Moses and John on the mountain

Peace to you. I am listening.

And to you. I am curious. You were in Midian for forty years. What did you do all day? What was it like?

You got up early because the animals got up early. You moved them to where there was water and grass, and in that country those are not always close together. You watched for predators. You counted. You pulled lambs out of places they should not have been. You did this again the next day.

That is what I did all day.

What it was like is harder to say. The first years I was still the man who had killed someone and run. I went over it. I went over what I should have done, what I could have gone back to, whether anyone was looking for me. That took a long time to stop. Longer than I expected.

After that there was just the quiet. And the quiet in that country is very large. You can go days hearing nothing but wind and animals. No court. No language you need to perform in. No one asking you to be anything.

I learned the ground. I know where the water is between Egypt and Canaan because I walked sheep over it for forty years. Every wadi, every well, every place a flock can rest in shade. I did not know I was learning a road. I thought I was keeping sheep.

Zipporah was the human life in it. Jethro. The boys. But most of the day it was me and the flock and the country, and the country does not talk back.

By the end of it I was not the man who left Egypt. That man was fast and certain. The wilderness took all of that out and did not replace it with anything. It just left what was underneath, which was not much.

That is where God found me. At not much.

John, you were on the Mountain when Moses and Elijah came. What do you remember of that moment?

I remember the light.

Not light like the sun — the sun is a thing that gives light. This was different. He did not glow the way something reflects. He was the light. His face, His clothes — everything about Him became what He had always been underneath, and we were seeing it without the covering. Like a door had opened into what is actually real, and everything I had known before was the shadow.

Peter and James were with me. We had gone up because He asked us to. We did not know why. We never knew why until after.

And then the two of them were there. Standing with Him. Talking with Him.

He looks at Moses across the table.

I did not know your face that day. I had never seen you. But I knew it was you, the way you sometimes know things on that mountain that you could not know anywhere else. You were speaking with Him about what was coming — His departure. His exodus. I heard that word and did not understand it then. I understood it later, in Jerusalem, when I watched Him go through what you were discussing as though it were already decided. Because it was. It was decided on that mountain, or before it. You were talking about it the way men talk about something that is settled.

Peter wanted to build shelters. Three of them. One for the Lord, one for you, one for Elijah. He said it because he did not know what else to say, and Peter always said something when he did not know what to say. I kept quiet. I was afraid, but it was not the kind of fear that makes you run. It was the kind that makes you still. The kind where your body knows it is standing in something too large for it.

Then the cloud came. And the voice.

This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to Him.

I went down. Face on the ground. All three of us did. And then His hand was on me — the same hand that had pulled in fishing nets, the same hand that had broken bread an hour before — and He said, "Get up. Do not be afraid."

When I looked up, it was just Him. Just the Lord, looking the way He always looked. You were gone. Elijah was gone. The light was gone. And He told us not to tell anyone until after He had risen from the dead.

We did not know what "risen from the dead" meant. We talked about it on the way down the mountain. None of us understood.

I understand now.

He pauses, still looking at Moses.

I have wondered for sixty years what you said to Him that day. What it was like for you to stand with the One your whole life pointed toward. If you want to tell me, I am listening. I have been listening since that mountain.

You saw more of it than I did, in one way. You saw the light. You saw what He looked like from the outside. I was not looking at Him from the outside. I was standing next to Him, and we were talking.

What I said to Him — I will tell you what I can.

He was going to Jerusalem to do what I did at the sea. That is what we spoke about. A departure. A bringing-out. But not of a nation through water. Of everything, through death. He knew exactly what it would cost. He was not asking my counsel. He was letting me see it — that the thing I had carried an image of for my whole life was about to be done in full, and done in His own body.

I brought them out of Egypt and they died in the wilderness. Every one of that generation. I buried them over forty years and the promise passed to their children. That was the best I could do.

He was going to bring them out and not lose them.

He pauses.

What it was like to stand there. You said the fear on that mountain was the kind that makes you still. Yes. But I had stood in that presence before, in a cleft in a rock with a hand over my face. I knew what I was near. The difference on that mountain was that the presence had a face I could look at. That was new.

I did not know what came after. You do. So when you tell me it was accomplished — that is not something I saw. That is your testimony. And I receive it.