And they saw the place
Sermon preached at St. Margaret's Anglican on August 21, 2022.
Appointed readings: Jer 1:4-10; Ps 71:1-6; Heb 12:18-29
Introduction
If you have a Bible with you this evening, it may
be helpful to have it handy as this will be one of those sermons that a friend
of mine once described as “A Bible in one hand and more Bible in the other.”
Now, I am far from a Greek scholar as my seminary transcripts can attest to,
and I generally have a rule against appealing to biblical languages in the
pulpit. But, just this once, I want to draw your attention to a little bit of
text criticism as our way into our epistle reading this evening.
Our lesson from Hebrews begins “You have not come
to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and
a tempest… etc.” But what is this “something” that is being referred to? The
Book of Hebrews, true to its name, sets out to explicate the gospel of Jesus
Christ by way of a close reading of the Hebrew scriptures. With that in mind,
this passage is fairly obviously a reference to Mt. Sinai, and indeed, if you
have a study bible, you’ll probably notice Exodus 19.12 referenced as a
parallel text. While the NRSV has chosen to leave the “something” ambiguous,
critical editions of the Greek NT note that a significant number of manuscripts
add the greek word ὄρει which
means “mountain.” The passage would then read something like “You have not come
to a mountain that can be touched…” Clearly, at least some ancient scribes
thought the allusion to Mt. Sinai was so strong here that they literally
spelled it out in their copies.
Now, both of the major critical editions of the
Greek NT, the UBS5 and Nestle-Aland 28 have decided that the preponderance of
the manuscript evidence weighs against a reading that includes ὄρει.
However, English translations still go either way about 50/50. Translations
like the KJV, NKJV, NASB, and NLT opt for a reading that includes “mountain”
with the NASB going so far as adding a heading that makes it clear that this
passage is explicitly a comparison of Mt. Sinai and Mt. Zion. On the other
hand, John Wycliffe’s translation, as well as the RSV, NRSV, NIV, and ESV all
opt for the more ambiguous reading. Clearly, this is a case that can easily go
either way.
Ok, you’re probably thinking, what in the world
could possibly be the point of this deep dive into the minutiae of textual
variants and translation choices? Well, I did say this would be a Bible-heavy
sermon, and I meant it. I draw attention to this ambiguity in the manuscript
and translation reception of this verse because I think it’s actually a pretty
fitting illustration of the problem of interpretation that this passage as a
whole has for us. In fact, I want to persuade you this evening that what this
passage is about is the work of interpretation as such and that attending to
questions of interpretation is actually at the heart of the Christian life.
Something
that Can(’t) be Touched
Again, to our text, “You have not come to
something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a
tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers
beg that not another word be spoken to them.” Let us begin with the tradition
that identifies this “something” with Mt. Sinai. This short list of descriptors
is a nice concise gloss of Israel’s experience at Sinai. The voice of God was a
terror to the Israelites, and they begged Moses to enter the thick gloom, the
darkness, and fire of God, to speak with God on their behalf and then report
back. The Sinai account is interesting, for at times we are led to believe that
Moses speaks to God face to face, yet when Moses begs to see the Lord’s face,
he is refused and sees only his back. It is said that Moses speaks to and sees
God, yet this assertion is coupled with images of divine gloom, thunder, and
trumpets. God himself declares in Exodus 33 that “no man shall see my face and
live” and John’s gospel concurs, reminding us that “No one has ever seen God.”
So, what’s going on at Sinai? At the very moment
that God is making Godself known to his people Israel, promising that He will
be their God and they will be His people and giving them the Law that will give
them a way to live and be as his people forever, at that very moment, we’re
also confronted with the utter ineffability of God. God appears, but he does so
in a way that defies human sensibility.[1] God
appears, but in dark and gloom. He speaks, but his voice is like a trumpet and
inspires terror. Whatever and Whoever God is, it is clear that God is not among
the sensible beings of the universe but nevertheless, makes Godself truly known
to God’s people. How can this be?
(Un)Knowing
God
There is a mystical tradition in Christianity
that runs from Evagrius to Maximus, through pseudo-Dionysius to Nicholas de
Cusa and beyond that has grappled deeply with this paradox. How is it that God
is a God that can be known, yet is known precisely by eradicating the possibility
of sensible perception and our ordinary rational faculties? Within this
mystical tradition, Sinai is sometimes taken as a model of spiritual ascent; one
climbs this mountain by way of negation and at the top, the believer enters the
‘divine gloom’ or the ‘cloud of unknowing’ where God may be truly known and
encountered.
