Excluded from the Promised Land

Some biblical stories come to my mind time and again. The truths and emotions they communicate become part of the narrative of my own spiritual journey. One story that has captured my attention this year, is the story of Moses’s sudden death as told in Deuteronomy 34.

Moses never enters the Promised Land. This is not just any Moses, but the Moses who saw the burning bush, the Moses who announced the ten plagues to Pharaoh, the Moses who parted the Red Sea, and the Moses who received the Ten Commandments. God chose this Moses to lead the Israelites to the Promised Land. But just when the Israelites are about to cross the Jordan into that land, Moses stands on a mountain, looks across into the Promised Land, and then suddenly dies. Moses is excluded from the very place that he had labored throughout his life to reach.

None of the Israelites earned the right to enter the Promised Land. It was, after all, a promise that God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But, as a reader of the Old Testament, something seems wrong with Moses’s sudden death outside the Promised Land. The Bible tells us that Moses was excluded from the Promised Land because he hit a rock with his staff rather than just speak to it to bring out water from a rock (Numbers 20.2–13; Deuteronomy 32.48–52). Despite this explanation, I am still left wondering why the hero doesn’t complete his quest. Why would God exclude the one who had served as the loudspeaker for divine messages for over forty years?

Moses’s exclusion from the Promised Land invites us to pause and consider when we have experienced exclusion in our own lives. What are the communities, the opportunities, and the relationships from which we seem to have been excluded? And where was God in these situations? The Bible provides no easy answers to these questions. But the story of Moses’s exclusion from the Promised Land encourages us to express our disappointments to God.

Moses did not reach the Promised Land in his life. But in the transfiguration of Jesus, Moses and Elijah stand with Jesus on a mountain that is within or on the borders of the land that God promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Each week in the Eucharist and every moment in our prayers we are invited to experience eternal moments such as that on the Mount of Transfiguration. God promises to meet us when we receive communion and God promises to be with us when we pray. When we experience exclusion, we can offer up our concerns to God and trust that both now and in the age to come we will be welcomed into the love of the Trinity.

Contributed by Philip
Monday August 1, 2011
Liturgical Year A: Week 36
Liturgical Color: Green
Sunday Gospel reading:
Lectionary 18 (Proper 13)
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost