Thursday, July 17, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Yhweh
He sent Moses his servant;
Aaron, whom he had chosen.
They wrought his signs among them,
and wonders in the land of Ham.
The Lord remembers his covenant forever.
When he was a young boy, Jesus joined the other children of Nazareth for scripture lessons, which included much memorization. He would have learned today’s Psalm 105. He would have memorized the story of God speaking to Moses from the burning bush and even learned how to pronounce His name. This pronunciation is no longer known to us, because that record was lost when the Jewish temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. But in the story Jesus heard, God spoke his name when Moses asked him.
God replied, “I am who am.”
Then he added, “This is what you shall tell the children of Israel:
I AM sent me to you.”
The LORD, the God of your fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,
has sent me to you.
This is my name forever;
this my title for all generations.
Margaret envisions God’s throne very differently than those of medieval or biblical kings. Those human thrones were built high above the floor, and seated there the king looked down upon his subjects far below, whom he judged with cruelty or generosity at his own pleasure. On the other hand Yahweh’s judgment … judgment of “I am that I am” who came to earth embodied as a fallen man … is not like that of human kings. It is clothed in mercy. His throne, just one step up, is accessible to all.
He remembers his covenant which he made binding for a thousand generations.
Without God’s mercy we are doomed to a futile struggle to make things right ourselves by defining good and evil for ourselves and then seeking to enforce those definitions on others. In his book Chastity, Erik Varden contrasts this with “the Christian difference, which resides in mercy and the obstinacy of pardoning grace, a quality of gentleness that shows itself to be, in the strict sense, essential.”
Varden invites me to “conceive of human life as potentially embraced and contained by mercy,” thereby avoiding three pitfalls: ungrounded optimism, pessimism with its attendant despair and fatalism, with its nihilistic conclusion that the world is governed by factors beyond our control.
The more we are aware of being robed in mercy, the more serenely we can live within ourselves, with our desires and flaws, contradictions and hopes. Mercy gives us courage to remember and look forward. It enables pardon, gives strength for compassion, nurtures hope. The Christian mission is to spread mercy abroad, to let no corner of the world – not a single tear-stained destiny – remain untouched by it (p. 47-48).
Varden wrote these words long after Moses encountered Yahweh in the burning bush. His words reflect more of what Jesus told us than what Moses heard and then witnessed in the coming plagues of Egypt. But from our vantage point, having vicariously endured with the participants so many Older Testament stories of violence and cruelty, and now watching the same stories acted out again and again during our brief moment of time, I think it is evident that mercy -unending and unconditional mercy – has been the language of Yahweh from the beginning. I mean, just listen to the trumpet of Jesus:
Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for yourselves.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.
(Exodus 3, Psalm 105, Matthew 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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