Ord Om ordet
Burial in Moab
Deuteronomy 31.1-8: ‘You shall not cross this Jordan’.
Matthew 18.1-14: Become like little children.
The sight of Moses at a hundred-and-twenty being told he cannot enter the promised land towards which his life-long endeavour has been directed may seem to us unfair.
When we have poured ourselves out for a given cause, we wish to see our efforts flourish. If we do not we feel let down. The temptation is great to start moping and to complain. This is natural. Moses shows us what a supernatural response looks like.
There is peculiar warmth and fervour in the last words of this man who, for having once declared himself ‘slow of speech and of tongue’ (Ex 4.10) turned into a terrific talker. His recommendations are emphatic: ‘Be strong, stand firm, have no fear, be not disheartened by anything.’
This is how a man speaks who has learnt to see beyond superficial consolations, who consents to being part of a providential scheme that of its nature transcends the scope of any particular existence, who has interiorised the Psalmist’s prayer: ‘Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory’ (Psalm 115.1).
Moses understands that he, having led the people to the Jordan’s bank, must be eclipsed. The exodus and homecoming have not been his work but the Lord’s. So it must be ‘the Lord […] who will cross over’ at the head of the people while Moses remains on the wilderness-side to be buried in Moab in an unmarked grave: ‘no man knows the place of his burial to this day’ (Dt 34.6).
When we work for God, what matters is to let God work through us while we increasingly find joy in being his tools. The more we get a true sense of who God is, and who we are, the more we shall be grateful, astonished simply to be picked up and used.
Is this not what it means to ‘become like little children’? Little children do not evaluate experience in quantitative terms. They do not calculate, expecting returns on investments. Instead they are content to be whole-heartedly, delightedly invested in the here-and-now, in the game as it unfolds, without considering it some sort of transaction.
To relearn this way of living and relating is quite a proposition. But what freedom it confers, on ourselves and on those round about us.
Moses buried in Moab by the Lord himself, assisted by angels, in a woodcut from the Cologne Bible, 1478-80.