The Fire That Does No Harm
How we with Moses come to trust in the fire that is Love.
All of creation will one day on the Last Day be as the Burning Bush, illuminated, afire—but not consumed—by the glory of God in the Son. —David Bentley Hart
In firefighting terms the bramble on Sinai is “fully involved.” The bush is saturated with flames—every branch, every stem, every leaf. Yet these flames are unlike any fire seen in creation.
The bush is burning but remains unharmed. The leaves are not turning black, the branches not withering, not fallen to earth or aglow with slow destruction.
The plant is verdant, full of life and moisture; not a cell is dead or damaged. Its internal life-giving structures are intact. There is no smoke but there is somehow everywhere an inexplicable, attractive fire.
This is not how it goes with the things of this world and fire. Fire destroys the things of this world but not this fire. This strange fire that engulfs yet preserves life is what turns the head of Moses, and turns our head.
Moses and the bush that burns without being consumed is one of the great moments in the Scriptures, a captivating, arresting apocalypse suffused with the gospel.
This fiery sign in the wilderness marks the beginning of Israel’s Exodus, an event that for the first Christians tells the long story of humanity as a miraculous deliverance from death enacted by the faithfulness of God.
Chaim Potok describes how we find Moses in our decisive moment:
Years have passed since [his] flight from Egypt. The prince is a Bedouin now, in the dusty desert garb of the Sand-Crossers. The inexhaustible black soil of the rich Nile valley, the vast temples, the many gods, the golden palace of the pharaoh, the opulence of his youth—all are a vanished dream in the hot, dry, mountainous wilderness with its violent sunlight and shadows, burning days and chilling nights, and the flock that picks at the low leaves of scrub brush and occasional wild grasses that grow in the reddish earth.
God observes that Moses has turned aside to see this “great sight,” this revelation of non-toxic fire.
The “angel of the Lord” or “the angel of God” calls out to Moses from the midst of the flaming blackberry bush. This is not, like Gabriel, an angelic messenger.
As we listen to the words of this “angel” it becomes clear that here in the Burning Bush is Someone within God speaking not only for God but as God.
The prince of Egypt turned Bedouin shepherd is told to take his sandals off because he is standing on holy ground—nothing dead can come between the flesh of Moses and the presence of God.
A voice in the midst of the bramble declares: “I am the God of your father: The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”
And Moses, we are told, “hid his face, afraid to look at God.” The narrator and Moses agree: this is no less than God speaking, and this God has a face.
God tells Moses from the flaming bush that he has seen the affliction of his people, that he has heard their cries, that he knows their pain.
God tells Moses he is sending him to deliver the Hebrews from death [Egypt]: “I have come down to help them, pry them loose from the grip of Egypt, get them out of that country... .”
“Why me, Lord?,” Moses asks. It’s not just Moses’ question; it’s every human’s question.
God is terse with Moses (and with us): “I’ll be with you” is God’s only reply, echoing the words of Jesus to his disciples at his Ascension, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
“I’ll be with you.” Moses is asked to trust this. We are asked to trust this.
Moses asks to know the name of the God who sends him.
The ‘angel of the Lord’ tells Moses, “I am the One who exists.”
John’s gospel records seven “I am” statements spoken out into the world by Jesus:
“I am the bread of life.”
“I am the light of the world.”
“I am the door.”
“I am the good shepherd.”
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
“I am the way, the truth, and the life.”
“I am the vine.”
I hope you you are beginning to see that this story of the Burning Bush, of the beginning of Passover, is a gospel story.
“I am the One who exists” signals to the Spirit-inspired reader that the Burning Bush is transfigured by Christ, by God-with-a-face.
As the Eastern churches pray, “O Lord, to foreshow the womb not burnt by the Godhead, thou showest the bush burning unconsumed to Moses.”
This moment at the Burning Bush and the sacred moment of Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin are initiations of Passover, are holy ground, are what rescue us from death, and from where God sits they are the same moment.
The first Christians did not pull this way of reading Exodus out of a hat. Paul taught them to read (and to pray) Exodus in this way:
Remember our history, friends, and be warned. All our ancestors were led by the providential Cloud and taken miraculously through the Sea. They went through the waters, in a baptism like ours, as Moses led them from enslaving death to salvation life. They all ate and drank identical food and drink, meals provided daily by God. They drank from the Rock, God’s fountain for them that stayed with them wherever they were. And the Rock was Christ. [1 Corinthians 10:1-4, The Message]
The story of Israel’s Passover, their journey through death to resurrection, is simply our story, a revelation that death is not the end of anyone or anything.
In the synoptic gospels, the Sadducees ask Jesus a complicated question about a woman who marries seven brothers, wanting to know who’s wife she will be in the resurrection (that, you will remember, they don’t believe in).
We tend to focus on Jesus’ answer that we are no longer married in the world that is coming to this world, and thereby miss Jesus’ strong rebuke of the Sadducees for assuming that the seven brothers and their wife are dead.
