St. Stephen's Episcopal Church

Exodus 3:1-15   The Book of Exodus reports that God chose Moses to organize and lead the Israelites out of their slavery in Egypt.  Today’s story relates the calling by God of Moses to accomplish that end.  “Moses himself is to be chosen the instrument for this purpose.” ¹ 

    It takes place on God’s mountain, Horeb (or Sinai—same mountain, two different names).  “The literary form of the call of Moses corresponds very closely to that of the call of Isaiah (Isaiah 6).” ²  

   “God was thought to dwell upon the mountain, whose peak reached into heaven.  It was an ancient divine abode, although this fact is now revealed to Moses for the first time.”³  “The importance of the fire here is as a sign of the presence of God.”⁴

     ‘The angel of the Lord’ often in the Old Testament is actually God himself, as is true here. The burning bush that was not consumed by fire demonstrates a “self-sufficient, self-perpetuating, and wholly unaffected by its environment, symbol of the transcendent, awesome, and unapproachable Divine Presence.”⁵

   In verse 6, God identifies himself to Moses as the same God who had previously appeared to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  “The primary tradition therefore was clearly that Moses experienced his first encounter with God on the mountain of God in Midian.”  Also in this verse “Moses hides his face...The wording suggests that God is thought to have appeared in some visible way.” ⁷  

  In verse 8 “The promised land is described for the first time as ‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’  This matches the description of the land found in the Egyptian tale of Sinuhe (ANET; 18-23), and the Annals of Thutmose III (ANET, 237-38; Fensham 1966).⁸  It is the same land that God promised to Abram (Abraham) in last Sunday’s Old Testament lesson.

  In verse 10 “Moses is to be his instrument to bring Israel out of Egypt.”⁹  

  In verse 11 Moses’ reaction to God’s call appointing him as his messenger to Pharaoh is to refuse to do it.  When God assures Moses that ‘I will be with you’¹⁰ Moses again objects that he does not know his name.  God answers, ‘I Am Who I Am,’ which  often is translated ‘He causes to be what comes into existence’

  ‘The God of your ancestors’ is the same God whose name is ‘I Am Who I Am,’  “Moses...must be taught his relationship to the Lord in this mission.”¹¹  The lesson ends with Moses still not agreeing to do as God asks, although subsequently he agrees.

Psalm  63:1-8   This psalm testifies to a “profoundly intimate communion with God and [reflects] the elemental yearning of a faithful heart.”¹²

  The psalmist has been “Beset by grievous troubles…In his distress he seeks God’s presence in the sanctuary (vss. 1-2), and there, as he sleeps under the shelter of God’s wings, his soul is satisfied, since in communion with God he discovers…the resources which he has in God and the grounds for fullness of confidence and courage (vss. 6-8). The psalmist takes heart, therefore, and with joy vows to sing all his days praises to God for the deliverance which he sees at hand (vss. 4,5,3).” ¹³

     It is “a king’s prayer for the beatific vision in the heavenly sanctuary...Maligned by enemies (vs. 12) and threatened by foes (vs. 10, The desolate king, in language similar to that of Philip i 23, prays for deliverance from this life’s vicissitudes in order to repose in the shadow of God’s wings (vs. 7).”¹⁴

In verse 2 (although it seems better to apply it to verse 1), the poet’s “yearning to see God is like the longing of parched earth for water.” ¹⁵   Verse 5 is to take place “in Paradise with God.”¹⁶   Verse 7, ‘shadow of your wings’ is “a description of the security of the afterlife in heaven, for which the psalmist prays.”¹⁷   The sense of verse 8 seems to  be “assumed into heaven...a prayer for union with God in the afterlife.”¹⁸

   When this psalm was “adopted into the liturgy of the temple, [it] acquired a corporate meaning, the ‘I’ of the psalmist being expanded to embrace the whole people of God.”¹⁹

First Corinthians 10:1-13 “The situation confronting Paul at Corinth is that the Christians there are supposing that the sacraments automatically confer the fullness of salvation here and now…Paul therefore has to stress the ‘not yet’ aspect of the sacraments.”²⁰  “Some Corinthians believed that their participation in the Christian sacraments guaranteed them against any possible loss of future salvation.”²¹  