For some, this is a matter of technique. Evagrius
for example, provides a program of discipline in his Praktikos for taming unruly desires so that the heart and mind are
not led astray into sin and thus purified, the believer may ascend the
blue-sapphire mountain of the mind and there see God. For the author of the
anonymous medieval manuscript, The Cloud
of Unknowing, Christians are instructed in a method of prayer that prioritizes
short prayers, single words, single syllables, and most ideally, wordless
prayer such that the structures of language are stripped away bit by bit in
order to arrive at knowledge of the divine love of God that is unmediated by
human categories or effort but instead arrives as pure grace and gift. The
Dionysian tradition emphasizes the divine gloom as an image for the method of
apophatic or negative theology. This is a method for doing theology that
insists that if we are to predicate attributes of God, that is, God is just,
God is love, God is merciful, etc. we must immediately negate the predication
by denying that God’s justice, love, mercy, etc are in any way analogous to our
fallen, proximate, finite conceptions of these attributes.
The point of this tradition, broadly speaking, is
to remind us that God is God, and we are not. When Moses asked God what his
name was, God answered, “I am who I am.” God is not a being who may be summoned
by name and manipulated by magic or ritual. God is not a being at all, at
least, not as any creaturely entity is a being. And yet, precisely because God
is who God is, God is radically free to be for us and to make Godself known to
us. Yet how can we know something that defies sensibility or rational
categorization?
Place
Nicholas de Cusa, a 15th-century
bishop and scholastic mystic, developed the tradition of apophatic theology in
a variety of remarkably creative ways, and the way of unknowing was a theme
that he returns to often throughout his writings. Yet near the conclusion of
one of his books, On Learned Ignorance,
he observes that there is in fact a role for positive theology, that is, there
is one use of positive predicative language for God that is both fitting and
necessary. It is in worship, Cusanus says, that we rightly use language to say
things positively about God. In worship we say with the angels, “Holy, Holy,
Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”[2]
Now, I don’t know if Cusanus had this passage
from the book of Hebrews in mind when he wrote that book, but I think his
observation about the necessity of negative theology and its relationship to
the positive theology inherent in worship is reflected quite neatly in our text
this evening. For we have not come to something that can be touched. The God we
worship is precisely not “something” and the attempt to make God into the
sensible objects of the world is to commit idolatry, as the Israelites under
Aaron’s misguided leadership, learned to their detriment in the golden calf
incident.
So perhaps the manuscript tradition and
translators who decided to keep the “something” in this passage ambiguous have
a point. When it comes to knowing God, we have not come to something that can
be touched, etc., God is precisely not these things and we do well to remember
it or risk idolatry. And yet, if God is left merely as something that is the
negation of what we know, how is it that we do know God? Does it even make
sense to say that we can know God?
Well, to lay my cards on the table, I think the
translators of the NRSV got this one wrong. I think the variant tradition that
preserves ὄρει or
“mountain” is the better reading. The reason I think this is because in the
Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, when at Sinai the
elders of Israel join Moses on the holy mountain to have a feast in God’s
presence in order to ratify the covenant, there is again a textual variant in
the Greek that differs from the Hebrew Masoretic Text upon which our modern
translations are based. Exodus 24:9-11 reads thus in the NRSV,
Moses and Aaron, Nadab
and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel.
Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue
as the sky. But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the
Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.
The NRSV Old Testament is largely based on the
Hebrew MT and is a fairly straightforward translation of the Hebrew, and on
this reading, it looks as though the elders of Israel, together with Moses and
the other leaders, indeed saw God and they were not harmed. Yet as I have
already noted, the text elsewhere insists that the people DID NOT SEE GOD. One
solution to this apparent difficulty, one that might be taken by modern
biblical studies for example, is to argue that this shows competing religious
conceptions in ancient Israelite religion and that these conflicting reports
represent different periods of redaction as Israelite theology moved away from
its so-called ‘primitive’ Canaanite origins into the more mature monotheism of
later Judaism. Perhaps. But it is not the speculative prehistory of the Bible
that is what we have to deal with, what we have to deal with is the text as it has
come down to us, albeit in plural forms, yet nevertheless, as a fairly stable
textual tradition.
So, what do we do with this apparent
contradiction? Did the people see God or not? Well, here the Septuagint is
potentially clarifying, for in verse 10, instead of reading “and they saw God”
it reads, “Και ίδον τον τόπον” “And
they saw the place”. According to the Septuagint, the people saw the place
where God stood, which actually makes much more sense given that the rest of
the verse goes on to describe, not the appearance of God, but the appearance of
the place where God stood. That place was like pavement of sapphires (or lapis
lazuli) and as clear as the sky.
