Rolling the Stone

Genesis 29:1–14; 1 Corinthians 10:1–4

Jacob arrives at a well in the east and finds shepherds waiting. A great stone covers the mouth of the well, and the custom is to wait until all the flocks are gathered before rolling it away together. No one waters their sheep alone. Then Rachel arrives with her father’s flock, and Jacob—in a surge of something between love and adrenaline—rolls the stone away by himself and waters her sheep.

It is a small, vivid scene. A man showing off for a woman, perhaps. But it is also an image of love’s capacity to do what convention says requires a group effort. Love makes us stronger than we are. Love rolls stones that should be too heavy to move.

"Do I dare disturb the universe? In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." —T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Paul writes to the Corinthians about a different rock: they all drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. In Paul’s mystical reading of Israel’s history, the rock in the wilderness that gave water was not just a geological formation. It was a sign of the living Christ, present with his people even before the incarnation, providing water in the desert.

Two rocks. One that blocks the well and must be rolled away. One that follows the people and provides what they need. Perhaps Lent is about both: the stones we must roll away—the heavy obstacles that cover the sources of life—and the Rock that accompanies us and provides even when we do not see it.

In the film The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne spends nineteen years slowly chipping through a prison wall with a tiny rock hammer. When his friend Red finally sees the tunnel, he marvels: Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of foulness I can’t even imagine. It is an image of persistent hope—the refusal to accept that the stone cannot be moved.

Amma Theodora, one of the desert mothers of the fourth century, said: Let us strive to enter by the narrow gate. Just as the trees, if they have not stood before the winter’s storms, cannot bear fruit, so it is with us. The stone is heavy. The winter is real. But the rolling—the effort, the persistence, the refusal to give up—is what prepares us to bear fruit.

What stone covers the well in your life today? What heavy, immovable obstacle sits between you and the water you need? Perhaps, like Jacob, you will find strength you did not know you had. Perhaps, like Israel, you will discover that the Rock has been following you all along, ready to give you everything you need.

The mystical tradition speaks of the dark night of the soul—that period when all familiar sources of spiritual nourishment dry up and we feel abandoned by God. John of the Cross, who coined the phrase, insisted that the dark night is not punishment but purification. The stone over the well is not placed there by God to prevent us from drinking. It is the accumulated weight of our attachments, our certainties, our comfortable spiritual routines that have become obstacles rather than aids. Sometimes the stone must be rolled away before the water can flow again.