The Lectionary Readings this week from the Book of Numbers and the Book of Deuteronomy continue to describe the journey of the Israelites to the Promised Land led by Moses. Not an easy journey, not an easy people.

They grumble, they/re jealous, they doubt.  They’re hardly heroic as they journey on. Listen to their laments:  “Would that we had meat for food! We remember the fish we used to eat without cost in Egypt and the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now we are famished; we see nothing before us but this manna.”

 Moses is hardly a secure leader. unaffected by them: 

“Why do you treat your servant so badly?” Moses asked the LORD.”Why are you so displeased with me that you burden me with all this people?Was it I who conceived all this people?  Or was it I who gave them birth, that you tell me to carry them at my bosom, like a foster father carrying an infant,to the land you have promised under oath to their fathers?Where can I get meat to give to all this people? For they are crying to me, ‘Give us meat for our food.’ I cannot carry all this people by myself,for they are too heavy for me If this is the way you will deal with me, then please do me the favor of killing me at once, so that I need no longer face this distress.”

Exhausted by the journey, Moses has hqd enough.

Are the new people of God so different from their ancestors in the desert? Are its leaders better than Moses?

One reason we read the Old Testament is it’s a mirror for the New.