Invitation to draw near

St. Catherine’s Monastery beneath Mount Moses

 The mountain upon which it is traditionally believed that Moses saw the burning bush

Shutterstock download: photo by Tomas Konopasek

 

Signs and Wonders

Part One

An Invitation to draw near

 

            The season of Epiphany for church calendar keeping people, is a season when such churches look at the signs and wonders helping to manifest Christ in His glory. A first century person living in Judea in the Middle Eastern region of Palestine would have first seen a rather ordinary human being when they first saw Jesus of Nazareth. He was, as the ancient creeds testified “fully human.” At times when his enemies sought to capture him, he simply walked into the crowd where his ordinary appearance would blend in with the Middle Eastern peoples of his day. There was no halo. There wasn’t even the mystic face of someone speaking with his eyes looking up to the heavens and out into the distance while he spoke his religious truths. In the Gospels we don’t so much see our movie screen version of the distant to the heavens gaze of a religious figure, as much as we see one actively engaged with his audience.

            A reality we can discover reviewing the signs, wonders, and miracles surrounding Jesus’ life, is how His Deity seems both revealed and manifested by his humanity. He at times states that the people of His day must see signs and wonders or they won’t realize who he is. We sometimes think that the signs and wonders that surrounded Jesus’ life were given as a sort of divine apologetics for who Jesus is. That is, we imagine that the signs and wonders were given to the people of Jesus’ day in order to prove to them who Jesus is, that he is the Son of God, the Word become flesh, the promised Messiah. I wonder though as I look over the signs and wonders through which God is made manifest if the signs and wonders are given to prove the existence of God or the Deity of Christ, or if they are the attention grabbers which are meant to bring us in for a closer look. The light on a hill, the unique star in the sky, the burning bush in a desert capture the attention of someone far off so that they draw near to discover what the meaning of this wonder is.

            St. Augustine spoke of the relationship of the Old and New Testaments, describing the Old Testament as the New concealed and the New Testament as the Old revealed. Signs and wonders are not solely New Testament phenomena. For a first century Jewish man or woman if they thought about the age of miracles, and of signs and wonders they would quickly think of the times of Moses. Moses saw a burning bush. Moses took a sign back to the people of Israel to show them that God was going to use him to deliver Israel from Pharaoh’s enslavement. Moses won the people’s release from Pharaoh with ten plagues, and then passed through the Red Sea while Pharaoh’s army drowned. There were more signs and wonders in the Wilderness as the people of Israel wandered forty years. It was in part for this remembrance of their history, that so often the Jewish people of Jesus’ day wanted to compare the signs and wonders associated with his appearance in the life of Israel with the times and ministry of Moses.

            My first writing this season of Epiphany was on the visit to Jerusalem and ultimately Bethlehem of the Wise Men. The magi were attracted to a star in the heavens that seemed to indicate to them the birth of a child who would become King of the Jews. They were intrigued by the star appearing in the heavens and were compelled in their spirits to find out more about this sign and wonder in the heavens. Signs and wonders are often incomplete. We see them and are intrigued. They tease us with possibilities. But they seem especially to invite us to inquire, investigate, seek, and come near to learn the whole story associated with the sign and wonder.

            This season of Epiphany I have especially been drawn to look at Moses’ experience with the burning bush. Hopefully you know at least the basic story. Moses has fled from Egypt and lives among the Midianites in the desert. He guides sheep from one food patch to another while his memories of growing up in an Egyptian palace and yet also associated with the people of Israel grow more and more to be shadows from a distant past. He names a child a name that signifies he is now a stranger living among a strange people. His child is not circumcised. Israel is a shadow of a past life. The desert is his home now. Instead of being some hope of Israel he is a sheep herder in difficult circumstances, a Bedouin at the margins of civilization. It strikes me that as the Magi were people distant from Israel when they saw the star in the night time skies, so was Moses distant from Israel when he saw the burning bush. He saw the flame coming out of the bush, but instead of the bush being consumed by the fire, the bush remained unharmed. What wonder was this that a man who grew up in an Egyptian palace, heard the stories of Israel’s patriarchs, and wandered the desert wilderness for many years now saw on this mountain? This was something different from anything in his personal or learned experiences. He was intrigued and he became determined to draw closer to the wonder. It was as he drew closer that He learned the Lord was addressing him. The sign, the wonder had gotten his attention but it was not the message.

