Moses’ inner conversation with himself (which is again more vivid in Hebrew than can be expressed in English and is something along the lines of ‘Let me turn aside and …’) suggests a lively curiosity that led him to want to know more. He was intrigued and followed his instinct to see more.
This, of course, is closely connected to the second characteristic needed for turning aside: the willingness to take time to explore. Busyness can so often prevent us from doing something only on the off chance that it might produce something. Before we begin, we want to be assured of results, to be confident that the time we take out will produce fruit and be worth the time we spend on it. The problem is that God isn’t like that. God doesn’t sign on the dotted line to give guaranteed satisfaction at a pre-selected and pre-determined time before engaging with the world. Instead God gives a hint here, a suggestion there or a glimmer on the horizon. Busy people are all too likely to miss God’s presence because we do not have the leisure to follow up the hints, suggestions and glimmers on the off chance that occasionally, like Moses, we might encounter the living God.
Sometimes it all begins when we turn aside – the question is whether we have the curiosity and are prepared to take the time out to do so.
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2. And then living with the consequences
Exodus 3.7−11 Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’ But Moses said …
For further reading: Exodus 3.7—4.13
Any encounter with God should come with a health warning. Encounters with God are accompanied with life-changing consequences. Moses certainly seemed to regret the consequences of his encounter with God – if not the encounter itself – almost immediately. This is because, as is so often the case with encounters with God, God did not reveal himself to Moses simply so that Moses could enjoy the encounter, or so that he could feel better about his spiritual journey, but so that Moses could do what God asked him to.
One of the features that interests me about modern discussions about spirituality and mysticism is that sometimes – often even – what we might call religious experiences are perceived as being for their own sake: to help us along in our spiritual journey or to teach us more about God. It is hard, however, to think of any encounter with God in the Old or New Testaments that is not accompanied with the command to do something: Elijah’s encounter with ‘the still small voice’ on Mount Horeb sent him to anoint new kings; Isaiah’s great vision in the temple in Isaiah 6 comes with the command to proclaim God’s word to a people who would not listen; Ezekiel’s vision of God’s chariot in Ezekiel 1 set the scene for Ezekiel being sent as prophet to the people in Exile. For many people today the purpose of encountering God is their own spiritual journey; for the biblical writers the purpose of encountering God is mission, by which I mean being sent out to do God’s will in the world. People who have a lively spiritual life should expect to have a correspondingly lively life of mission in the world; you can’t have one without the other. Moses discovered this to his cost. What began as turning aside out of curiosity, ended as being sent on the most challenging mission conceivable: to free God’s people from slavery.
It is easy to believe that great biblical heroes are somehow more prepared for God’s call than we are; that where we stumble, hesitate and procrastinate, they leap in with guts and enthusiasm. In all honesty we can only believe this if we don’t read the texts too carefully. The biblical heroes are easily as reluctant as we are to be involved with God’s mission in the world and none more so than Moses. The opening of verse 11, ‘But Moses said …’, opens up a section in which Moses objects to God’s call. He begins by asking who he is to be called to this: ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ Exodus 3.11; moving swiftly on to who he should say God is: ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ 3.13. From there Moses looks at worst case scenarios: ‘But suppose they do not believe me or listen to me’ 4.1; and his own inabilities: ‘O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue’ 4.10. Finally he gets to his real point: ‘O my Lord, please send someone else’ 4.13.
The point is that although to us Moses is a great leader, to him he was simply an ordinary person about his ordinary life who was suddenly called to something so extraordinary that he found it hard to comprehend it. What we notice in Moses’ grand argument with God about why he really shouldn’t have chosen him for the task, is God’s infinite patience and reassurance. Over and over again, God assures Moses that he will be with him to provide all the extraordinary features that are needed. God makes clear in the face of Moses’ objections that he doesn’t need to be well known or a brilliant theologian able to describe in detail who God is. He doesn’t need to be an optimist believing that it will all go well, or a good communicator. He doesn’t even need, it appears, to be all that willing. All God expects is that Moses goes to do what God requests. God still calls us as we are to provide the ordinary to his extraordinary and is still, I imagine, as frustrated by our attempts to point to all the people who would be better at it than we would be. God still calls us in all our ordinariness, all we have to do is go … when we do we discover that God’s promise to Moses remains and that, wherever we go, he is with us.
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3. You cannot be serious!
Jonah 1.1−3 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
For further reading: Jonah 1.4−17 and chapters 3—4
One of the glories of deciding to choose to look at the ‘ordinary’ people of the Bible is the almost unlimited choice that this presents. The Bible is stuffed with stories of ordinary people, doing ordinary things until God breaks in to call them into extraordinariness. So why choose Jonah? Surely he was a prophet already, so not strictly ‘ordinary’? I would argue that while his job may not have been ordinary he himself, as a person, was gloriously ordinary, with ordinary responses, reactions and grumbles.
Jonah turned aside but not in the way that Moses did. Jonah’s turning aside took an entirely new direction (literally!). Jonah has to be one of the most comic books of the Bible, a comedy that begins even in its first three verses. This is even more vivid in the Hebrew than in English, where the word of the Lord came to Jonah and said, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh.’ So Jonah arose … and went to Tarshish. No one is quite clear where Tarshish is but the one thing that scholars are agreed upon is that it is in the opposite direction to Nineveh. Jonah half obeyed God in that he arose and went, the only problem is that he didn’t quite go where he was meant to go! Jonah certainly turned aside but this time he turned aside to run in the opposite direction.
It seems as though Jonah is all too aware of the consequences of encountering God, and thought that he would cut these short by eluding God’s notice. Again the Hebrew seems to stress this by saying that Jonah went to Tarshish ‘away from the face of the Lord’. The implication seems to be that God is looking from Jonah to Nineveh, therefore if Jonah scarpered to Tarshish God might be so busy looking at Nineveh he wouldn’t notice that Jonah had gone. Jonah was playing hide and seek with God but one of the many points of this story is that God is not such a local God that you can escape his gaze. Wherever we go, God is there (as the Psalmist