Advent is a time of anticipation, in which we allow the Old Testament to point us to the coming of the Messiah. We allow the Prophets to orient us to holy waiting; yet where Israel could only guess how God was going to rescue the world from sin and death, as Christians we know what Emmanuel (“God With Us”) looks like, sounds like.
In this series of posts we will sit with some of the archetypes of the Old Testament in order to reveal what the arrival of King Jesus meant then, and what it means today. Our second meditation will be on the story of Moses and the burning Bush.
In the advent of the Messiah, we receive God-With-Us, who liberates us from bondage to freedom. Who is this God Who promises liberation? We must remember as we enter the story of Moses that he does not really know the Voice Who calls him in the wilderness. This is a man, born a slave to a people robbed of their identity over 400 years of oppression, yet raised as an Egyptian prince with a panoply of gods who prop up the pharaonic empire for its own devices. Scripture tells us Moses, in an act of rage, kills an Egyptian oppressor and yet is rebuked by an Israelite Hebrew and flees into the wilderness; which is to say that both his identity markers, tenuous as they already were, are stripped from him. The wilderness motif in the Bible is a place to be deprived of our common understandings of self to encounter a God Who speaks to the core of us. The fire that does not burn is the glory, the manifest presence, of a God with whom Moses is not acquainted.
Read Exodus 3:1-6
God has been a constant in history, proving His character through the promise to our spiritual ancestors. First Moses must locate himself to the Voice That Calls. “Here I am” is the most worthy response to mystery, one found in many other stories in scripture, whether the testing of Abraham or young Samuel in the temple or even Mary responding to the angel’s prophecy, “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.”
The first appeal the Voice makes is to history and covenant. This is to say that Moses must begin by understanding God as Someone Who stretches back before his present moment of crisis and confusion of identity. Perhaps this historical reference is a familiar one to Moses, but it is likely he had only a vague awareness of the origins of his people. He himself was dislodged from the story by his privilege. For God to establish himself as the God of "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” is not only to show God’s moving through history with us, but to remind Moses of the covenant made with the patriarchs: “I will make you into a great nation, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12). God has not forgotten his promises, even though God’s people might have done so!
Advent reminds us that Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to bless all people and draw them back to God. Christ is the fulfillment of history and the pioneer of the future.
“I have made a promise.”
What does it mean to me that my God is a God of history?
Read Exodus 3:7-12
God binds Godself to us in every moment, never leaving nor forsaking us. The Hebrew name for Egypt is “Mitzrayim”, which can be translated as “the narrow place”. It is a place of squeezing, of constriction and bondage. There is no freedom in this land, for one is bound to the expectations of the pharaonic empire to produce or die. There is not rest, because one must work from morning until night to appease the powers and principalities or else go hungry. It is a place of relentless striving. God contrasts the narrow place with “a good and spacious land”, one in which God’s people will have freedom, rest and abundance.
And now Moses’ line of questioning turns to the personal - “who am I?” Perhaps he accepts the Voice as the God of history and the covenantal promise, but that still does not answer the pain in his heart of being one dislodged from two competing identities in Pharaoh’s courts. God’s beautiful response to Moses is not to assign him yet another task by which to identify himself, but instead to offer him presence, solidarity. It is an appeal to God’s immanence, closeness to us in the present moment, that ultimately tells us who we are, Who we belong to. Too often the Greek definitions of God’s perfection remove God from our mortal plane - God is simply too all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful, all-perfect to bother with us. God floats above the morass. Yet here we see God’s primary self-definition is not one of unattainable stoic perfection, but of steadfast with-ness. We call this “love”.
It is prophesied later that Jesus would be known as “Emmanuel” - God With Us - even as an infant, Christ is the Presence of God incarnate. Before his ascension Jesus reiterates his solidarity with the human family as our best way to know God - “and surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Mt. 28:20).
“I am with you.”
How does Emmanuel change your perspective of the “narrow places” you experience today?
Read Exodus 3:13-15
God, as Pure Being, transcends all our convenient categories as the only one worthy of worship. Moses’ next question is one of authority - “You made a promise to my ancestors in the past, You say You are with with me, but do You have the authority to do all this?” In Moses’ world, the gods conveniently existed to prop up the pharaonic system of power and oppression. Each God was defined by its relation to a family name, or a natural phenomena such as a river or the sun, or an abstraction like war or love. Pharaoh ruled without question because Ra deemed it so. It is a technical fallacy to suggest the Hebrews of the Old Testament were pure monotheists; it is more accurate to read the story as the steady de-idolization of Israel to receive the One True God. Throughout the narrative Yahweh contends with the lesser gods that have infiltrated God’s people through the surrounding polytheistic cultural influence. The psalms and the prophets are rife with language about idols as created things - “they have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see” - and the natural consequence for those who worship them - “Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them: (Psalm 115:6, 8).
We become like what we worship, even as our idols conveniently validate our already-existing values and desires. From our supposedly evolved 21st century standpoint we like to assume we are beyond such primitive idol worship; yet our obsession with power or money or war, our self-definition being found in political parties or celebrities, fall short in sustaining themselves as our highest ideal. Later in the story we find that while Moses is atop Mount Sinai in “the thick darkness where God was” (Ex. 20:21), his brother Aaron capitulated to the fearful demands of the Israelites by gathering together their valuable material goods and manifesting a golden calf. This was not an alternative god, but rather insidiously a more domesticated version of the God-on-the-mountain they could not comprehend or contain. This is idolatry at is most dangerous.
God’s wonderful response to Moses about authority is to give God’s true name - YHWH. While usually translated “I am Who I am”, this strange name is a profound mystery. Bundled together in those four letters is past, present, and future tense at once. Still more, the use of the basic verb “to be” connotes that God ultimately is defined as Pure Being, self-referential and unencumbered by submission to anything else in creation. My favorite interpretation of the divine name would be something like, “I was, am, and will be Who I always have, am, and will be”. YHWH is not simply a personification of a family name or a river or even an abstract concept like war; God transcends all our categories to exist outside creation. God is a non-necessary Being, in that God does not depend on anything outside god for definition. In a dazzling simplicity, The Name (ha-shem) tells us everything, yet in the same breath is beyond our comprehension. This is God’s appeal to authority as the Only One who can save the world.
The striking sweep of scripture shows us the steady de-idolization of a people in order to purge them of small gods so they might encounter a True God who has no discernible form or subservience to the created order. And in a profound twist, the New Testament shows us how that same formless God incarnates in human form to reveal everything about God. Jesus utters the phrase “I AM” seven times in the Gospel of John to the chagrin of his religious opponents. John himself begins his telling of the Christmas story by claiming, “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Jesus is the immanence of God-With-Us and the transcendence of YHWH all-in-one.
“I AM.”
What does it mean to you that God transcends all things?
When Moses seeks to know the Voice in the burning bush, God offers three references: History & Promises, Personal Experience of Love, and Transcendence above all categories - this understanding of God is what we need for liberation from bondage to freedom.
Read 2 Corinthians 3:7-18
The miracle of Emmanuel is that we no longer need the mediator or the Law to know God - we have God incarnate in Jesus. Even as Moses’ face radiated the glory of God as he descend Mount Sinai, Jesus is the radiance of God. In another of his beautifully dense passages, Paul draws the conversation back to glory, the manifest presence of God, hinted at in the story of Moses but fulfilled in Christ: “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” The veil has been removed, we now have freedom to live in God’s glorious presence. In doing so, we become what we worship.