Matthew Hester—Year A Proper 24
Anthony:
All right, let’s transition to our next text. Exodus chapter 33:12–23. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 24 in Ordinary Time, October 18.
Moses said to the LORD, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ 13 Now if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider, too, that this nation is your people.” 14 He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” 15 And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not bring us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.” 17 The LORD said to Moses, “I will also do this thing that you have asked, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” 18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The LORD,’ and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” 21 And the LORD continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; 23 then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”
There’s a lot going on here. A lot to talk about. So, Moses insists that Israel cannot move forward unless God’s presence goes with them. Now, we believe, don’t we, Matthew, that God is omnipresent. So, we believe God is always present to us, always going with us, but I wonder, is there something that we can learn about Moses’ intention of not moving before God moves, and how might that intention inform the way we understand our participation in God’s mission to the world?
[00:42:47] Matthew: Oh, yeah. I think it’s helpful for us to distinguish between God’s presence and our conscious participation in that presence.
Anthony: Tell me more.
Matthew: Yeah, as you mentioned in, as you mentioned in the question yes, God is truly omnipresent. We, we agree. So, Moses isn’t trying to convince an absent God to become present. It’s impossible.
Psalm 139 will eventually say, “Where can I even go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” Paul is going to say later in Acts 17, “In him we live and move and have our being.” So, there is no outside of the presence of God. So, there’s nowhere Israel could go where God’s not.
But what I believe is being revealed here is something deeper, because Moses doesn’t just want to arrive at the destination. He wants their movement to arise from communion. And that’s something I’ve really been leaning into as of late: the distinction between union and communion. Union is what God establishes, communion is how we participate.
And I think that’s such an important distinction, because sometimes, I’ve done it myself, we talk about waiting for God to move. And again, it’s actually funny, just to use a little bit of logic, as though God is inactive, as though we’re waiting for him to finally do something. But I wonder if the deeper invitation is actually learning to discern the movement of God that is already occurring …
Anthony: There you go.
[00:44:21] Matthew: … and then participate in it. Again, that’s the communion of participation. So, that’s how I understand mission. Like mission isn’t primarily our great idea that we ask God to bless. No, mission begins in God. And so, the theological word, missio Dei, it captures this beautifully: the mission of God.
The Father sends the Son, the Father and the Son send the Spirit, the Church finds itself swept into that divine movement toward creation. So, we’re not actually bringing God somewhere God isn’t, we’re awakening to what God is already doing there. And for me, that completely changes evangelism and ministry for me.
When I encounter another person, I don’t arrive carrying Jesus into a godless space. That’s what we’ve often imagined. I know I have before. No, Christ is already holding that person’s existence together. Like they … The very fact that they’re standing in front of you means they’re being upheld by the power of his word. He is in all things and through all things, including them. That’s what Colossians says anyway.
And so, my question becomes less how can I get God into this situation, and it’s more like, “Father, what are you already doing here and how can I participate?” And I think that’s a very different posture because it requires listening, it requires discernment, humility, patience. It means, sometimes, refusing to manufacture movement simply because we’re uncomfortable being still. And man, that is such a huge indictment against so much of the Western Church, and I would even say from the charismatic Pentecostal framework. And I can talk about them, they’re my mother tongue, okay? They’re my people.
We’re always in this, let’s just try to … Let’s be still, but I’m not sure I can be still for long because we got to get God on the move. Sometimes you’ll find God moves the most in those moments of what we perceive as stillness.
And so I think Moses essentially is saying here, “I would rather remain in the wilderness with your presence than to arrive in the Promised Land without consciously participating with it.” And for me, that’s profound, because the destination is actually not the point. If you think about it, that getting from Egypt and crossing the Jordan, if we’re not careful, we think crossing the Jordan’s the point.
The point that God is trying to mold within a freed society of people is this: communion.
Anthony: Yeah.
[00:46:48] Matthew: Okay? Let’s navigate this one day at a time, one moment at a time, one meal at a time, one encounter at a time together. And then Jesus embodies it. This is who his Father’s always been, and he says, “The Son can do nothing on His own, but only what He sees the Father doing.”
What is that? It’s actually not divine mimicry. No. It’s participation. That’s what Jesus is saying.
