In the Jewish texts called the Talmud there are some teachings of 2nd and 3rd century Common Era rabbis that talk about whether or not God prays, and if God prays, what does God pray. It sort of sounds like a spiritual version of the omnipotence paradox, “Can God create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?” Does the one who is the object of our prayers, the One who receives them, and answers them also pray? To whom would God pray? To whom would God make a petition?
Well, in the Talmud, a central text of the Rabbinic Judaism that took shape at about the same time the Jesus Movement was turning into early Christianity, there is a berakhot, a tractate, that address this question in two parts. First Rabbi Yohanan appeals to Isaiah 56:7 which says,
“I will bring them to My holy mountain, and make them joyful in the house of My prayer.” “The verse,” the Rabbi says, “does not say the house of their prayer, but rather ‘the house of My prayer’; from here we see that the Holy One, Blessed be He, prays.”
The Gemara [writings still within the Talmud] asks: What does God pray?
[To answer this question]
Rav Zutra bar Tovia said that his teacher, Rav, taught:
God says: May it be My will that My mercy will overcome My anger towards Israel for their transgressions,
and may My mercy prevail over My other attributes through which Israel is punished,
and may I conduct myself toward My children, Israel, with the attribute of mercy,
and may I enter before them beyond the letter of the law.1
I love this teaching that eavesdrops on God’s own inner monologue, God’s own prayers. In it we hear an understanding of God who has the same self-awareness we see in God who is talking with Moses about the divine relationship with God’s people. We hear ofGod who prays that God will act with love over anger, mercy over wrath when love and mercy are the most appropriate reaction – – but we also hear and acknowledgement that both mercy and anger are among the divine attributes. That God’s whole being and response to humanity might be justified in showing both.
This is helpful to remember particularly as we move into this second week of a sermon series about “Disputing with God,” particularly as we look at this continuation of the story that started with the Hebrew people molding a golden calf to worship when their patience ran out waiting for Moses.
Moses, who had been leading the people of God around the Sinai peninsula after their escape from enslavement in Egypt under Pharoah, went alone up the mountain to receive God’s gift of the law that will define for everyone how God will be their God and how they will be God’s people. Only Moses seemed to take longer than the Hebrew people would have liked, so they decided that maybe they needed a god down among them instead of counting on a god and a leader up on a mountain. Aaron, maybe reluctantly, obliged them and helps them build a golden calf. When they worshiped it with revelry and sacrifices, God and Moses took notice, and God, suffice it to say, was not too happy. God and Moses went back and forth a bit, one of the disputes with God that frames this series, and eventually Moses convinced God not to wipe out the entire community. Moses went back down the mountain, pretty darn angry himself (that’s an understatement), and announced punishment for the disobedience of the people of God.
The story left the relationships between God and God’s people, Moses and God’s people, even Moses and God’s people in a precarious position, but a precarious position, we hope, that is better than relationships and people utterly destroyed. God, as the 33rd chapter opens, is trying to figure out how they will all go forward. Clearly, God has seen, God’s anger is stirred in ways that God almost seems uncomfortable with when these people, the people God brought out of the land of Egypt, whose cries as enslaved people spurred the Divine into action against Pharoah, take matters into their own hands and stray from the holy covenant. The same anger that freed them from captivity is stirred up and focused on them when they are stiff-necked, singularly focused on their own solution rather than God’s desires. God doesn’t seem to like that response in God’s own being, and pronounces to Moses that instead of coming with them on the rest of the journey, God will send a messenger, an angel to accompany the people to the land that was sworn to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This news does not go over well. That is not how the people thought this relationship was going to work. In the short time since they left Egypt they had grown accustomed to and reliant upon God’s presence being right in the midst of them, in the tent of meeting that Moses would pitch outside of their camp. It was the place where Moses would go and meet directly with God, represented by the pillar of cloud that would descend on the tent while they talked intimately with one another. The people could see that the God who brought them out of the land of Egypt, as God was always so quick to remind them, was still with them, and they would stand with reverence, with awe, with gratitude, with devotion and watch from their own tents as Moses met God, even in their midst.
