A difficult grace
One of the hardest-to-take passages in all the Bible is the one that describes Moses’ momentary outburst of anger - and the consequences - in Numbers 20:10-12. After listening to the Israelites gripe for the hundredth time, Moses lost it (but only a little). “Listen, you rebels”, he said to them, “must we bring you water out of this rock?” Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank.
Then comes this in v. 12 - But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, “Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them.”
It seems so unfair - the death penalty for getting jelly on the tablecloth, as Fred Craddock once put it. But L. L. Barkat, in her new book Stone Crossings, suggests that God’s discipline hides a severe mercy, a difficult grace. She says that the way Moses speaks to the people here shows that maybe he’s handled the things of God for so long that he is beginning to confuse himself with God (a common temptation in ministry). So God shuts him out of Canaan.
But this isn’t the end for Moses. At the end of Deuteronomy, God takes him to a high mountain and shows him the Promised Land. GOD does this, as a man might do for his best friend. And then Moses dies there on that mountain, and God buries him..as a man might do for his BEST friend. Getting shut out of the Promised Land wasn’t the same as getting shut out of God’s presence. Quite the opposite.
I read this in Stone Crossings today just after I read about the pitiful prophets of Matthew 7 to whom Jesus says “I never knew you”. “But Lord, Lord,” they say, “didn’t we do mighty miracles in your name?”
Maybe that’s where Moses was heading when God saved him from himself.
P. S. Did Moses ever enter the Promised Land? Sure he did. See Matthew 17:3 
Sinéad O’Connor and grace
If you know anything at all about Sinéad O’Connor, you probably remember her ripping up a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live 15 years ago. That’s pretty much all I knew about her.
So it surprised me to see Christianity Today do an interview and feature article on her. It surprised me more to read that O’Connor is releasing a CD called Theology, based on themes from the Old Testament, and that the CT articles are part of her publicity campaign. The biggest surprise, though, is how RIGHT she gets grace.
Sinéad O’Connor isn’t likely to win any Dove Awards with Theology. She’s still profane (I had to steer around an expletive in the quote below). But she shows real insight into grace, authenticity, repentance and the power of God when she speaks to CT about the Catholic church abuse scandals:
The reason they were afraid to fess up is because they knew their congregations would slaughter them, which means they haven’t taught forgiveness—they haven’t actually taught the Christian lessons to their own congregations. If they had taught forgiveness and understanding…people would have a lot more respect for them.
If they believed in God, they would’ve gone through this sexual abuse scandal a lot easier because they would’ve actually asked and employed God in order to sort things out. So they’re still swimming through it with no life support.
Who deserves to suffer?
This headline caught my eye: “Rabbi claims holocaust dead ‘deserved it’”. Read the article and you’ll see that the headline is only slightly sensationalized. The rabbi is Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox Jew from England who recently spoke at the controversial holocaust conference in Iran. Cohen isn’t a holocaust denier, but he holds a point of view that is at least as old as Job’s comforters - that those who suffer deserve it, and those who inflict suffering could not otherwise succeed. Cohen’s beliefs about suffering shape his view on Israel (and this is what makes him so controversial): He believes that the modern nation of Israel was formed as an act of rebellion against God, who wills that Jews live peacefully in exile.
Laying aside Cohen’s anti-Zionist doctrine, it strikes me that Christians inhabit an entirely different universe of ideas about suffering. On one hand, we all deserve it “in one way or another” as Cohen so loosely puts it. “The wages of sin is death” says Paul in Romans 6:23. Jesus talked about people who died in a much smaller incident of anti-Semitism in Luke 13, and then he said: “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:2-3, NIV)
On the other hand, at the center of our faith is the one true innocent man suffering without deserving it. The “punishment that brought us peace was upon him,” Isaiah says.
Grace is a wild, unlikely thing, isn’t it?