We do this all together, guys. So, Jesus is not inventing ministry. He’s not anxious about it, trying to get his itinerary filled. His life is flowing from that communion with the Father through the Spirit, and that’s the same invitation offered to us.
So, perhaps, maybe it’s more like this. “Don’t move without God’s presence” doesn’t mean God might get left behind. That’s not what we’re saying.
What it means is, don’t become so obsessed with going somewhere for God …
Anthony: That’s right.
[00:47:49] Matthew. … that you forget how to move with God. That’d be the takeaway for me.
[00:47:50] Anthony: That’s such a good word. And it does, it changes the way that you show up in every room, every space. For me, the question is, what are you up to, Lord? In this space, right here in this hospital room, at this birthday party, at this sporting event, in this house of worship ― what are you up to here? Give us eyes to see, Lord, what it is you’re doing. We want to do it with you.
Matthew: Yeah, I would love to participate.
Anthony: Yes.
Matthew: Yeah.
[00:48:18] Anthony: And this is one of the ways Moses wanted to participate. He wanted to see God’s glory. And God responds by revealing his goodness while shielding Moses from what he couldn’t handle the fullness of his presence. So, what does this interaction teach us about the knowability and the mystery of God, and how does God’s self-revelation unveil the intimacy of knowing God with divine transcendence?
Matthew: Yeah, such great questions. You’re already leaning into it here already. Moses asked or says, “Show me your glory,” and God responds, “I’ll make my goodness pass before you.”
Look at that. Moses asked for glory, God reveals goodness. And I think that is significant. Because we imagine divine glory often in these terms of overwhelming power, its brightness, majesty, probably a lot of what the people were scared of, right? The thunder, the transcendence. Those images certainly, they’re there in Scripture. We’re not ignoring them.
But here, when God interprets his own glory and it’s huge, he begins talking about goodness, graciousness, mercy. And again, you follow that trajectory all through Scripture, then you arrive at Jesus, and then John says, “The Word became flesh, lived among us, and we have seen His glory.”
Where? In Jesus. And that is so astonishing to me because the glory Moses could only glimpse, Christians confess has taken on a human face. I’m so glad that Moses’ encounter here was not the end of the story on glory because you look at the answer. God says, “No one can see my face and live.” But then Jesus says, “Whoever seen me has seen the Father.”
So, someone missed it here. Somebody missed it. All of a sudden, Jesus is like, “Wait a second, you guys believe that no one can see Him. I’m telling you, if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father. Behold, here I am.” Here he is. Hebrews calls Jesus the radiance of God’s glory.
[00:50:27] The exact imprint of God’s being. And so we can make a claim like this with this tension here. God is mysterious, but that doesn’t mean God is unknowable. And I think a lot of times we try to categorize those two words together.
Mystery … Listen, there are things about my wife, I’ve been married to my wife, we’re coming up on 25 years. There are still things about her that are mysterious to me.
And that’s part of the beauty of our relationship. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know her. My goodness.
And part of that mystery is the beauty of relationship. And mystery doesn’t mean God is hiding behind Jesus. Maybe, perhaps, he’s actually something completely different.
Jesus reveals God precisely while never exhausting God. I love that thought. And that should be important to us, because sometimes we use divine mystery as a theological escape hatch. And we’ll say things like, “God’s ways aren’t our ways,” right? And then we’ll attribute something horrific to God that looks nothing like Jesus.
So usually that’s what we do. We can’t explain it, so his ways are higher than our ways. But Christian mystery for me ― it can’t mean contradiction. It can mean a lot of things, but it can’t mean contradiction in its truest form. Because this is what I mean ― I may never comprehend God exhaustively, absolutely, but I can know God’s character truly …
Anthony: That’s right.
[00:51:57] Matthew: … because God has made himself known in Christ. So, what does that mean? Jesus, he didn’t reveal a percentage rate of God. It’s not 30%’s good, 70%’s dangerous, and good luck, guys. Again, Paul tells us in him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. All the fullness. And so, God’s transcendence doesn’t mean that somewhere behind Jesus there’s another god. It means that God is perfectly revealed in Jesus.
