As we have seen in our readings from Numbers earlier this week, the Israelites in the desert grumble and long for the riches of the slavery from which they have been freed rather than standing in grateful obedience to the Lord who has freed them and who is leading them to a land of milk and honey. In a sense, this grumbling is infidelity, but it is also part and parcel of the covenant between God and his chosen people, especially from Jacob on, once Jacob wrestles with the angel that God sent him and receives the name Israel which indicates his vocation to contend with God and with men. I have already alluded to the importance of Israel’s wrestling with God and its significance for all of humanity (https://www.magisspirituality.org/ignatian_reflection/17-07-11/) and how this relationship with God continues through the sons of Israel https://www.magisspirituality.org/ignatian_reflection/17-07-12/.
Israel has the right to wrestle with God, but God has the right to wrestle back, and wrestle back God does in Numbers 13. After forty days in the desert, the sons of Israel are on the cusp of entering and taking the land flowing with milk and honey that God has promised them, but they are divided among themselves and their own gossip causes the entire people to despair of the difficulty that they will face in obtaining God’s promises. We should be attentive to what happens next, because what has happened to Israel can also happen to each one of us. If we lament to God that entering into the calling (vocation) which he offers us is too much and that we would rather spend our lives where we are, then God can say to us, “I will do to you just what I have heard you say. Here in the desert shall your dead bodies fall.” Then our prayer will be answered and we will have gotten exactly what we asked for: to stay where we are, in the desert. But that is not what God wishes for us. He wishes to bring us into that promised land that he had promised, and which he now promises to the descendants of that quarrelsome bunch, since that first group did not actually desire the fulfillment of the promise. We can—and we should—wrestle with God as we are called to do so. But let us learn, with Israel, that the wrestling is not an end in itself but a means towards the life that God wishes to freely share with us. And with every arrival of the fullness of that life is offered us, let us pray that we will cease to wrestle and simply take the Father’s hand and join him in his glory.