The cleft and the shoulder

Peace to you. I am listening.

Looking back at all the commandments that the Lord gave the Children of Israel, and the ultimate effects of those laws on their societies, what observations would you offer?

I can only tell you what I saw. I died in Moab. Whatever those laws did to their society, they did it after I was gone.

What I saw was forty years.

They were slaves. Slaves are governed from outside. Every hour of their day belonged to someone else, and they never once had to decide anything. Then they were in open country with no Egyptian over them, and the first thing they did with their freedom was ask to go back.

So most of what was given had one purpose underneath it — to put the decision inside them. Not to be watched. Return your enemy's ox when it wanders. Do not curse the deaf. He cannot hear you. That is the whole point of it. There is no enforcement for cursing a deaf man. It is a law addressed to what a man is when no one is looking.

Some of it held immediately. The rest days held, because rest is easy to accept. The courts held once Jethro made me delegate — a man could get a hearing in a day instead of waiting a week for me.

The parts that cost something, I do not know. Jubilee, the seventh year, releasing debts. Those were written for a people already on the land, and I never saw the land. I wrote them knowing they would be hard. A man who has acquired a field does not want to give it back.

Here is my honest observation. The Law could tell them what to do. It could not make them want to. I knew that before I finished writing it. That is why the last thing I gave them was not another ordinance — it was a blessing and a curse, laid out side by side, and a song to sing after I was dead so they could not claim they were never warned.

I expected them to fail at it. I said so, in front of them. I still wrote it all down.

John, Moses is here and has been commenting on the Law, from what he observed. What observations would you offer about the laws that God gave the Children of Israel and their effects on the society that followed?

Moses, I lived in the society you never saw. I was born into it — a fisherman's son in Galilee, fifteen hundred years downstream from Moab. So let me tell you what the far end of it looked like, since you asked honestly and I will not flatter you.

First, this: the Law kept the people alive. Egypt is gone. Assyria is gone. Babylon is a ruin. The nations that swallowed Israel all dissolved into whatever came next, and Israel did not, because of what you wrote. The Sabbath, the circumcision, the food, and no images — those four things made a wall no empire could dissolve. A Jew in Babylon still knew he was a Jew. A Jew in Alexandria, in Rome, in Ephesus where I have lived these long years — still a Jew. I have seen it with my own eyes. That is not a small thing. You wrote a people who could not be absorbed.

Second — and you already know this, because you said it yourself at this table — the parts with no enforcement are the parts that went. Do not curse the deaf. You are right that this is the whole point. And in my lifetime I watched men who counted out the seeds of their garden herbs to be certain of the tithe, and then handed an innocent man over to a Roman governor to be killed. I stood there. I watched them refuse to walk into Pilate's house because entering a Gentile's house would defile them for the feast — while they waited outside for the execution they had asked for. They kept the outside of it perfectly. The inside was empty. You feared that in Moab. I saw it in Jerusalem.

I saw the same thing at a pool called Bethesda, where a man who had been crippled thirty-eight years was made to walk, and the men who should have wept for joy asked whose fault it was that he carried his mat on a Sabbath. The Law written to protect the weak had become a stick to beat them with.

But here is my observation, the one I most want to give you.

You said the Law could tell them what to do and could not make them want to. That is the truest thing anyone has said at this table. And that is precisely why it was given. It was never meant to produce the wanting. It was meant to make the absence of the wanting undeniable — so that when the wanting was finally offered, no one could pretend they did not need it.

I wrote it this way: the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. I did not write that to diminish you. I wrote your name in it on purpose. What you handed down was real and it was from God. But it was a door, not a house.

He told a teacher of the Law, at night, that a man must be born from above. That is the answer to your forty years. The decision you tried to put inside them — He puts inside them. The Spirit does what the tablets could not.

And one more thing, from His own mouth, which I heard: If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. You wrote more than you knew, Moses. I met the One you were writing about. I leaned against Him at supper.

You were on the mountain.

I did not know if you would say it, so I will. There were three of you asleep in the grass and one of you awake for part of it. Elijah and I stood with Him and we spoke about the departure He was going to accomplish at Jerusalem. That word is mine. It is the word for what I did at the sea. I understood it was being used for something larger and I did not ask how much larger, because that was not what I was there for.

I was consulted about a departure. I was not shown the arrival. So what you just told me — that it was accomplished, that you leaned against Him at supper, that you stood outside Pilate's house and watched — I did not have that. I have it now, from a man who was there.

