Wednesday, August 13, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Moses went up
Moses went up from the plains to Mount Nebo, and the Lord showed him all the land as far as the Western Sea, with the lowlands of Jericho, city of palms.
Moses might have been an old guy – he had lived three lives each of forty years – but he could still climb every mountain. As the Torah says,
Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died,
yet his eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated.
Now this was his last day on the planet where he was born. Born into slavery, rescued and raised in the pharaoh’s palace, he became God’s voice to call his people out of bondage into the wilderness and finally, forty years later, to the border of their promised land.
So much has happened, and the books of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) remind the Hebrews through story after story of both their victories and their defeats. Now another book will be written into their history. Will they remember the lessons and listen to the laws and customs God has given them?
No prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face. He had no equal. But now Joshua, son of Nun, was filled with the spirit of wisdom, because Moses had laid his hands on him.
But before Moses departs to the bosom of his Father he too must surely recall all that has gone before. This is his judgment day. Writing from her own deathbed of another judgment day, the final short story of author Flannery O’Connor gives me pause as I think today about Moses.
Getting home is escaping from the narrow tenements of time to the house of the Lord (Psalm 23). The world of sin and death with its monstrous contingencies leads to the order of resurrection.
There is nothing we can do to prepare ourselves other than what Moses did, simply trust and obey. God is in charge, and we are not. In the judgment moment, we see that clearly, often for the first time..
O’Connor prepares her characters for elevation to a richer life by bringing them to the bedrock of experience: the awareness of limitation. This state of want is a sign that the last days have begun. Such poverty has nothing to do with economics. It has rather to do with mystery, and it is the central mystery of our position on earth as debtors to God in relation to one another. – Richard Giannone, Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love, p. 247
In a book, The Grieving Brain, that my friend John mentioned to me, the author says simply, “We need our loved ones as much as we need food and water.”
Amen, I say to you,
whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,
and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Again, amen, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth
about anything for which they are to pray,
it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father.
For where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them.
Our own “state of want” might be named or it might not even be acknowledged, but it’s real. Reading in John’s book, I also read today’s gospel differently. Jesus knows how much we depend on each other and together depend on God. His assurance that our Father knows this … is comforting far beyond physical limitation or reality, which wedding vows warn us will be … “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
What was it that Leonard Cohen sang?
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Listen to the trumpet of Jesus …
Where two or three are gathered together in my name,
there am I in the midst of them.
YES!
(Deuteronomy 34, Psalm 66, 2 Corinthians 5, Matthew 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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