The news that God would stay behind on the mountain and the people would get some secondary messenger did not sit well with the people or with Moses, so Moses went back to God for another round of “talks,” that is, this week’s dispute with God. This new arrangement, Moses insisted, is not what you promised. You have said we are special. You have said that I am special, Moses reminds God. What does that even mean if you remove your presence from our midst and send us off with some deputized angel? What does that mean if we don’t get to see the fullness of who you are, the One who shows us compassion and correction, mercy and justice, grace and righteousness, love and wrath. The love in the wrath.
Black liberation theologian James Cone talks about the necessity of God’s wrath in God’s love. The God who again and again is on the side of the oppressed, Cone argues, can’t be a God whose love has no consequences for those who do not live within its bounds. Love without a demand for righteousness, that is, wrath, is unacceptable, in his words, “to blacks,” to those who are oppressed. A view of God that cuts out the demand for justice and consequences for those who work against it is, Cone writes, “a product of the minds of enslavers.” It works to keep people enslaved by not demanding a change to the actions and mindsets that enslaves them.
From this same impulse, I argue, Moses demands from God that God bring God’s whole self to their relationship. Moses had had a front row seat to the justice of God‘s anger. It wasn’t a tiptoeing God who backed down from anger that sent plagues to Egypt to convince Pharoah to let God’s people go. Instead, Moses remembered how the anger of God freed God‘s people from enslavement. Moses knew the fullness of God includes God‘s undying commitment to seeking justice for the oppressed, refuge for the exile, food for the hungry, water for the thirsty, care for the least of these. And Moses can’t imagine traveling into the promised land without this fullness of God, who is both merciful and compassionate, and just even to the point of anger.
The Israelites have seen and known the blessing of God‘s anger, and for them it meant freedom. Leaving that behind, Moses wisely discerns is too much to lose. He is willing to risk himself and the people of God in the generations that following being the subjects of God’s pursuit of justice, being among those of whom better is demanded in order to ensure that this justice-seeking God is with them on their journey and at the very center of their lives when they reach their destination.
Moses’ argument works and God commits to doing what Moses has asked. But Moses might need a little more convincing. He’s been through a few rounds with God at this point, and he wants to know God really means. He wants to know God is going to bring God’s whole self to this journey… to this relationship with the newly freed people of God. Moses asks to see God’s glory before they continue.
God agrees. Sort of. God, I think it seems, is still a little nervous about showing Moses God’s full glory. God’s not sure that Moses, even the one with whom God has been speaking face to face, can handle it. So God agrees to pass by with the divine glory, but only let Moses see the back. Silly jokes about God mooning Moses aside, I think this is a lovely gift because it seems to invite Moses, and us, into the relationship even deeper. I think it goes part way toward healing and restoring the relationship by giving us the charge to look for the signs of God’s glory – of God’s love, of God’s loving pursuit of justice – from the back side. To me that means looking for – and joining in – the places were God’s goodness is flourishing, where love is being shown to the stranger, comfort is being given to the sick, friendship is being offered those who are cast out.
It also means being a part of those places and those situations where God’s justice is being sought after and fought for, and recognizing when our own lives and behaviors are worthy of correction by God’s righteousness. That’s what we see when the people of God turn over their adornments. The necklaces and bracelets, the jewelry and ornaments that they took with them out of Egypt – the sets that matched those rings they melted down for the Golden Calf – they all need to be left behind for the people of God to go all in, to bring their whole selves to this relationship, this redemption, this reconciliation with God.
Moses’ dispute with God calls God to be all in on the covenant, fully present with God’s people, in love and in righteousness. We too need to be all in – stripping ourselves of the things we hold onto from which we might build another idol, making ourselves ready to stand in God’s presence, looking for the signs of God’s glory, and joining in the love and justice that brings about God’s redemption of all creation, this day and always. Amen.
Scripture
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- https://www.sefaria.org/Berakhot.7a.1?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en ↩︎