NOTES for Exo 3:1-22

Thus eternity touches earthly history... A meeting of God and man takes place. This is undoubtedly a new stage of revelation, yet this revelation does not consist in the prophet learning some secret knowledge about God or about the world. God reveals His name, meaning that His only name is He Himself: "I am who I am," He says to Moses in the flame of the bush.

This revelation is a meeting in action. God, who revealed Himself to Moses, immediately gives him two things: a promise and a task, corresponding to the two sides of this meeting. God promises that He will act through Moses and save His people from slavery, and Moses, in turn, must carry out His assignment.

The mystery of God's inexpressibility is revealed in the mystery of the cooperation of mortal man with the eternal God. And how else can the Unknowable be known except by living His life, desiring His will, doing His work?..

The biography of Moses, like that of some other biblical heroes, is remarkable because everything important, everything for which these people lived, happened to them when, by human standards, there was nothing more to expect from life. Moses, of course, had not forgotten who he was and where he came from, but after living most of his life in the wilderness, he no longer thought of returning to Egypt or that he would ever again have to see his kinsmen. Then a meeting took place in his life that radically changed that life. This meeting was a meeting with God.

In the Sinai wilderness there are often plants resembling tumbleweeds. They are large balls, up to half a meter in diameter. These plants give off essential oils that sometimes flare up, since in the open sun the temperature on the surface of the ground can reach 60 degrees C. But these bushes burn quickly, flaring up like matches. No wonder Moses was very surprised by a bush that burned and yet could not burn up (vv. 2-3). Only when Moses came closer did he understand that this was no ordinary fire: before him was a shining cloud, and from its depths the voice of God sounded (v. 4). Then God revealed Himself to Moses, telling him that He was the God of his fathers (v. 6), and that at last the day had come when Moses' kinsmen would leave Egypt and move to Palestine, to the land where Abraham had once wandered (vv. 7-10).

Of course, Moses had to know the traditions about the God of the fathers. In those days these traditions were known to everyone who remembered that he was a descendant of Jacob. But these traditions told of a God who had remained in the past together with the fathers to whom He had revealed Himself and with whom He had spoken. In Egypt, God was silent. And His people had nowhere to go: how, indeed, can one follow a God who is silent and gives no sign of Himself?

And now the God who had been silent for many years had spoken. And having spoken, He reminded Moses of the promises once given to Abraham (Gen 15:13-21). If that is so, then the time had come for the fulfillment of the promises God had given. And that means that the people of God become the people of God not only in name: for God's people are a people participating in the fulfillment of God's plan both for themselves and for the salvation of the world, in which God's people are to take the most direct part.

It is customary to think that after seventy, or certainly after eighty, a person has only to rest and sum up his life. Among the Semites in Moses' time this point came even earlier: the active age was considered to be from twenty to sixty, forty years, the length of one generation. With Moses everything turned out quite differently. For him everything most important began after eighty. That was when he met God. The meeting was unexpected for Moses.

In the wilderness he saw a burning bush. It was one of those bushes that resemble tumbleweed, though much larger, the kind often found in the Sinai wilderness. Sometimes they really do burst into flame from the heat of the sun; in summer, on the ground, the temperature in the sun can reach seventy degrees here. The point, however, was that the bush burned suspiciously long: usually they flare up and burn quickly, like paper. Coming closer, Moses understood that before him was not physical fire, but something else: a shining cloud that had descended upon the bush. In this way God marked on earth the place of His presence.

This was something new: the Hebrews had known nothing like it before. Moses, of course, knew all the traditions about the God of the fathers, for until school, until the age of five or six, he had remained with his mother, whom Pharaoh's daughter, who adopted Moses, had hired as a nurse. In those days boys remained with their mother or nurse until entering school. During his early childhood Moses undoubtedly had to remember, from his mother's retelling, the traditions of his people, including the stories about the God of the fathers that already existed then.

Here, however, was something of which no traditions spoke: such theophanies were not mentioned in them. The newness was not only that God revealed Himself to Moses in a radiance that from a distance Moses took for fire. The most important thing lay elsewhere: God had come in order to stay. To stay among His people, with whom He wanted to meet here, by one of the spurs of Sinai. To meet with them in order to make a covenant with them and then lead them Himself. This was a new revelation, good news promising liberation and the fulfillment of the promises given long before to Abraham. At last the time had come for those promises to be fulfilled, and Moses was to play the main role in their fulfillment.

It was obvious to Moses that the voice he heard from the burning bush belonged to God. For him, that day became the day of an encounter that changed his entire life. Yet Moses could have walked past... Do we not walk past the encounter appointed for us? We are too “wise and understanding,” as Jesus says; we find a rational explanation for everything, one in which there is no room for God. But the encounter is possible if we become “like children,” agree to be children before God, and then the Son of God will reveal the Father to us.

Calling Moses to service, God reveals to him a staggering knowledge of Himself. God is the One who exists; He is Existence itself; He is the God of Existence, and therefore not the god of earth, the god of water, the god of the sun, or the god of rain, but the God of all that exists. He is the One who exists unconditionally and without limit, the One who brings everything else into existence.

Such a God is fearsome and incomprehensible, yet He also turns to Moses with a concrete commission concerning the deliverance of the people of Israel, and He will also reveal the fullness of His love in Jesus Christ, who will say: "I am gentle and lowly in heart."