Within this larger story of the relationship between God and God’s people in the Exodus that we have been tracing over these many weeks, is the story of the smaller, more intimate relationship between God and Moses. In fact, the relationship between God and Moses and the intimacy they share is really unparalleled in scripture, save for perhaps Mary in the Gospel of Luke. Ellen Davis, a wonderful Biblical scholar, has said that “if God has a best friend (and why not?) then surely it is Moses.”[1]
But now this friend, Moses, is struggling.
I.
He’s grown tired from this long journey that started way back in Midian at the burning bush, found its way to Pharaoh’s court, through the parted waters, and into miles and miles of desert sand. Moses has stood there between God and the people, mediating this tense and at times contentious relationship that is still in its infancy. And he’s done this largely on faith—knowing very little about God and God’s methods and plans and purposes. But after enduring all of this, here near the end, he is experiencing something that will be a part of any spiritual journey of consequence. He’s burned out. After so much laboring, so much following, so much trusting, he wants what each of us wants at different points in our lives; he wants to know.
He wants to know that God will continue to travel with them. God knows him, but Moses wants to know God. He wants to know what God is up to in all this—why claim this people? Why choose him? Why wander in the desert? Why any of it?
God seems eager to give Moses what he wants. God promises to remain with the people in their journey and see them through to the end—which is no small thing. Just a few verses before after the failure of the Golden Calf, when the people spit in God’s eye and reject God for idols, God seemed to reconsider this whole arrangement, telling the people “I’m outta here.” That is now in the past. God promises to go with them and make them a people.
But Moses continues to press God to stay with them, revealing, perhaps, just how vulnerable he feels. Show me your glory, he says. “Show me everything,” in other words. “I need you even closer,” we might say. “Let me know who you are. Let me understand what all this is about—this journey, this life.” It’s a question that each of us will likely ask of God at some point in our life. Perhaps many times, in many forms. Why did this happen? What does this mean? There must be some sense to make of it all. What happens next? What should I do? Who am I? Moses says to God, You’ve brought me this far. I’ve done all you asked. Now let me know what all this means.
God says in response, “My goodness will pass before you”—God’s essence, God’s presence, we might say. And on top of that, God will even say to Moses the divine name, a mysterious act of profound intimacy in scripture.
But, God says, you cannot see my face.
You’ll go out to the cleft of the rock. I will stroll by you and cover your face with my hand until I have passed by, and then I’ll take my hand away and you shall see my back. But my face shall not be seen.
II.
Moses’ relationship with God was unlike any other, and yet this exchange affirms some important things about honest prayer and the spiritual life.
The first has to do with Moses and his earnestness and directness with God. We might say that Moses displays some hutzpah in prayer here with God.[2] A kind of boldness that surely is the product of what by now is a long and secure relationship, having survived periods of distance and doubt, same as any close relationship. I know the conversations that Audrey and I are able to have now after 18 years of marriage are very different from those we were able to have when we were first dating. Moses is clear in what he wants and insistent, and sets the terms of the conversation with a kind of force that may feel alien to much of Christian prayer as it’s often understood—which is a shame.[3]
There is a tendency within the Christian tradition to tread lightly with God. To take a stance always of deference, praise, and thanksgiving. These are of course good things and wonderful postures to take in prayer. But they are not always where we are, and so to assume them is not always honest. It is instructive, I think, that in the Book of Psalms there are more psalms of lament than there are psalms of praise. More psalms outlining real concerns and taking God to task—asking God why and demanding that God do something about it. Honest prayer before God can and even must inhabit the full spectrum of human emotion and experience, good and bad, hard and soft.
I remember hearing of an old professor of church music who was serving on a panel discussing what at time was known as the “worship wars,” between these traditional and contemporary camps. Someone asked him how he felt about having a praise band in worship. He took a long pause and finally said, “I believe I could accept a praise band leading in worship if there was a lament band too.”[4] The full spectrum is needed for honest worship—something all congregations would do well to remember, whatever our style or approach. (Very few psalms of lament are included in our lectionary and liturgy each week, too, and some might even say we lack a certain form of praise!)
Moses’s prayer is bold and direct and demanding of God. But it is also focused on the right things. This is not “name it and claim it” prosperity talk. Moses does not ask of God anything more than an assurance of God’s presence with him and the people; to know God and God’s ways more fully and thus to know himself and his own path. And when he has said his piece and receives something of a response, he lets it go. His directness with God does not push beyond the bounds of friendship, but nor does it fall short of it. Moses treats God as God longs to be treated, which is as a real and imminent presence, who asks much of us, but even more, of whom much can be asked.
