Numbers 12-14 I'm a day behind in posting this blog entry. I heard a parishioner this morning say that the Old Testament readings were really pretty boring right now. But yesterday and today we come into some really excellent narrative again, after a lot of instructions about sacrifices, a lot of counting, and a lot of rules that don't seem particularly relevant for our time.
In Numbers 12 we see family dynamics that feel totally familiar. Three thousand years or so don't seem like fifteen minutes when it comes to sibling competition/rivalry. Every youngest child's fantasy, every eldest child's nightmare, comes to pass as God punishes Miriam and Aaron and vindicates Moses…
But the whole community of Israelites waited until Miriam could re-enter the camp after her brush with leprosy, before they pulled up stakes in Hazeroth and began to move through the wilderness of Paran.
In Numbers 13, we see the spies sent into the land of Canaan. Members of each tribe went on the expedition, bringing back some of the delicious fruits of civilization: grapes, pomegranates, and figs.
Guess how long they were out spying? "Forty days" (13:25). The biblical "long enough" increment.
The report they returned with was mixed. This is a rich land, flowing with milk and honey, but ….
..but "the people who live in the land are strong, and the towns are fortified and very large" and there are giants! (28)
Only Caleb brought the minority report.
In Numbers 14, we see how the people heard only the bad news, not the good news of the spies. Once again they complained: "wouldn't it be better for us just to go back to Egypt?" (14:4)
Now we meet Joshua who, along with Caleb, imagined that it was possible for the Israelites to claim this land of promise. They saw this fearfulness as disobedience/rebellion against God (14:9). Their point of view wasn't very popular: "the whole congregation threatened to stone them" (14:10)
Then God is ready to just give up on the Israelites. But Moses and God have switched roles from Chapter 11, and this time Moses intercedes for God to give the Israelites another chance.
In making his case, Moses reminds God of how God had revealed himself in that classic poetic statement that appears at key points in the Hebrew Bible:
(14:18) The LORD is slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love,
forgiving iniquity and transgression,
but by no means clearing the guilty,
visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children
to the third and fourth generation.
---and Moses does not add here what the LORD has said, visiting his blessing to the THOUSANDTH generation!
God forgives, but says that none (except Joshua and Caleb) from that generation will see the promised land. And God visits a plague on the fearful spies.
We have a wonderful example of a set of nested quotations here.
The LORD spoke to Moses and to Aaron saying…
say to the Israelites,
'As I live,' says the LORD,
'I will do to you the very things I heard you say…
Soon afterwards the Israelites said they were sorry and tried to invade the promised land. They were roundly defeated (14:44-45).
Psalm 44 My edition of the NRSV puts the heading "National Lament and Prayer for Help" on this Psalm. There are, indeed, psalms of lament, and this is one of them. The psalmist does not understand why, despite Israel's faithfulness, God seems to be asleep and hiding his face; why, despite "good behavior," they are being taunted and overwhelmed by their enemies.
At the end, the psalmist can only appeal:
Rise up, come to our help.
Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.
Romans 5 Here Paul speaks of our being "justified," and that justification having been accomplished by Jesus "through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God" (5:2).
Then Paul articulates--he does not resolve!!!--one of the great paradoxes of human and Christian experience: "…we also boast in our sufferings,
knowing that suffering produces endurance
and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope,
and hope does not disappoint us,
because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Significant words! An early Trinitarian formation, where Father, Son, and Holy Spirit appear.
Significant also for that classically Pauline rhetorical fondness for chained ideas:
suffering -> endurance -> character -> hope.
And here (5:11) Paul moves to the notion of reconciliation being accomplished between God and us.
Then he tries a different way to say what is going on. This time he contrasts the old and new Adam. As if Jesus is Humanity Re-Booted. As if there's a cosmic new start for the human race through Jesus Christ.
The language is so full of "therefores" and "just as-es" and "if-thens" and "much more surely-s" that it is pretty challenging to see where the argument is leading, if anywhere, logically speaking. You can take out a sheet of paper and try to match up the clauses of the sentences, stacking them in parallel one under another. It doesn't quite ever look tidy when I try to do this. Nevertheless, the overall effect is to get the sense that Jesus is, in Paul's estimation, absolutely key to bringing all humanity back from brokenness into glorious relatedness to God.
This is a lot to think about in a single reading. Romans is a letter that bears slow, steady study, kind of the opposite of what we're doing here in our reading of the entire Bible in a year. Still, there's value in getting a passing familiarity with the contents of Paul's letters by reading them a chapter at a time, or even at a single sitting.
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