  “To illustrate his point, Paul draws an analogy with Israel in the wilderness and finds in the Exodus story types of the two major Christian sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist:  the children of Israel were baptized when they passed through the cloud and through the Red Sea [sic, the Reed Sea], and they were nourished with spiritual food and drink by the manna and the water from the rock in the wilderness.”²²

   In verse 1 Paul refers to ‘our ancestors’ who participated in the Exodus from Egypt.  Gentiles in the congregation at Corinth are included, “because Paul assumes that the Old Testament traditions are the common background for the faith of all Christians.”²³  

   In verses 1 and 2, Paul says that the Jews of the Exodus underwent baptism in following the cloud provided by God as a guide and as they crossed the Reed Sea fleeing from the Egyptian army.  In the Exodus God led the Jews in a pillar of could by day and by night in a pillar of fire (Exodus 13:21).  They crossed the Reed Sea when God told Moses to stretch out his hand over the sea and God drove back the sea so the people crossed on dry land (Exodus 14:21).

   In verse 3, the ‘spiritual food’ refers to the manna and flesh (quails) that God provided the people when they were starving in the wilderness [Exodus 16:4, 13, 35].  This is a type of the Eucharist as is the water provided when the people complained that Moses was trying to kill them with thirst so God instructed Moses to strike a particular rock with his staff and water poured forth (Exodus 17:2-6; cf. Num. 20:7-11).  ‘The spiritual drink’ of verse 4, says Paul, came from the rock that was Christ.²⁴  “Thus the Israelites had supernatural experiences which prefigured the sacramental experiences of the Christian community.”²⁵ 

   In verse 5 despite of all these experiences whereby God saved them, their actions did not please God and so they ‘were struck down’ and none of them entered Israel; even Moses was punished by not being allowed to enter Israel, the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’ (See Numbers 14: 22-23, 26 ff.).  In verse 6 Paul says Christians need to learn from the failures of their religious ancestors who, on many occasions, showed a lack of trust and faith in God (Numbers 14:). 

    In verse 7 Paul quotes Exodus 32:6, which deals with the people making and then worshiping a golden calf while Moses was on the mountain receiving the law from God.²⁶     

  When Paul refers to ‘sexual immorality’ in verse 8, he appears to have had in mind the people’s playing ‘the harlot with the daughters of Moab’ and God decreed that those who had ‘yoked themselves to Ba’al of Pe’or [the god of the Canannites] should be slain; a plague killed 24,000 (Numbers 25:9).    

  Verse 9:  At Numbers 21:5 “the people spoke against God and against Moses.”  God then sent ‘fiery serpents’ who bit many people so that they died.  Paul’s reference to those who ‘were destroyed by the destroyer,’ however, is uncertain.

  Verse 10:  Paul may have had in mind I Chron 21:11-16.  Cf. also Exod 12:23 and Wisdom of Solomon 18:20-25.  The figure is uncertain.

     Since the Hebrews had spiritual experiences of Christ during the Exodus, Paul warns “the Corinthians that they are not the first to have received the benefits of Christ; and therefore the experiences of the earlier time should speak to the New Testament situation.”²⁷  “Notwithstanding the sacraments, the Israelites fell into sin, and having sinned they perished in the wilderness and were thus not permitted to enter the promised land.”²⁸    

   “He reminds the confident believers in Corinth of the self-assurance of the old Israelites, and he sounds a warning by recounting their end…departure from God’s way and will brought and brings destruction.”²⁷  “Baptism and partaking the Lrod’s supper are not enough to guarantee salvation, any more than corresponding acts fuficed for the ancient Hebrews.”²⁹   “One reassurance they have: no supernatural testing will confront them; their temptations are of the sort which beset all humanity.  But beyond this, their reassurance rests upon the faithfulness of God.”³⁰  

Luke 13:1-9 “Jesus here refers to two recent disasters, otherwise unknown to historians.  One was the outrage of a tyrant, the other an accident involving construction workers in Siloam.³¹  “When he was told about Pilate’s slaughter of Galileans in the temple, [Jesus] responded, not with indignant denunciation of Roman brutality, but with a warning to his own people to ‘repent’.³² 

     Verse 3: “From both events he draws a warning for Israel.  Unless the nation repents, it too will perish.  For Jesus, repentance means accepting his message of God’s kingdom. The parable of the fig tree reinforces the challenge to repent.”³³  “Disasters that overwhelm individuals do not prove that such people are worse sinners than others.  But they ought to serve as a warning…that only timely repentance can avert destruction at the Day of Judgment.”³⁴   