But it also does mean it’s infinitely deeper, greater, more beautiful than I could ever exhaust. So, mystery doesn’t mean that I don’t know who God is. And I think that’s just, it’s an important distinction to make.
Anthony: Oh, that’s so good.
Matthew: Yeah.
[00:52:42] Anthony: Yeah, Eugene Peterson says it like this, “Mystery is not the absence of meaning. It’s the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.” It’s the depths of exploration in this relationship with God. We know his nature and character in the personal work of Jesus. Eternal life is knowing that, right? Knowing God and his Son, and it’s just plumbing the depths of that goodness, is it not?
[00:53:09]Matthew: Yes. Yeah. And I like to even say it this way and exactly what you said, beautifully stated. I say it this way, mystery doesn’t even create distance. Growing up, I don’t know why I would allow myself to think that way. “Oh, I don’t know something about God, so I must not know him.” No. When we begin to realize mystery doesn’t create distance, it actually invites wonder.
Anthony: Huh, there we go.
[00:53:33] Matthew: And that’s such a huge component of our relational journey is that wonder, and it’s so needed. It is so needed in this day and age. And so, as we have a more clear picture, a more clear representation of who Jesus is, the mystery doesn’t actually disappear. It just becomes more beautiful.
And so, again, back to the start of the question, Moses says, “Show me your glory.” God said, “I’ll show you my goodness.” and ultimately, I think that’s why we can make claims like this, “Hey, God’s goodness has passed before us in human flesh.” So, in the day of Moses it didn’t quite look like what we behold today. In our day, we’ve actually beheld the goodness of God, and his name is Jesus.
Anthony: Amen.
Matthew: And he didn’t just pass before one of us, he passed before all of us.
[00:54:21] Anthony: Hallelujah. Praise God. Oh, this is so good. Such a great conversation of this … I love this idea of mystery. Listen, Matthew, we have so much information, don’t we? We’re inundated with information.
And in that I think that we think we know something, and we lose, we can lose sight of just the awe and wonder of who God is. This is not about information. It is about a relationship, and just like you said with your own spouse there’s this ongoing learning about the beauty of who she is. Imagine the depths of that with God.
his is what we’re leaning into, in the awe and wonder of who he is.
All right, let’s transition to our next text. Exodus chapter 33:12–23. It is a Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 24 in Ordinary Time, October 18.
Moses said to the LORD, “See, you have said to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ 13 Now if I have found favor in your sight, please show me your ways, so that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider, too, that this nation is your people.” 14 He said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” 15 And he said to him, “If your presence will not go, do not bring us up from here. 16 For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinct, I and your people, from every people on the face of the earth.” 17 The LORD said to Moses, “I will also do this thing that you have asked, for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name.” 18 Moses said, “Please show me your glory.” 19 And he said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The LORD,’ and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.” 21 And the LORD continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; 23 then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”
There’s a lot going on here. A lot to talk about. So, Moses insists that Israel cannot move forward unless God’s presence goes with them. Now, we believe, don’t we, Matthew, that God is omnipresent. So, we believe God is always present to us, always going with us, but I wonder, is there something that we can learn about Moses’ intention of not moving before God moves, and how might that intention inform the way we understand our participation in God’s mission to the world?
Matthew: Oh, yeah. I think it’s helpful for us to distinguish between God’s presence and our conscious participation in that presence.
Anthony: Tell me more.
Matthew: Yeah, as you mentioned in, as you mentioned in the question yes, God is truly omnipresent. We, we agree. So, Moses isn’t trying to convince an absent God to become present. It’s impossible.
Psalm 139 will eventually say, “Where can I even go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” Paul is going to say later in Acts 17, “In him we live and move and have our being.” So, there is no outside of the presence of God. So, there’s nowhere Israel could go where God’s not.
But what I believe is being revealed here is something deeper, because Moses doesn’t just want to arrive at the destination. He wants their movement to arise from communion. And that’s something I’ve really been leaning into as of late: the distinction between union and communion. Union is what God establishes, communion is how we participate.
And I think that’s such an important distinction, because sometimes, I’ve done it myself, we talk about waiting for God to move. And again, it’s actually funny, just to use a little bit of logic, as though God is inactive, as though we’re waiting for him to finally do something. But I wonder if the deeper invitation is actually learning to discern the movement of God that is already occurring …
Anthony: There you go.