Jesus says they are in God’s sight very much alive.
To show this, Jesus takes them to our moment with Moses at the fiery bush: “…as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’” then Jesus adds, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”
(Notice, God takes for granted that what was said to Moses at the Burning Bush was said somehow also to the Sadducees and—dare we ignore this?—to us, as if we are all there in the deep wilderness with our sandals off).
What is the nature of a fire that does not consume what it burns?
God is love and love is a fire that consumes sin and death without consuming creation or creatures.
The first Christians see and hear the Son of God in the Burning Bush, in the “angel” that speaks from its center, in the Lord whose face is somehow made visible to Moses in the flames.
This humble bramble, low to the ground and of no reputation, aflame in the obscurity of the deep wilderness, makes known the body of God in the humanity of Jesus Christ, and the sacred fire makes known the divine life that suffuses the only begotten’s ordinary, frail human dust.
Jesus is human all-in and divine all-in: the human things he does reveal his humble divinity and the divine things he does reveal his vulnerable humanity. The God of this burning bramble knows the pain of Israel and our pain—from the inside, in the flesh of Jesus hanging from a tree.
The deliverance that God accomplishes in the flesh of Jesus, by the Passover he endures on the cross—prefigured in the thorns of the engulfed-but-not-consumed blackberry bush—is the defeat of death that “death might vanish from human nature like straw in flame” [Athanasius].
The cross destroys neither the humanity of Jesus, nor his divinity. Instead the death of God in the human flesh of Jesus destroys death, not only for Jesus but for all who share human nature, making resurrection the end of every human and not the grave.
The Burning Bush prefigures also the Transfiguration of Jesus, where a light unknown to this world radiates from the physical Christ, shining brighter than the sun in full strength. Christ’s conversation on Tabor with the dead-but-very-much-alive Moses and Elijah reveals the cross as the crux of what it means to be human and what it means to be God, and Moses and Elijah are witnesses that the resurrection is death’s end.
Our children inspire me, bowing as the cross passes them in our gospel procession.
They do not reverence an instrument of torture but their God, who hangs from a tree to show us the sort of divinity he embodies in our created humanity, which are in Jesus united as co-suffering love.
I watch as they make the sign of the cross over themselves, remembering that as we embrace this practice—here in the assembly and during the week—our lives are interpreted by the death of God for the life of the world, and interpreted by the Burning Bush.
It’s our little ones I have in mind and heart as we remember the words of Jesus:
“I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled.”
In the churches in which many of us were raised, we were taught—explicitly or implicitly—to live in fear of the fire of God.
We are not making that mistake as we disciple our children. The ancient Christians show us a better way of perceiving the divine fire we encounter in the Scriptures and in our experiences.
I want our children to trust that they can welcome and embrace the fire of God—to learn that there is no reason to live in terror of the fire that has come from God, that is coming from God as we stand on holy ground, and that will come from God in the end.
We welcome the fire of God because we know the character of the God who meets us in the flesh of Jesus Christ.
This God comes among us not to destroy humanity but to burn everything out of us that is not of love, that does not have its origin in the divine life.
Like all healing, deliverance, and reconciliation there is pain involved in being set free and made well. It is not easy. It is not a cake walk.
Humanity became cold when we turned away from Love, and like any object the further it travels away from the fiery source of its life the colder it becomes.
Yet there is good news: we are freed from anxiety and fear as we embrace the cleansing fire of God. “With its fire, love makes better whatever it touches” [Ambrose].
Remember: the Burning Bush is aflame, is entirely engulfed, but never consumed by the fire of Love.
Remember: the flames of the fiery furnace do not consume the Hebrew children but the angel—Christ himself—stands with them in the scorching flames and they emerge from the fire unharmed.
Remember: at Pentecost flames of fire come to rest on the heads of the gathered men and women. Christ baptizes us with fire and the Spirit. For Cyril of Jerusalem, the words of Jesus about “casting fire upon the earth” find their fulfillment in this coming of the Spirit at Pentecost.
Remember: God makes his ministers flames of fire, and in the end we shine like the sun in the kingdom of heaven.
And so it is with us now: the fire of the love that is the Spirit of God—Ambrose describes the fire of love as having wings—flies through us, consuming whatever is not of Love and trying whatever is good in us in order to purify the good and make it ready for the kingdom.
And we can trust this fire because the fire is the human who is God, who has journeyed through death and hell to bring us back alive with him.
We walk confidently into the fire that is God, knowing that his fire will “keep us unto everlasting life.”
The way you come to have visions of this world recreated—every farm and street and dwelling engulfed by the fire of divine and permanent flourishing, a world where children don’t die, where people live as long as trees, where no one must cry for help and no blood is shed, where predators lie down with the innocent, where everyone lives to see and enjoy the good fruit of their labor, and nothing is wasted—is first to see in flesh the God who makes this sort of transfiguration credible. This is the glory Moses beholds on Sinai and on Tabor.