  “The evangelist understood that parable to be against the leadership of the nation...the problem...[is] the crisis of fruitless leadership within the nation...”³⁵  “The parable of the fig-tree...[is] directed against Israel as a whole...To belong to the people of God will not serve as a protection against the judgment of God...The parables which deal with the impending crisis...[do not have as] their purpose to propound moral precepts, but to shock into realization of its danger a nation rushing upon its own destruction, and more especially its leaders, the theologians and priests.  But above all they are a call to repentance.” ³⁶ 

 “The word ordinarily translated ‘let it alone’ (vs. 8) is the New Testament word for ‘forgiveness’…”³⁷  The order to ‘cut it down’ is not carried out because the gardener asks for more time.  “The request is...granted; an announcement of judgment becomes a call to repentance.”³⁸   

    Jesus tells his Jewish audience the same thing Paul told the Corinthians: ‘So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall,’ but in a different way:  “Neither the old Israel nor the new dare presume upon a false sense of security.”³⁹ 

Footnotes

Exodus 

1. The Anchor bible Dictionary, Vol. II [article, Book of Exodus, by Nahum M. Sarna, 1992], 692;  

2.  The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 1 [exegesis of Exodus by J. Coert Rylaarsdam, 1952], 871:

3.  Ronald E. Clements, Exodus [The Cambridge Bible Commenatry, 1972], 20:  “The place is holy ground because of God’s presence there, and this entails physical danger to undiscerning intruders. It must only be trodden in bare feet.”

                                    , 19:  Horeb “was undoubtedly a very ancient holy place.” 

   Gerhard von Rad, Theology, Vol. I, [Tr. D.M.G. Stalker, 1957, rev. ed.; 1962], 9: “If it was in the territory of Midian…this then leads to the almost inevitable conclusion that the Midianites were worshippers of Jahweh before the ‘Israelites’ were.”

   Martin Noth, Exodus [The Old Testament Library, Tr. J.S. Dowden, 1959, 1962], 31, 39: “The primary tradition therefore was clearly that Moses experienced his first encounter with God on the mountain of God in Midian. “

                                    , 39: The mountain of God’ was part of “an original local tradition to which the ‘holy ground’ concerned was still known as such at a later period...H. Gressmann (Moses, pp. 26ff.) is able to produce a whole series of parallels from Syria-Palestine of stories of bushes which burn yet are not consumed.”

    See, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, The Free Press, NY [2001], 326-28: 

Christian folklore and tradition places Sinai (Horeb) at Jebel Musa, in the Sinai, the site of a Christian mnastery. 

But this is merely speculation for which there is no proof.                        

   The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Vol. IV [article, Midian, by George E. Mendenhall, 1992], 815:  Midian is “the

name of an ethnic or political population group especially associated with South Transjordan that played a very important role in the earliest history of ancient Israel, and is probably the earliest identifiable Arabic-speaking social group.”

   It was located on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Aqabah.  This would place it directly opposite (to the east) of the Sinai, an Egyptian wilderness through which the Hebrews were reported to have traveled or wandered for forty years after they fled Egypt. 

   TABD, Vol. IV, Mendenhall, 817, points out that, “There is no plausible objection to the presence of shepherd bands in the Sinai, who were identified...as adherents of the political/cultural system of the Midianites.”

   Noth, 31:  “We must reckon with the possibility that the Midianites...had their camping places and watering spots even to the west of the gulf of el’-aqaba...and were thus on the Sinai peninsula...”

   Reginald Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary, Liturgical Press, [Rev. Ed. 1984], 410:  “The Exodus story functions in the liturgy as a type of the saving act of God in Christ.  God sees the affliction of his people.  He ‘comes down,’ that is, intervenes in history out of his transcendence, to deliver them from the slavery of sin and to bring them into the land ‘flowing with milk and honey,’ the kingdom of God.”                 4. Clements, 20;

5. Nahum M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus [Schocken Books, NY, 1986], 41;   TIB, Rylaarsdam, 871:  “Angels in this early period are not personal entities, as later, but people or things that temporarily embody deity.”  