Matthew: … and then participate in it. Again, that’s the communion of participation. So, that’s how I understand mission. Like mission isn’t primarily our great idea that we ask God to bless. No, mission begins in God. And so, the theological word, missio Dei, it captures this beautifully: the mission of God.
The Father sends the Son, the Father and the Son send the Spirit, the Church finds itself swept into that divine movement toward creation. So, we’re not actually bringing God somewhere God isn’t, we’re awakening to what God is already doing there. And for me, that completely changes evangelism and ministry for me.
When I encounter another person, I don’t arrive carrying Jesus into a godless space. That’s what we’ve often imagined. I know I have before. No, Christ is already holding that person’s existence together. Like they … The very fact that they’re standing in front of you means they’re being upheld by the power of his word. He is in all things and through all things, including them. That’s what Colossians says anyway.
And so, my question becomes less how can I get God into this situation, and it’s more like, “Father, what are you already doing here and how can I participate?” And I think that’s a very different posture because it requires listening, it requires discernment, humility, patience. It means, sometimes, refusing to manufacture movement simply because we’re uncomfortable being still. And man, that is such a huge indictment against so much of the Western Church, and I would even say from the charismatic Pentecostal framework. And I can talk about them, they’re my mother tongue, okay? They’re my people.
We’re always in this, let’s just try to … Let’s be still, but I’m not sure I can be still for long because we got to get God on the move. Sometimes you’ll find God moves the most in those moments of what we perceive as stillness.
And so I think Moses essentially is saying here, “I would rather remain in the wilderness with your presence than to arrive in the Promised Land without consciously participating with it.” And for me, that’s profound, because the destination is actually not the point. If you think about it, that getting from Egypt and crossing the Jordan, if we’re not careful, we think crossing the Jordan’s the point.
The point that God is trying to mold within a freed society of people is this: communion.
Anthony: Yeah.
Matthew: Okay? Let’s navigate this one day at a time, one moment at a time, one meal at a time, one encounter at a time together. And then Jesus embodies it. This is who his Father’s always been, and he says, “The Son can do nothing on His own, but only what He sees the Father doing.”
What is that? It’s actually not divine mimicry. No. It’s participation. That’s what Jesus is saying.
We do this all together, guys. So, Jesus is not inventing ministry. He’s not anxious about it, trying to get his itinerary filled. His life is flowing from that communion with the Father through the Spirit, and that’s the same invitation offered to us.
So, perhaps, maybe it’s more like this. “Don’t move without God’s presence” doesn’t mean God might get left behind. That’s not what we’re saying.
What it means is, don’t become so obsessed with going somewhere for God …
Anthony: That’s right.
Matthew. … that you forget how to move with God. That’d be the takeaway for me.
Anthony: That’s such a good word. And it does, it changes the way that you show up in every room, every space. For me, the question is, what are you up to, Lord? In this space, right here in this hospital room, at this birthday party, at this sporting event, in this house of worship ― what are you up to here? Give us eyes to see, Lord, what it is you’re doing. We want to do it with you.
Matthew: Yeah, I would love to participate.
Anthony: Yes.
Matthew: Yeah.
Anthony: And this is one of the ways Moses wanted to participate. He wanted to see God’s glory. And God responds by revealing his goodness while shielding Moses from what he couldn’t handle the fullness of his presence. So, what does this interaction teach us about the knowability and the mystery of God, and how does God’s self-revelation unveil the intimacy of knowing God with divine transcendence?
Matthew: Yeah, such great questions. You’re already leaning into it here already. Moses asked or says, “Show me your glory,” and God responds, “I’ll make my goodness pass before you.”
Look at that. Moses asked for glory, God reveals goodness. And I think that is significant. Because we imagine divine glory often in these terms of overwhelming power, its brightness, majesty, probably a lot of what the people were scared of, right? The thunder, the transcendence. Those images certainly, they’re there in Scripture. We’re not ignoring them.
But here, when God interprets his own glory and it’s huge, he begins talking about goodness, graciousness, mercy. And again, you follow that trajectory all through Scripture, then you arrive at Jesus, and then John says, “The Word became flesh, lived among us, and we have seen His glory.”
