KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 12 November
Because God is God
A moment’s reflection on the Scripture readings of the past few weeks suggests how powerfully they speak to many of the current confusions and uncertainties in our culture. Just recently we have been pondering the spiritual journey that takes us from the Covenant with Noah to the Abrahamic Covenant, from Moses and the Burning Bush to the Mosaic Covenant in The Ten Commandments, the moral code for our humanity, as it were, written in stone. This provides the background, too, for The Beatitudes which presuppose the Law and perfect it, at least in the Christian understanding. At the very least, they stand in a complementary relation to each other.
“I Am Who Am” is God’s revelation of himself as the ultimate principle of thinking and knowing without which there can be no causality at all. That leads in the thinking of Exodus to the further revelation of God’s will for our humanity in the ethical principles of The Ten Commandments, themselves a coherent set of interrelated concepts that speak to the nature of our humanity individually and communally and always in relation to God as the causal principle of all and every good. Not unlike Plato’s arguments about the ethical and intellectual priority of the Good in which the being and the knowing of all things depend.
This way of thinking is framed as a rejection of the fearful uncertainties of the ancient Mesopotamian world and its legacy wherever the movement of thought goes from chaos to order. For the ancient Sumerians, for instance in The Epic of Gilgamesh, this sense of fearful uncertainty about reality is imaged in figures like Humbaba the unknowable, the Bull of Heaven which Ishtar unleashes upon the City of Uruk symbolizing drought, and the ancient flood story which threatens even the Gods. In all of those images, chaos is seen as always fearfully present and as capable of upending everything. Even the gods are a most uncertain quantity. Quite apart from any sort of confidence even simply in “natural processes”, all is basically “random” even though the ancient Sumerians, much like our own culture, were remarkably practical about many things from irrigation to sailing to wine-making. The first major technological revolution speaks to its latest iteration and, yet, with a similar degree of uncertainty.