The second truth about any honest walk with God revealed in this exchange is this: that there will always be a part of God that is hidden. Something that is unknowable, something beyond us. Put another way, there is simply no getting around the fact that faith is faith, and not certainty. Moses wants to know, just like we want to know—what it all means, what our purpose is, what to make of suffering and loss, where this is all headed. And yet where there is certainty, where there is knowing, there cannot be faith. Certainty is not the completion of faith—it is not what we hope is waiting for us at the end of whatever spiritual journey we’re on. Certainty is another category of knowing altogether. We’re never called to be people of certainty. We’re called to be people of faith.
III.
And while it’s true this element of mystery is at the heart of our relationship with God, it is also true of any intimate relationship. Of course it would be impossible for us to step into the mind of God when it is impossible for us to step into the mind of anyone; to understand fully anyone’s motivations or actions. Most of the time I feel like I’m not even able to step inside my own mind!
It is great frustration in life, maybe especially within those relationships that are most intimate, where we feel entitled to know deeply, that there is a part of each of us that remains inaccessible. I remember when each of our boys was born, holding them and seeing their small faces looking back at me and knowing precisely where they had been and who they had been around for every moment of their lives, and yet being overwhelmed with the knowledge that as much as I loved them and knew them, even then there was a part of them that would always be a mystery to me. They would be their own person. This has only grown more true in time.
And of course it goes both ways—how rare is it to feel that we truly know our parents? Sometime ago I read a beautiful eulogy that a journalist had written for her father, capturing so many little things about his personality, so many memorable moments. It felt so comprehensive, so intimate, especially for an adult child to write of her dad. And I sent it to a friend, and he wrote back, isn’t this what we want? To be known this way by our children? How do we do that? How do we become more than enigma, more than a ghost? Spouses, partners, husbands, wives. It is the tension at the heart of love that the more we come to know each other, the more we understand how much there is we will never know, and how beautiful and how terrifying this is. And if it is true for each of us in our relationships with each other, how much more in our relationship with God?
And this is perhaps the great paradox revealed in this exchange between God and Moses, that the tension of nearness and hiddenness at the heart of God and our relationship with God is also at the heart of our human relationships—and that this is okay. Maybe even more than okay, it is how it should be. We’re called to imitate a God who knows well what to reveal—what to share, what to offer to the world— and what to keep hidden.[5] This is the mark of true intimacy and good, honest, and mature relationship and self-knowledge. It shares generously with others, but also knows what part of the self to keep. And with this generosity also doesn’t demand more of others than is possible or reasonable. It respects the hiddenness, which is to say the holiness, of every human life.
IV.
This tension of closeness and hiddenness is so much a part of life: our life with God, our lives with each other, in life, and even in death—in ways that are mysterious but deeply true. Says the poet Franz Wright, “And let me ask you this: the dead, where aren’t they?”[6] A mystery we’ll honor and stand before in just two weeks on All Saints’ Sunday.
This is really the miracle of biblical spirituality: that God is both creator of the universe, as expansive as the cosmos, and yet as near as our next breath. This tension, this miracle, is at the heart of what it means for God to be God. And yet it is a tension and miracle at the heart of human life as well. And the continuity between these two, the closeness and hiddenness of God and the closeness and hiddenness of each other is what the church through the generations has called incarnation. It is the same miracle and mystery disclosed in this deep conversation between Moses and God that the gospels tell us took on a new and radical form in the person of Jesus. Jesus, whose birth the Gospel of Luke tells us, was announced to shepherds watching their fields when “an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them”—that same glory Moses longed for.
The promise of God here in Exodus to be with the people wherever their journey would take them found its completion in Christ. Christ who took on human form, who lived and walked among us in the full expanse of human life and human death, and who invites us further into the life of God. A life that suggests that the more we come to know God the more we will come to know ourselves and each other, and that the more we truly come to know each other and ourselves, the more we will know God. How this is true, even after all these many generations remains a mystery. But it is a mystery we continue to and can only live together.
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1 Ellen Davis, Getting Involved With God, 46
2 Walter Bruggemann, Exodus, New Interpreter’s Commentary. As always, Bruggemann has been helpful teasing out this esoteric passage.
3 Ibid.
4 I heard Tom Long share this story at a conference years ago.
5 Bruggemann again.
6 Franz Wright, God’s Silence