The Bitter is made Sweet by the Cross

The Israelites were in the wilderness for three days with no water. And then, when they found a place with water, it was so bitter they could not drink it. So they named that place Marah, which means “bitter.” Dying of thirst, the Israelites then murmured against Moses, saying, "What shall we drink?" And so Moses cried to the Lord and the Lord showed him a tree. Moses took the wood of this tree and threw it into the water – and the water became sweet (Exodus 15:22-25).

We heard this story in the first reading of Vespers last night. This is because it is a prefiguration of the cross, which we exalt today. The tree shown to Moses by the Lord is a type of the cross. The bitter water that the Israelites find after three days with no water is like the bitterness of our lives of sin and suffering and death. When Moses throws the wood into the bitter water, it becomes sweet. And when we accept the cross into our sinful lives, which lead to death, our lives become sweet and our deaths lead to everlasting life in Christ.

Apart from our sweet Lord Jesus, life is surely bitter. It is a place like Marah.

Interestingly, the name of Mary may have the same root as Marah. We're not actually sure what the name Mary means. It may mean “longed-for-child” or “beloved.” Unfortunately, I don’t know any Hebrew, so I can only tell you what other people think it might mean. But, in any case, it may also mean “sea of bitterness.” This is a rather shocking possible meaning for the name Mary – at least for us Christians who love and venerate Mary. I was shocked when I first heard it suggested that Mary means “bitter.”

But that meaning begins to make a great deal of sense in the context of this story from Exodus. Mary was conceived and born in the ordinary way – and she was conceived and born into a world before the incarnation of her son. So, her human nature did not yet know that it was to be personally joined with the divine nature in her son, Jesus Christ. Mary is the bitter water of fallen humanity made sweet by the entrance of divinity inside her. The bitterness of the human nature that Mary is born into is made sweet by the son she bears, who enters into that humanity through her. Through her, God takes on our flesh and even its mortality, first embracing death, even a bitter death on a cross, and then conquering it in his sweet resurrection.

Death, without the cross, is everlasting, and that is a bitter pill to swallow. But today, on the cross, and nowhere else does Christ enter into death, and, by his death, he tramples death. And that is sweet. Now, in paradox of the cross, death has become the way to life.

This is fully accomplished only in and through the cross. And if we will partake of that sweetness, we must follow the way of the cross. We must drink the water we thought was bitter – the water of self-sacrificial love – and we will find that it has been made sweet by the wood of the cross.