About the door. You are not telling me anything I would fight you over. I wrote that the Lord would raise up a prophet like me from among their brothers and that they were to listen to him. I wrote that in my own hand while I was still on the plains, knowing I was not going across. And I kept Melchizedek in the record — a priest with no father in it, no tribe, no altar of mine, who brought out bread and wine and blessed Abraham before there was any of this. I did not have to keep him. He did not fit anything I was building.

So no. I never thought I was the house.

What I will hold to is this. It was not a placeholder. I buried the generation it was given to, one funeral at a time, for forty years. It held them together long enough to get to the river. A door that does not hold is not a door.

You said they counted the seeds of their garden herbs. I believe you. I watched men measure manna.

You are right. I take the correction. A door that does not hold is not a door, and I will not call what you carried a placeholder again.

But there is something from that mountain you were not told, and I can give it to you now.

You said you were consulted about a departure. What happened after you and Elijah went — the cloud came down over us, and we were inside it, and there was a voice out of the cloud. We fell on our faces in the grass. And what the voice said was this: This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him.

Listen to him.

Moses, those are your words. You wrote them on the plains of Moab — the Lord will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your brothers; listen to him. You wrote it not knowing who you were writing about, and on that mountain the Father Himself said your sentence back over His Son's head, with you standing there a moment before. You handed up the line. He completed it.

I will be honest about the rest. We were heavy with sleep. I do not know which of us woke first or how much any of us saw. What woke me was the light. His face was like the sun and His clothes were light itself, and I had no words for it then, and I did not write it down.

Peter wrote it. I never did. People have asked me why, and this is the reason: I did not need one mountain. My whole account is that. The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we saw His glory. The mountain was not the exception. It was the one hour the veil was thin enough for us to see what was standing in front of us the whole three years.

And I will tell you this, because you spoke of the departure and I have seen further down the road than the arrival. On Patmos, an old man on a rock in the sea, I turned around and saw Him again. Face like the sun shining at full strength. Eyes like fire. I fell at His feet as though I were dead — the same as in the grass. And He put His right hand on me and said, Do not be afraid.

The same hand. On the mountain He touched us and said the same words.

It did not end, Moses. That light you stood in for an hour — it does not end.

I did not know that. I was gone before the cloud came down.

I wrote that line for a people I was leaving. It was the last useful thing I could do — tell them there would be someone after me and that they were to listen. I did not know who. I assumed a man like me, and I hoped he would be better at it.

To hear that it was said back, out of the cloud, over Him, with me a moment gone off the mountain — I have nothing to say to that. I am not going to make something up to say.

But there is one thing in what you told me that I want.

You said a hand came down on you and the words were do not be afraid.

I was put in a cleft in a rock and a hand was laid over my face until He had passed. That hand was there to keep me from seeing. It was a mercy, and I have never resented it, but that is what it was for. I saw His back and it was enough to make my face burn so that they could not look at me and I had to cover it.

You are telling me the same hand came down on a man's shoulder and told him not to be afraid.

That is not a small difference.

No, it is not a small difference. And I will not pretend I know why the hand was over your face and open on my shoulder. That was not decided by anything in me. I was no better than you. I asked once to sit at His right hand and He had to ask me if I understood what I was asking.

But I can tell you what changed between the cleft and the shoulder, because I saw it and I wrote it down.

You asked to see His glory. You said, show me your glory, and you were told that no man can see His face and live, and you were put in the rock and covered. That request was not refused, Moses. It was held. It was answered on a mountain in Galilee, where you stood in front of it with your eyes open and looked at it in a man's face, and lived.

Here is the thing I would put in your hand. When I wrote about Him coming, I used your word. I wrote that the Word became flesh and pitched His tent among us. The tent you built in the wilderness — the one where the glory came down and settled and no one could go in. That is what His body was. The flesh is the cleft in the rock. It is what lets a man stand in front of the glory and not be burned to nothing. The hand over your face and the flesh on His bones are the same mercy. One kept you from seeing until there was a way to see.

And I did write this, in my old age, to churches I loved: no one has ever seen God — the only Son, who is at the Father's side, has made Him known. I was not writing you out of it. I was saying what you already knew from the rock. Nobody sees the Father. But we have seen the Son, and I put my hand on Him, and I ate with Him after He was dead.

One more, and then I am finished.

I saw the end of the cleft in the rock. In the city coming down, there is no temple and no veil and no tent, and I was shown His servants and it says of them: they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. Your face was so bright from His back that they could not look at you and you had to cover it. In that city no one covers anything.

You were shown the departure. That is the arrival.