God is powerfully present in creation

Exodus 14:19-31

Lectionary Reflection for September 13

Jacq Lapsley 

​For decades, I taught a class introducing first year seminary students to the Old Testament. Each year students would engage this story in Exodus 14 of Moses leading the Israelites across the sea as they fled Pharaoh and his army. One of the unusual features of this story is that two traditions are intertwined in the telling, which scholars call the Priestly tradition and the non-Priestly tradition. The Priestly tradition is called that because the broader tradition reflects the interests and concerns of ancient Israelite priests; the non-Priestly tradition because scholars can't agree on what else to call it—there are too many different opinions. 

​Students were given the two accounts of the crossing separated out, so they could see and hear the distinctiveness of each account's telling of this core Israelite memory of how God decisively acted to save Israel. For each account, I asked students: what does God do? What does Moses do? what do the Israelites do? What happens to the Egyptians? 

​Together students would suss out that the answers to these questions were quite distinct, depending on which version you were reading. In the Priestly tradition Moses is an essential intermediary for God's action: God commands, but Moses actually does everything (divides the waters, brings the waters back on the Egyptians). In the non-Priestly tradition God is present in the cloud and does everything directly and through "natural" means, e.g., an east wind turns the sea into dry land; mud clogs the Egyptians' chariot wheels. It's hard to see in the final form of the story that we have in our Bible but when the two accounts are separated, you can see the distinctive emphases of each. 

​What was the point of this exercise? It was not simply to alert students to the fact that many traditions and voices make up the Scriptures, though that is an important fact. Rather, through this exercise students could see that the diverse traditions that make up the Scriptures are essential aspects of its theological richness. God's word to us comes not univocally, but in many voices. In this particular case, the Priestly tradition's emphasis on Moses as a mediator of God's actions points to the importance of how we humans are called to be agents of God in this world. The transcendence of God is important to the Priestly tradition— in this way of thinking God is separate from and beyond all of creation. The non-Priestly tradition, on the other hand,emphasizes the immanence, the nearness, of God. Being present in the cloud, and acting through mud and wind, suggest that God is powerfully present in creation. 

​So which tradition gets it right? The answer is, of course, both! Each tradition contributes to our understanding of who God is. God is both transcendent—above and beyond God's beloved creation—AND immanent-—deeply engaged in and for this beautiful world that God created and loves. The presence of multiple tellings testifies to the many aspects of God's own being and diverse ways of engaging with the world. For Christians, that paradox of transcendence and immanence will come to its most exquisite form in Jesus the Christ, the immanent incarnation of a transcendent God.