Exodus 33:

Transcription

1 Exodus 33: Moses said to the LORD, See, you have said to me, Bring up this people ; but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight. 13 Now if I have found favor in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people. 14 The LORD said, My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. 15 And Moses said to the LORD, If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth. 17 The LORD said to Moses, I will do the very thing that you have asked; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name. 18 Moses said, Show me your glory, I pray. 19 And the LORD said, I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, The LORD ; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But, he said, you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live. 21 And the LORD continued, See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; 23 then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen. 1

2 A Glimpse of Glory I very much enjoy being here in Korea, but a few weeks ago I wished that I was back in America, at least temporarily. In early August I missed my best friend s wedding. (Why would he schedule his wedding right in the middle of the English camp?) But that s not even what I m referring to. I missed my best friend s wedding, but a couple of weeks later I also missed out on witnessing a total solar eclipse [SLIDE]. On August 21, a solar eclipse passed over the entire United States (not counting Alaska and Hawaii) from the West Coast to the East Coast. It was the first such eclipse in nearly 100 years, the last one having occurred in I was relieved to hear that the view from New York was not all that spectacular. New York was far from the direct path of the eclipse. But residents of South Carolina, in the southeastern United States [SLIDE], had a front-row seat to some aweinspiring astronomy. In the days leading up to the eclipse, there were many warnings given to the public about the danger of looking directly at the eclipse with the naked eye. Doing so could burn your retinas and leave you blind. To safely view the eclipse, you needed a special pair of disposable glasses [SLIDE]. Most people were smart enough to heed the warnings, [SLIDE] but not everyone. Some considered the warnings to be fake news [SLIDE]. It s an ironic truth: the Sun makes life on Earth possible, and yet at the same time, it makes good sense to shield yourself from the power of the sun. To get too close, to have too much exposure, is to get burned. There s a similar dynamic happening in today s passage from Exodus, in which Moses must be shielded from looking directly at the glory of God. 2

3 Today and today only we re going to parachute into Exodus to read just this one passage. Next week we will do the same with Leviticus. But I don t want to drop us in without some sense of where we are in the story. The book of Exodus tells the story of God s chosen people, the Israelites, and their transformation from slaves in Egypt into God s covenant people a people to whom God promises a land flowing with milk and honey. Exodus is filled with drama [SLIDE]. It begins with Moses mother setting her baby adrift in a basket with nothing more than hope and a prayer. It has the adult Moses witnessing the oppression of the Israelites and murdering one of their Egyptian slave masters. It has Moses the refugee in Midian encountering God s presence in a burning bush and being given a mission to rescue the Israelites from the hand of Pharaoh. It has a supreme villain in the hard-hearted and unrepentant Pharaoh, and the ten plagues that befall the Egyptians because he refuses to let the people go. It has the miraculous deliverance of the Israelites through the waters of the Red Sea. The climax of Exodus comes just half way through the book, with the formation of the covenant between God and the Israelites. The Ten Commandments are the sign of the covenant. The people agree to follow God s ways, and God agrees to be their God [SLIDE]. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples, the Lord promises them (Ex. 19:5). And the people agree, saying, Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do (Ex. 19:8). And that was that. Everything went great. The Israelites kept up their end of the bargain, and they lived happily ever after with their God. Only, no. That s not how it went. The Israelites rebelled. Hard [SLIDE]. In chapter 32, shortly before today s passage, the people get tired of waiting for Moses to come down from meeting with God on Mount Sinai. Led by Aaron, Moses brother, they 3

