Recapturing Awe and Innocence

Last updated on: February 20, 2017 at 12:52 pm by John C Holbert

Recapturing Awe and Innocence 2017-02-20T12:52:48-05:00 John C Holbert

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Moses_name ( Lectionary for February 26, 2017)

Because we are again about to enter the season of Lent, prefigured as always by Transfiguration Sunday, I have decided to leave the Psalms and return to the more traditional lectionary passages from the Hebrew Bible for my reflections for the foreseeable future. However, I must say that Exodus 24 is anything but calmly traditional. It is at the same time a very ancient bit of Israelite worship and an important prelude to the monumental events that will occur in the story of Moses in Ex. 32-34. I plan to look at the entire chapter 24 in order to provide a fuller context for our thoughts.

This section of the book of Exodus, chapters 21-31 is a sort of grab bag of ancient and more modern ideas enshrined in the ongoing interpretations of Israelite law, custom, and practice. It is immensely difficult, and finally impossible, to determine even generally when many of these materials were created or codified or written down. Laws concerning slaves (Ex. 21:1-26), property (Ex. 21:28-36), various kinds of restitution (Ex. 22:1-15), social and religious laws (Ex. 22:16-31), laws of universal concern for justice (Ex. 23:1-9), leading to a discussion and command for Sabbatical Year and Sabbath celebrations (Ex. 23:10-13), and a brief enumeration of Annual Festivals (Ex. 23:14-19) comprise the collection. The latter section concludes with the seemingly disconnected demand that “you shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” (Ex. 23:19)?! Exactly how that random command is to be related to what has preceded it and to what follows it I leave to the rabbis who have offered all manner of ingenious thoughts on this subject.

All of these laws and reflections on practice and custom are followed by a clear promise that Israel will indeed receive and settle in the land of promise after YHWH has “blotted out” those peoples currently living there (Ex. 23:23). Dire warnings are offered against any worship of the gods of those people, accompanied by demands to “listen attentively to YHWH’s voice and do all that YHWH says” (Ex. 23:20-33).

Some of this material appears to be quite ancient, for example the laws of slavery and restitution, while others appear to be rather more modern in formulation. As I said, ferreting out the ages of various parts of this collection is not easy. But whatever the ages of the various parts, now become a kind of random whole, the next section presents us with some very ancient practices indeed. At the beginning of Ex. 24 YHWH bids Moses to attend the God on the sacred mountain and to bring Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu along with “seventy of the elders of Israel” with him. However many people come with Moses, only Moses himself is to “come near” YHWH (Ex. 24:1-2).

GebelMoussaLandscape Then in a decidedly odd series of actions, “Moses told the people all the words of YHWH and all the ordinances, and all the people answered with one voice, and said, ‘All the words that YHWH has spoken we will do’” (Ex. 24:3). We must assume that Moses is now referring to the Ten Commandments of Ex. 20 and perhaps the ordinances that we have just described from Ex. 21-23. And of course the claim that the people will in fact do all these things YHWH has demanded is made quite ridiculous by subsequent Israelite history. Israel almost never “does what YHWH has spoken,” despite their protestations to the contrary as biblical story after biblical story make quite plain.

Nevertheless, after the people voice this assurance that they will do what YHWH asks, Moses performs what must be a very old worshipping practice as he takes the blood from the requested animal sacrifices of the people, pours it into several basins, dashes half of it against the sacrificial altar and throws the rest on the heads of the people. Worshippers drenched in blood and standing around a smoking altar is a quite primitive portrait of worship, I think it fair to say. It is, as Moses pronounces, nothing less than “the blood of the covenant that YHWH has made with you” (Ex. 24:8).

And if that bloody picture were not enough, things get unmistakably spooky in the following scenes. Acting on the demand from YHWH in Ex. 24:1, Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu and the seventy elders of Israel “went up and they saw the God of Israel” (Ex. 24:9-10). Now that is an astonishing statement! It is bold and direct in its claim that they actually saw YHWH, not hidden, not wrapped in a metaphor, but seen in the divine person. Such a statement is nearly unprecedented in the Hebrew Bible. It is true that the fugitive Jacob, while sleeping on his rock pillow at Bethel is said to have witnessed YHWH, but he is dreaming in that story and upon awakening confesses that “YHWH was in this place and I did not know it” (Gen. 28:16). Later he will claim to have seen the face of YHWH in the face of his brother, Esau (Gen. 33:10), but he hedges the stat Michelangelo-Moses-2 ement with the preposition “like.” Here at Ex. 24:10, there is no hedging at all; they saw YHWH.

They go on to describe something of the place where YHWH is standing; it is “something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like a very bone-white sky” (difficult Hebrew here; my translation is only an approximation of possible meaning). And then the text, amazingly, concludes with this: “they envisioned (beheld?) God and ate and drank” (Ex. 24:11). In other words, they gazed at God, and joined the Almighty in a picnic!

I see this entire scene as an amalgam of incredible awe and childlike innocence. They all stand in the very presence of YHWH, struck dumb by the white sapphire pavement upon which their God stands, but instead of averting their eyes or rushing headlong away from this awe-inspiring sacredness, they join God in a communal repast. And in that dual reality of awe and innocence I discover the meaning of this particular day in the Christian year, the headwaters of the season of Lent. We are called here, along with Moses and the elders, to join our God in profound awe but at the same time to share with God a holy meal. Another reason, it could be said, for the weekly celebration of the Eucharist.

The text for this day of transfiguration then follows where Moses is invited to enter the sacred cloud of YHWH, this time accompanied by Joshua, in order to receive the “tablets of stone, with the Torah and the commandment, that I have written for (the people’s) instruction.” The passage seems to assume that the Ten Commandments have only been composed by YHWH in Ex. 20, and now will at last be delivered to the lawgiver for conveyance to the people. In addition, a quietly ominous note is struck in Ex. 24:14, when Moses says to the elders, “Wait here for us, until we come to you again; Aaron and Hur are with you; whoever has a problem (literally: “a baal with words”) may go to them.” Unfortunately, there appears that little problem of the molten calf in Ex. 32 that Aaron is wholly incapable of resolving and that leads to the destruction of these very tablets that Moses in about to receive.

In this scene there is no direct sight of God. “The glory of YHWH settled (perhaps more literally “tented”) on Mount Sinai, and a cloud covered it for six days; on the seventh day, YHWH called to Moses out of the cloud. The appearance of the glory of YHWH was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the people of Israel” (Ex. 24:16-17). Not only was God hidden in the enveloping cloud, ringed with a raging fire, but only the divine voice was heard from the cloud, speaking only to Moses. There is no real sighting of God at all. We are a long way from a divine picnic now!

Still, we cannot forget the shared meal described above if we are to capture the fuller import of this astonishing series of scenes with YHWH on the sacred mountain. If we are to enter the season of Lent aright, we must have both awe and innocence at the same time to appreciate what God in Christ is about to offer us. I admit to thinking that awe is the harder for us to recapture. That sense that we get when we see the beauty and vastness of nature is extremely difficult to garner when we worship in our familiar sanctuaries, no matter how they may be structured, whether gothic stone or warehouse concrete. Yet, this day of transfiguration bids us to embrace the spooky side of our faith once again and to hold fast to our innocent approach to the Almighty, too, as again we embark on the Lenten journey toward the cross and Easter. We need the most awesome picnic with God as we begin. Why not join Moses and the elders on the mountain, and bite deeply into the divine potato salad and fried chicken, and behold the mighty presence of God who is with you in the feast?

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)

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