The visions of earth described in Isaiah 65, Isaiah 11, and Isaiah 9—this very planet with its continents and oceans and wildernesses and cities and humans and animals transformed as God intends her to be—are made possible by Isaiah’s living encounter with the glory of Jesus Christ.
To trust in the inconceivable transformations Isaiah prophesied is to first experience, as Moses does, a revelation of the Living God.
Just after John’s report of Christ’s triumphal entry, and Jesus’ predictions of his coming death—which no one would accept—Jesus tells us that Isaiah also saw his glory [John 12:41].
In Isaiah 6, the prophet sees a vision of the resurrected and ascended Lord seated on a throne, the hems of his robe billowing into every corner of the temple, the seraphim fly, crying out their triune praise—Holy, Holy, Holy.
As at the Burning Bush with Moses, Isaiah’s transitory-yet-eternal moment in the temple is a revelation of resurrection that puts time out of joint.
Isaiah is undone. He sees the living God and by seeing God in the flesh he truly sees himself for the first time—sees himself, his generation, and his nation as desperately diseased in the pure illumination cast from the Light from Light, and he momentarily despairs.
One of the seraphim takes a hot burning coal from the altar, unharmed wood that has become suffused with fire—two things become somehow one thing without ceasing to be what they are apart from each other.
The angel touches Isaiah’s lips with the fiery coal, which coal the first Christians see as nothing other than the grace that is the Spirit of God, the mercy that is the flesh of the Son, and the love that they together are in communion with the Father.
And the fire that is God does not destroy Isaiah, it purifies him. The fire burns away sin but does not harm the prophet. The fire makes him able to speak of a transfigured world where the child from Bethlehem leads creation and all creatures to the peaceable Kingdom.
Do you desire with Moses and Isaiah an encounter with the Living God?
Common bread on the table behind me is about to be suffused with the fire that is the life of the triune God. Two things—bread and Christ—will become somehow one thing without ceasing to be what they are apart from each other.
And when that fire touches our lips we are made clean, made ready to speak God’s transfiguring words over this planet, and made ready to join God’s adventurous work to redeem the cosmos.
The most important word in Isaiah 65:17 is the pronoun I. It is the Lord, the One who exists, who recreates the earth and the heavens. The Lord is our salvation, and the rescue of this good earth.
I am grateful that by the cleansing nourishment of the Eucharist—by a fire that purifies rather than annihilates—we get to participate right now in painting Isaiah’s vision of the world in bold colors, to write his vision on placards with large letters impossible to ignore: our very selves as servants to and lovers of our neighbors.
As far back as the Burning Bush—lush, green, and aflame, yet not consumed, with roots in holy ground on which a shoeless Moses kneels—in the voice of the “angel” who is somehow another in God who speaks for God—we hear a gospel about the resurrection of the dead, from a God who speaks of things that are not as though they somehow are.
John Henry Newman shares this about what the Sinai “angel” has to say to us resurrection:
Philosophers of old time thought the soul indeed might live for ever, but that the body perished at death; but Christ tells us otherwise, he tells us the body will live for ever. In the text he seems to intimate that it never really dies; that we lose sight indeed of what we are accustomed to see, but that God still sees the elements of it which are not exposed to our senses.
God graciously called himself ‘the God of Abraham.’ He did not say the God of Abraham’s soul, but simply of ‘Abraham.’ He blest Abraham, and he gave him eternal life; not to his soul only, without his body, but to Abraham as one man.
And here is a great beauty and a great mystery: God tells Moses that he has always been and will always be known as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
God decides to identify himself with the human story, with our story, and to name himself using our names.
This story of a bush and God and Moses is by the Spirit our story, is the story of the church as nothing less than the whole human family—is every human’s story.
By grace every human can become as this bush: engulfed by the fiery presence of God but unharmed, “fully involved” by flames that sanctify her, body and soul, burning away everything in her that is not of Love.
The first Christians, some of whom, like Moses, dwelt in the desert, tell this story:
Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’
God has acted, is acting, and will act to rescue us from death. And, like Moses, he allows us to participate in his work to remove the dark pall of death that hangs over the nations.
The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wants us to trust this:
Earth's crammed with heaven/And every common bush afire with God/But only he who sees takes off his shoes.
When by the Spirit we ignore satanic voices that hinder us from taking up our cross, we with Christ become walking, talking trees of life, aflame with the fire of God but not destroyed, made ready to participate in his deliverance of those who all their lifetimes are enslaved by the fear of death, made ready to love our enemies, made ready to preserve the creation God loves. In our transfigured eyes every bush is afire with his energies, every patch of ground holy.
There are burning bushes all around us if we have eyes to see. Let’s take our sandals off, enter the silence of the deep wilderness, and hear what God has to say to us about the end of death. He takes on our names in his story of redemption.
Again I am deeply moved by your contemplation, Kenneth. Thank you for sharing so generously.
Amen! What a beautiful way to start and live into this day and tomorrow..