The Greek tradition, and we must remember, it is
the Greek version of this text that shaped the writing of the New Testament as
well as a great deal of Christian theology until the Reformation, holds that
the Israelites did not see God, rather they saw the place of God. Ok great,
you’re probably thinking, but what does it really matter if they saw God, or
they saw the place of God? Presumably, if you see the place of something you
also see the thing that’s in place too, right? Isn’t Ryan just being a pedantic
theologian here? Again, I say, perhaps. But I think our lesson from the epistle
to the Hebrews actually rests on the underlying assumption that what the
Israelites saw was not God, but the place of God. Our passage reads,
But you have come to
Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to
innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn
who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of
the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant…
Once again, the emphasis is not on seeing God or
knowing God in any straightforward way in the way we know the things of this
world - for the passage goes onto conclude, “for indeed our God is a consuming
fire.” Rather, the author informs us that we have once again come to the holy
mountain of God - the place where God is enthroned, where the spirits of the
righteous assemble and the angels rejoice and crucially, where Jesus mediates a
new covenant. For as 1 John reminds us, we have seen Jesus and we have touched
him with our hands, or at least our ancestors did. Jesus, the God-man is among
the sensible things of this world and thus takes up the place of mediator for
us that we might know God and be made right in God’s presence. But when we see
Jesus, what we see is precisely the man Jesus. It is this man, Jesus, who is
the image of the invisible God, but we see the man, not God in God’s enthroned
and terrifying glory.
In John 14, Jesus says, “I go to prepare a place
for you, I will come again, and receive you to myself; that where I am, there
you may also be.” Place is an often-overlooked concept in theology, but as I’ve
tried to show throughout this sermon, place seems to be bound up with our
ability to know God. This is because, what place is, is a structure of
intelligibility that is deeply related to our ability to know the world. It is
in place that we begin the interpretive dialogue with ourselves, the world, and
others to know how to go on in the world. Yet our interpretative work becomes
agonistic when applied to God, for God is not captured within the dialogical
economy of our human existence in this world. On our own, God is a subject best
passed over in silence, for anything else might ultimately be idolatrous.[3]
Yet to conclude that we must pass over God in
silence would be supremely unfitting for a God who created in order to love and
be loved by creatures. Our lesson from Hebrews reminds us that our thanks and
worship is an acceptable offering, in reverence and awe, to the Holy God who is
enthroned above all. So it must be that our language is, after all, suitable to
at least this work - to worship God.
But of course, it must be, for the one who
mediates the covenant between us and this Holy God is the same one who was with
God in the beginning, the Word by whom all things that exist were created. It
is this One, this Word, this God-made-flesh who makes room for us by radically
giving himself for us. Just as Jeremiah discovered that God had put words in
his mouth, so to do we discover in our lives as human language users that we
have received language to go on speaking of and to God, even if this language
is perpetually inadequate, wounded, and wounding.[4]
Nevertheless, because Jesus makes room for us to come to the place where God
is, the end of all of our interpretation and dialogue can be graciously
received and consummated in worship.
Conclusion
The Christian life has at its heart a paradox. We
worship a God who is beyond our knowing and yet makes Godself known to us. On
the one hand, we have the temptation to banish God completely from the world as
something wholly beyond our knowing, thus rendering us safe from idolatry - but
this would be to do violence to the testimony in Scripture that God has been
making Godself known to God’s people from the beginning and continues to do so
now. On the other hand, we might have the temptation to identify God too
closely with the things of this world, and thus domesticated, think that we can
reliably control or predict what this God can or must do. But God is free, and God alone determines who God will be.
Perhaps the psalmist says it best when he
confesses, “In you, O Lord, have I taken my refuge; let me never be ashamed.”
For the good news of the gospel is that we have all been incorporated in Christ, and it is Christ who stands
as the mediator in the place where God is enthroned such that in Christ, we may truly know and love
God even as we are truly known. In Christ,
we are truly in the place of God and are able to go on living and offering
acceptable worship by way of the Word that has been given to us before we were
ever formed in the womb.
Blessed
be the mystery of love.
[1] See the
discussion of Immanuel Kant’s distinction of sensible and intelligible beings
in Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2013), 204.
[2] This point from
Cusanus has been more fully engaged in much of the work of Catherine Pickstock,
see Catherine Pickstock,
After Writing: On the Liturgical
Cosummation of Philosophy, 1st edition
(Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997); and Catherine Pickstock, Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics (Cambridge, United
Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[3] Cf. “What can be said at
all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden
(Benediction Classics, 2017).
[4] On the
woundedness of language, see Jean-Louis Chrétien,
The Ark of Speech, trans. Andrew
Brown (New York: Routledge, 2004).
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