https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SXT1mQK5IEY
I think we said in the previous episode that God’s self-description in verses 19 where he talks about, you know, I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. That’s plainly an echo, I think Ben said this in the last episode of Exodus 3.14. But as it were, it’s not as if the reason that there’s a shift here is from what’s happened in chapter 32. It’s the golden calf. It’s God showing mercy on the Israelites after their sin. And it’s not as we’ve talked a little bit about, you know, does God change? How can he be the same? How can he be in relationship and still not change? I think it’s a very subtle way of understanding that this is not God changing. It’s not God’s personality changing. It’s as it were, our relation to God, our understanding of God becomes, is progressively, God is progressively revealed to us through the changes, through the actions and the decisions that we undertake. And I think it’s a very important point. It preserves God’s immutability, maybe his impassibility, his freedom from suffering. But it also explains how we can, as it were, enter into relationship with him. That’s the concept of prayer, which is very difficult to understand on sort of the raw childish level, which is God is a gumball machine, right? You put in your quarter and the gumball comes out. The idea of prayer that you’re talking about is obviously a lot more meaningful because it’s really not about changing God’s mind, it’s about changing who you are and thus God naturally responds to you differently because you’re not the person that you were before you prayed. And the verb to pray in Hebrew is actually in the reflexive tense, right? Lehit Palael, right? Which is supposed to be the idea is that it’s supposed to be something that acts on you. The prayer is supposed to act on you. It’s not supposed to be something where you’re attempting to pry an answer out of God. Actually, one of my favorite kind of dark headlines from the Onion is, God answers prayers of paralyzed little boy, no says God, right? Which is obviously incredibly dark and terrible, but also true, meaning like God does say no. But the idea is that the person he’s saying no to might be a different person than the person he says yes to tomorrow because you change yourself in order to be the person who deserves a different response from God. And maybe that’s the whole message of the construction of the tabernacle, that it’s not something that, as it were, God does to the Israelites. It’s not sort of God acting through miracles or even through revelation. The revelation is an enabling condition of that, but it’s what the Israelites undertake together, it’s what they do together. To be able to receive revelation. That ultimately transforms them into the people that God’s called them to be. It certainly seems to me to be a productive way to consider prayer. I really do believe that our capacity to think, and I’m thinking about this as an evolutionary biologist, actually emerged out of the domain of prayer because thought seems to me to have a prayer-like structure. The first is, I have a problem that I need to solve. So that’s like an admission of insufficiency. And the next is, the answer could make itself manifest. Now you might say, well, I’ll think it up, but that’s a pretty sad explanation. It’s more like, no, you admit you have a problem and then you open yourself up to a revelation. And then the revelation makes itself manifest. The thought appears. And it’s often, especially if it’s a deep thought and a deep new thought, it strikes you as a surprise, right? It’s not like you predicted it. It springs itself on you as if it’s something new. Well, thinking and thanking are etymologically related. I didn’t know that. I want to return to Moses’ role for a moment. Douglas asked a question yesterday, and I want to amend the answer that I gave. You’re asking about Moses as not being perhaps sufficiently defined. And I went to the archetypal or the assimilating ego, let’s say, where he’s mediating between the id of the golden calf and the super ego that’s gone. But I think that gives him short shrift. And so in narrative, in contemporary narrative, where we have that aha moment, the sixth sense, the usual suspects, it’s where the mythic meets the particular, where it’s one second ahead of you, but it’s immediately graspable. You’re just talking about that a little bit. And with Moses, one of the things I was thinking about is this is, it’s evident for me very much with Jesus. There’s a number of moments where I’m about my father’s business. It’s the shocking moment, but then immediately you sort of grasp what that means. Why hast thou forsaken me? Forgive them, they know not what they do. But I think it’s short shrift to consider Moses more archetypal as a rough draft for Jesus because the more that we’re reading this and spending time in this, there’s a lot more that’s emerging for me that I hadn’t thought before this discussion that is the specific and is the particular. Show me thy glory. When he asked for his name to be blotted out of the books, there’s out of God’s book. And so there are these traits, I think, that three-dimensionalize him more than my initial answer of tacking to the archetypal or the Western. He’s got courage, he’s got curiosity, he’s got an opening to all no matter the cost, striving and seeking. There’s a whole number of modes of his engagement that I think are a lot more robust than I initially led with. If I can just say something about that particularity. There’s a sense, Jordan, when you talk about the veil, God veiling himself, that one could read that as God’s not wanting to show you all of himself, you’re not allowed to see it all. I think in a way that’s a mistake. This is more about the way in which things can actually happen in this mediated sense Jonathan’s saying. You don’t feed a baby with a fire hose of milk. When you’re cold coming in from the snow or whatever, you don’t warm yourself up with a blowtorch. You don’t teach a calculus to a two-year-old. And I think this is related to what I see as the profound tenderness in this passage. There’s something so beautiful. And it’s a, come to pass, while my glory passes by, they’ll put thee in the clifft or cleft of the rock and a pass by thee. And there’s that sense of the almighty, sovereign, sort of infinite that could destroy you in a flash, making himself such that you can hear and see. And this reminds me very much of the language at certain parts in the New Testament. The hairs of thy head are numbered and I would care for you like the sparrows of the field and the lilies of the valley. The sense that that which is highest not only knows us but makes itself such that with a tenderness we can hear and see and feel and live that. I would also say again, that’s believable if you can think about it very practically. If God is the great animating spirit of mankind at minimum, how would that make itself man manifest moment to moment? It would be in the same veiled manner that a very strong man would make himself available to wrestling with a child. It’s like you don’t unleash your full force, you only release the amount of force that’s necessary in precise proportion to keep the game going. Exactly, exactly that. And so it’s very realistic that that is part and parcel of the structure of being. It’s amazing how much changes in life, you can be depressed or overwhelmed or sad, if you step into thinking this actual circumstance right now is God loving me. If I can make the move to think, the move is kind of move of faith, to think that these terms right here and now, not sometime in the future, not after all these things change, not after I get my act together, but right now and here, providence you might say, the highest in what is most determining in all of reality itself is conspiring right here and now to love me. That makes a big difference. That’s a rough one. Well, I love bringing this back to freedom because when Ben introduced the idea of symptom, or however you pronounce it, as I understand it, God is everywhere but with a limitation, not the human heart. And that’s the origin of freedom. And you have this idea in the Bible of the primacy of the heart, that things flow from there and I love that idea, the limitation. The notion that God has to limit himself to allow for free choice, that is the ultimate act of love, is allowing somebody who you love to make choices and those choices are not going to go with your kids. It’s the most difficult thing. I mean, as a young parent with three kids and a fourth on the way at this point, it is the hardest thing. And one of the hardest things for me is I have a nine-year-old daughter and she is doing her math homework and I can see that she’s working on a multiplication problem and in the middle of the problem I can see she’s doing it wrong. And you can step in and you can tell her she’s doing it wrong and you can correct her or you can let her go through the entire process and discover for herself that she’s doing it wrong and go back and learn how to correct herself and actually make herself stronger at math.