            Yet it seems Biblically important that signs and wonders are events taking place in the context of creation. We remember that Biblically the creation itself points us to the God who is the author and Creator of the creation. The Psalm declares “The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament shows his handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1) St. Paul expresses it: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” (Romans 1:20) I suspect that the Psalmist and the Apostle Paul viewed the wondrous creation as itself a sign and wonder. The creation was not a part of the Creator, but a creation of the creator. The work of creation reflected the glories of the Creator, but if the creation tells us of the creator it does so in conjunction with knowing more of the story of the Creator. The wonder of creation intrigues us and as we look at lofty mountains, spacious plains, immense oceans, canyons carved by water flowing through rock formations, of birds in the skies, great creatures in the water, and every living thing, we are drawn to ask of this diverse and wondrous creation, “Could this have happened without a Creator? What is this God like? The signs and wonders of creation intrigue us and call upon us to seek, to find, and to keep knocking, and seeking until we find. Creation itself is like the star seen by the Magi or the Bush investigated by Moses.

             The connection between the invisible God seen and understood through the creation, in some ways I think is like our beholding Van Gogh in his painting “Starry Night.”

Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” a painting housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City

            “Starry Night” gives a silent testimony of the existence and qualities of Vincent Van Gogh. The painting intrigues us. Then the painting begins to be more explained as we understand Van Gogh’s personal story. His world is one of bipolar highs and depressing lows. He is attracted to brightness as well as to darkness. His world is slipping from a state of reality into the shadowy features he seeks to keep close to his soul as he struggles to maintain his soul’s balance. The intriguing painting can be seen as one thing when viewed independent of its creator; but becomes in a sense an autobiographical sketch expressing the mind and soul of its creator when the creator’s story we begin to know. Of course with God, the infinite nature of the being of God means that our understanding of God from the elements of his creation can never be fully comprehended. We can’t fully know the story of Van Gogh or any other single human being either. But how much more of an enigma do we sense when looking at creation we try to know the God of whom it testifies. Creation reveals and hides God. It testifies of him and an early Cosmonaut could simultaneously say that he went into space and did not see God. Creation both hides and reveals God. It is a sign and wonder which intrigues us and makes us wonder, “Who is the maker of this?” “Does he just watch this universe operate or is he actively involved?” “Is he good or just powerful?” “Is he the creator of beauty or the vicious power behind a world of the eater and the eaten?”

            The signs and wonders are never complete until the story of the one who gives signs and wonders can be learned. Moses came to the burning bush and removed his sandals and knelt prostrate on the sacred ground and worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The magi followed the star until they found the Child in Bethlehem and offered him their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They worshipped the Child. Moses and the Magi could not explain exactly how God manifest himself in burning bush, and in the star over Bethlehem, but they were brought to the sense of the holy manifested to them and worshipped the Living God.

            In an already lengthy blog, let me conclude with what I hope are good applications of these thoughts about signs and wonders.

            First, recognize that the signs and wonders are places where our spiritual journeys begin, not points of conclusions. We see a burning bush and we must listen to what the angel of the Lord says from the burning bush. We see the star in the Judean heavens and must find the child of which the star testifies. We are drawn to a mountain of transfiguration and having seen Moses and Elijah with Jesus we must listen to the voice of the Heavenly Father who tells us this is his Son, in whom he is well pleased, so pay attention to him.” The heavens and the earth and all creation testify of God’s glory. Yet it also requires our knowing the story of the High and Lofty one of Israel who has humbled himself into the weakness of man for us to begin to see the story creation with its signs and wonders tells us.

            In our next blog we will consider another lesson. I cannot imagine the story of Moses and the burning bush, without a sense of a Moses who felt himself far removed from so much that mattered in life. He was removed from the ordinary life of human civilization he had known in Egypt. He was removed from the people associated with his ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Finally he was seemingly a whole world away from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I suspect he must have felt hopeless in the desert of ever finding the life from which he was now estranged. Do not despise signs and wonders. They are gifts to people far removed from where they were meant to fit, far removed from the people of God, and seemingly far removed from the life of the Living God. The sign and wonder offered to us whether from a Bible passage, from a sight in the glories of nature, or in a sense of a special friendship pointing us to God should be for us an invitation to seek the Lord and be grateful that in the midst of our sorrows and our sense of exile there is this sign and wonder which invites me to hope that God is there and that he is a rewarder of those who by faith see the invisible and discover in the sight that they are standing on holy ground before the child whom they are meant to worship.