, how was the rock in the desert of Zin Christ? Well, the rock saved them. The rock was a mediator of grace. The rock didn't just symbolize Christ, the rock was Christ because Christ is always saving and sustaining us. We can look back upon our lives and see how we've had many saving and sustaining encounters with Christ. Perhaps it wasn't a rock, but it was something.
In his book Unapologetic Francis Spufford describes a moment of conflict, shame, and despair in his romantic relationship. Spufford was the guilty party, and he describes feeling stuck, relationally and emotionally. Mired in these feelings after a bitter argument he finds himself in a coffee shop. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, the middle movement, the Adagio, begins to play. And the music saves him, becomes a mediator of grace. Here is Spufford describing it:
If you don’t know it, it is a very patient piece of music. It too goes round and round, in its way, essentially playing the same tune again and again, on the clarinet alone and then with the orchestra, clarinet and then orchestra, lifting up the same unhurried lilt of solitary sound, and then backing it with a kind of messageless tenderness in deep waves, when the strings join in. It is not strained in anyway. It does not sound as if Mozart is doing something he can only just manage, and it does not sound as if the music is struggling to lift a weight it can only just manage. Yet at the same time, it is not music that denies anything. It offers a strong, absolutely calm rejoicing, but it does not pretend that there is no sorrow. On the contrary, it sounds as if it comes from a world where sorrow is perfectly ordinary, but still there is more to be said. I had heard it lots of times, but this time it felt to me like news. It said: everything you fear is true. And yet. And yet. Everything you have done wrong, you have really done wrong. And yet. And yet. The world is wider than you fear it is, wider than the repeating rigmarole that is in your mind, and it has this in it, as truly as it contains your unhappiness. Shut up and listen, and let yourself count, just a little bit, on a calm that you do not have to be able to make for yourself, because here it is, freely offered. You are still deceiving yourself, said the music, if you don’t allow for the possibility of this. There is more going on here than what you deserve, or don’t deserve. There is this, as well. And it played the tune again, with all the cares in the world.
The novelist Richard Powers has written that the Clarinet Concerto sounds the way mercy would sound, and that’s exactly how I experienced in 1997.
Let us say, "That music was Christ." Not symbolically, but actually. Christ plays in ten thousands places. And if that is so, we come to see, with dawning recognition, that Christ has been saving us our entire lives.
Paul looked at a moment of grace in the story of Israel and declared, "That rock was Christ."
In your story, as well, those rocks exist.