4 worship a golden calf that they had created as a substitute for God. When Moses finds out, he storms down the mountain carrying the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. He proceeds to hurl the tablets to the ground, breaking them into pieces. He melts down the golden calf, grinds it into a powder, scatters it on the water, and then makes the Israelites drink it. At the beginning of chapter 33, God then tells Moses to leave Sinai and go to the promised land, to the land that God swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Despite their outrageous sin, the Israelites remain children of the promise, and God will be faithful to God s promise. God will still give them the land, but they will have to do without something else... the presence of God [SLIDE]. Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey, the Lord says, but I will not go up among you, or I would consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people (Ex. 33:3). That s where we pick up the story. God is sending the Israelites to the promised land, but they go alone, without the presence of God to lead them. Moses doesn t like the sound of that. They ve come too far for God to leave them now, at this final stage of the journey. They ve passed through the sea and through the wilderness. They ve been sustained by bread from heaven. They ve been guided all the way by the presence of God in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. God cannot leave them now. Moses doesn t hesitate to make his case directly to God [SLIDE]: 12 See, you have said to me, Bring up this people ; but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight. 13 Now if I have found favor in your sight, show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider too that this nation is your people (Ex. 33:12-13). Look at how Moses complaint begins and ends by playing on the identity of the people of Israel. Moses says, See, you have said to me, Bring up this people. This people. God does not refer to them as my people. After their rebellion, God wants 4

5 no part of the Israelites. God no longer wants to be associated with them. They are no longer God s people. They belong to Moses. This break happened in the previous chapter, after the people began worshiping the golden calf. God calls Moses attention to what the Israelites are doing. From Mount Sinai God says to Moses [SLIDE], Go down at once! Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely (Ex. 32:7). Your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt. God is going so far as to rewrite history, disassociating himself from the faithless people of Israel. According to God, it was now Moses who led the people from slavery in Egypt. God doesn t want to take any credit for it. Moses and God are like two parents fighting over their misbehaving child. One parent greets the other with a question: Do you know what your son did today? It s not a question as much as an accusation. My son? the other parent responds. You re the one who s responsible for looking after him. I wasn t even here! But Moses won t let God off the hook. He reminds God that the Israelites are still God s people. He ends his first plea by saying, Consider too that this nation is your people (Ex. 33:13). Your people. Moses has the audacity to remind God not only of who the Israelites are, but even who God is. Moses is in effect saying to God, You made these former slaves into a nation. You chose them. You liberated them. You led them. They are yours and you are theirs. Remember who you are! Moses is remarkably direct with God. What s even more remarkable is that it works! God relents [SLIDE]: My presence will go with you, God says, and I will give you rest (Ex. 33:14). 5

6 But then something strange happens. God has just said, My presence will go with you, but Moses answers, If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here (Ex. 33:15). Did Moses not hear that God promised to go with the people? Or did the writer of this passage make a mistake and not realize what he had just written? Something seems odd here. Biblical scholars long ago noticed the discrepancy between verses 14 and 15. The most common explanation is that there is a translation error. The words with you are not in the original Hebrew. It should read, My presence will go, not My presence will go with you. Without the words with you, the verse suggests that God will go into the promised land but will not be with the people. Perhaps God will observe from a distance. I have to say that I disagree. It s true that the words with you aren t in the Hebrew, but God says to Moses that God s presence will give you rest (Ex. 33:14). God is not going along as an impartial observer; God s presence will soothe, will ease, will give rest to Moses and to the people. God is still very much concerned with the well being of God s chosen people. Here is another possibility. This is not my own interpretation but comes from a scholar named Ellen Davis. She makes the case that in his anxiety, Moses doesn t hear God s answer. Moses is so worked up, so anxious about God not going with the people, that he fails to hear God say, All right, then, I will go with you. That makes sense. That s what happens when we are filled with anxiety. Our senses fail us. Haven t we all had that kind of argument before? We go back and forth with someone, covering the same ground over and over. They eventually relent and say the words that we want to hear: I m sorry, or Yes, you were right, or Okay, I ll do it, but we don t hear the words because we re too deep inside the well of our own anxiety. All we hear is our own echo reverberating in our heads. 6