Where? In Jesus. And that is so astonishing to me because the glory Moses could only glimpse, Christians confess has taken on a human face. I’m so glad that Moses’ encounter here was not the end of the story on glory because you look at the answer. God says, “No one can see my face and live.” But then Jesus says, “Whoever seen me has seen the Father.”
So, someone missed it here. Somebody missed it. All of a sudden, Jesus is like, “Wait a second, you guys believe that no one can see Him. I’m telling you, if you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father. Behold, here I am.” Here he is. Hebrews calls Jesus the radiance of God’s glory.
The exact imprint of God’s being. And so we can make a claim like this with this tension here. God is mysterious, but that doesn’t mean God is unknowable. And I think a lot of times we try to categorize those two words together.
Mystery … Listen, there are things about my wife, I’ve been married to my wife, we’re coming up on 25 years. There are still things about her that are mysterious to me.
And that’s part of the beauty of our relationship. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know her. My goodness.
And part of that mystery is the beauty of relationship. And mystery doesn’t mean God is hiding behind Jesus. Maybe, perhaps, he’s actually something completely different.
Jesus reveals God precisely while never exhausting God. I love that thought. And that should be important to us, because sometimes we use divine mystery as a theological escape hatch. And we’ll say things like, “God’s ways aren’t our ways,” right? And then we’ll attribute something horrific to God that looks nothing like Jesus.
So usually that’s what we do. We can’t explain it, so his ways are higher than our ways. But Christian mystery for me ― it can’t mean contradiction. It can mean a lot of things, but it can’t mean contradiction in its truest form. Because this is what I mean ― I may never comprehend God exhaustively, absolutely, but I can know God’s character truly …
Anthony: That’s right.
Matthew: … because God has made himself known in Christ. So, what does that mean? Jesus, he didn’t reveal a percentage rate of God. It’s not 30%’s good, 70%’s dangerous, and good luck, guys. Again, Paul tells us in him, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. All the fullness. And so, God’s transcendence doesn’t mean that somewhere behind Jesus there’s another god. It means that God is perfectly revealed in Jesus.
But it also does mean it’s infinitely deeper, greater, more beautiful than I could ever exhaust. So, mystery doesn’t mean that I don’t know who God is. And I think that’s just, it’s an important distinction to make.
Anthony: Oh, that’s so good.
Matthew: Yeah.
Anthony: Yeah, Eugene Peterson says it like this, “Mystery is not the absence of meaning. It’s the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.” It’s the depths of exploration in this relationship with God. We know his nature and character in the personal work of Jesus. Eternal life is knowing that, right? Knowing God and his Son, and it’s just plumbing the depths of that goodness, is it not?
Matthew: Yes. Yeah. And I like to even say it this way and exactly what you said, beautifully stated. I say it this way, mystery doesn’t even create distance. Growing up, I don’t know why I would allow myself to think that way. “Oh, I don’t know something about God, so I must not know him.” No. When we begin to realize mystery doesn’t create distance, it actually invites wonder.
Anthony: Huh, there we go.
Matthew: And that’s such a huge component of our relational journey is that wonder, and it’s so needed. It is so needed in this day and age. And so, as we have a more clear picture, a more clear representation of who Jesus is, the mystery doesn’t actually disappear. It just becomes more beautiful.
And so, again, back to the start of the question, Moses says, “Show me your glory.” God said, “I’ll show you my goodness.” and ultimately, I think that’s why we can make claims like this, “Hey, God’s goodness has passed before us in human flesh.” So, in the day of Moses it didn’t quite look like what we behold today. In our day, we’ve actually beheld the goodness of God, and his name is Jesus.
Anthony: Amen.
Matthew: And he didn’t just pass before one of us, he passed before all of us.
Anthony: Hallelujah. Praise God. Oh, this is so good. Such a great conversation of this … I love this idea of mystery. Listen, Matthew, we have so much information, don’t we? We’re inundated with information.
And in that I think that we think we know something, and we lose, we can lose sight of just the awe and wonder of who God is. This is not about information. It is about a relationship, and just like you said with your own spouse there’s this ongoing learning about the beauty of who she is. Imagine the depths of that with God.
This is what we’re leaning into, in the awe and wonder of who he is.