   Clements, 21:  In verse 8, “The peoples referred to were clans, or local communities, of varied racial origin.  The Canaanites occupied the eastern Mediterranean coast land…The Hittites established a great empire centered upon a kingdom in what is now Turkey…[those referred to here] seem only distantly related to this empire…

   “The Amorites were a West Semitic people who had migrated from Mesopotamia… Perizzites appears to mean ‘villagers’, indicating an indigenous population living outside the cities which formed the main centers of Canaanite life.  The Jebusites formed the local, pre-Israelite, population of Jerusalem; the Hivites were settled in Gibeon.”       

6. Noth, 31;    Noth 30:  This story “must also have formed the kernel of the tradition from the beginning of its history,”

   Gerhard von Rad, Theology, Vol. II, [Tr. D.M.G. Stalker, 1960; 1965], 322:  The traditions which accompanied the religion of the Gods of the ancestors “were adopted by the Jahwism which followed.”         

     Gerhard von Rad, Genesis [The Old Testament Library, Tr. W.L. Jenkins, 1961; Rev. Ed. 1972], 189:  “To the difficult question about the pre-Mosaic religion of Israel’s ancestors [i.e., the religion prior to belief in Yahweh] one must answer that it was a cult of the ‘God of the fathers.’”    

     Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Vol. I [Tr. D.M.G. Stalker, Harper & Row, N.Y.], 20:  “...the figures of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob became assimilated to the cultic legends which were initially Canaanite in origin…[The] process of transplanting the cult of the ancestral gods to shrines formerly Canaanite, and the assimilation of the figures of the patriarchs to Canaanite cult sagas that it involved, was far from being ended with the clans’ adoption of Jahwism” which later was designated Judaism.

     Sarna, Exploring, 44:  “The specific title ‘God of your father’…is widely documented outside the Bible. It occurs in 19^th century B.C.E. tablets from old Assyrian trading colonies in east-central Asia Minor, as well as correspondence…found in the archive at Mari…deriving from a century later [i.e. 18^th century]…It also occurs in a fourteenth century B.C.E. letter found at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, as well as in Ugarit near present day Latakia (Ras Shamra) on the Syrian coast.”                                                            7.  Noth 38;

8.  TABD, Vol. II, Sarna, 698;  Victor H. Mathews and Don C. Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels [Paulist Press, 2006], 138:  Stories of Sinuhe:  Sinuhe marries the oldest daughter of Ammunshi, and settles in his land.  He lives like the herders and becomes famous for his wealth and the strength of his household...It was a land overflowing with figs and grapes.  It had more wine than water, honey and oil in abundance.”

9.  TIB, Rylaarsdam, 873;

10.  Brevard S. Childs, Exodus, The Old Testament Library [1974], 74:  “The grounds for his being sent do not rest on Moses’ ability, but on his being a vehicle for God’s plan.” 

11.  TIB, Rylaarsdam, 873:  “God must instruct Moses before he can serve.  Not only must he be told what to do in Egypt; more basically, he must be taught his relationship to the Lord in this mission.”

   Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Vol. II [Tr. D.M.G. Stalker, Harper & Row, 1960, 1965], 57:  “Neither previous faith nor any other personal endowment had the slightest part to play in preparing a man who was called to stand before Jahweh for his vocation.”

Psalm  

12. Artur Weiser, The Psalms [The Old Testament Library, tr. Herbert Hartwell, 5^th Rev. Ed., 1959, 1965], 454;

   Weiser 455: The poet has found fulfillment of his prayer and now clings to God. “He can no longer conceive of the purpose of his life in any other way than that his soul, being filled to the utmost with the thought of God, should be a living echo of God and his life a continuous prayer, a testifying to God by singing his praise.

13.  The Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. 4 [exegesis of Psalm 63 by William R. Taylor, 1955], 327-328; 

14. Mitchell Dahood, S.J., Psalms II [The Anchor Bible], 96;  

   J.H. Eaton, Psalms [SCM Press, London, 1967], 160, 161; Eaton agrees: It “is best taken to relate throughout to the need of a Davidic king and his loyal people…The king thus comes in great need to seek an encounter with God in the Temple.  If God gives him such experience of his power and glory (the powerful Presence centered in the inmost shrine), and so grants him salvation, he vows an offering of continual praise.”  Verse 9, which is not part of our lesson, seems to support this view; it says, “But they who murderously seek my life, may they go to the nether world’s depths.”

15. Dahood, 97;        16. Dahood, 99;       17.  Dahood 100;       18.  See Dahood, 100;       19. Fuller 162;