7 And so Moses, caught up in his worries, clings to anxiety, saying [SLIDE], If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? (Ex. 33:15-16). Moses is saying, If you re not coming with us, we might as well not go. For how will the nations know that it was you who liberated us from captivity, and you who blessed us with the land, unless you go with us? After all, it s the presence of the Lord among the people of Israel that has distinguished them as a people. Moses says, In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth (Ex. 33:16). Notice also how Moses again reminds God that the Israelites are your people. Yet again God relents. God hears Moses plea and responds [SLIDE], I will do the very thing that you have asked (Ex. 33:17). This entire conversation is amazing. Moses, a man, a mortal, is persistent in pleading with God, insisting that God keep up God s end of the bargain, even if the Israelites have not kept up their end. The nerve of him! Who does Moses think he is? Actually, Moses is not motivated by who he is but by who God is. And Moses knows God to be a God who can be pleaded with, reasoned with, a God who is so close as to be struggled with. In fact, the name Israel means struggles with God [SLIDE]. Do you remember the story of Jacob wrestling with the stranger? Jacob prevails and refuses to let the stranger go until he receives a blessing. That s when the stranger renames Jacob Israel : Then the man said, You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed (Gen. 32:28). 7

8 The Israelites are people who struggle with God, over and over again. They struggle to follow God s ways. They struggle to remain faithful. They struggle to understand what sometimes feels like God s absence. They are not so unlike us. We also struggle to follow the way of Jesus Christ. We also struggle to remain faithful to his path of loving those who wish us harm, of serving those who offer no benefit to us. We also struggle to understand those moments when it seems that God is saying to us, I will not go with you. You re on your own. In that regard, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the struggle is real and inevitable. No matter how strong your faith, no matter how often you come to church (whether on time or not), no matter how much you serve the church, no matter how much you give financially to the church, at some point, you will struggle in your faith. You will have moments, or even seasons, of profound struggle. So, what s the good news? The good news is that the God we worship is the God of Israel, the God with whom we can struggle, the God to whom we can voice our complaint, the God who listens, the God who responds. In one sense, today s passage reads like a conversation between Moses and God. But it is more than a conversation. This is a prayer. The passage functions on multiple levels. You can read it as history, if you choose as a record of a literal conversation. You can read it as literature, as a story whose purpose is to tell the Israelites something about themselves and their God. And you can read it as a prayer between a man and his God, between a man who struggles with God on behalf of his people and a God who is willing to be struggled with, a God who is not above or beyond the desperate cries of human beings. 8

9 Every line of this passage that we ve looked at thus far speaks of God s astounding intimacy with Moses. God is close enough to be addressed in a personal way. God is open to being reasoned with. God is open to persuasion. This is one of the reasons that we pray. In prayer, we can make our requests, our laments, our confession, our praise, and our gratitude known to God. God hears our prayers. God listens. God responds, as Moses experienced. But then beginning with verse 18 the dynamic suddenly changes. Perhaps excited at how God has responded positively to his prayer thus far, Moses takes it a step further and asks to see God s glory. Moses wants a direct, unmediated encounter with the living God. I don t think Moses fully appreciates what he s asking for, but God does, which is why, for Moses own sake, God refuses [SLIDE]: 19 And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, The LORD ; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But, he said, you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live. Instead, God will walk past Moses, but Moses must be shielded from the divine glory by keeping hidden behind a rock. This is an ironic truth of our faith: God is so close to us that we can struggle with God, and yet, at the same time, we cannot fully take in God s presence. God is Immanuel, God with us, but God is also transcendent, i.e., beyond us. Even in revelation, God remains, to some extent, a mystery. We don t see God directly. Like Moses, we see God only from behind. We catch but a glimpse of God s trailing glory. Isn t this how we experience God in daily life? We re not always, or perhaps not often, aware of God s presence with us in the moment. Rather, it s in retrospect, when we look back on our lives, that we recognize how God was present in a particular moment or through a particular season of our lives. God was present in the church members who visited us when we were in the hospital. God was present 9

10 in the community that shouldered our pain at our family member s funeral. God was present in the friend who offered her apartment when we had no place to stay. God was present in the friendly face who welcomed us when we were the newcomer. In all these instances and countless more, we catch a glimpse of God s glory. 10