Put Me to Death at Once!
No Debts, No Masters...
It is said that Moses was the most humble man on the face of the earth. This is something of a joke in religious circles, because it's written in the lore of Moses and some conservative traditions hold that Moses himself was the author. It is certainly true that the stories give the image of a person who had no desire to lead anyone. He finds the task thankless and miserable. He complains loudly and often. He casts a lonely shadow and the path leads him to a somewhat embittered end.
On one occasion (one of very many such occasions) he finds himself sorely ground between the wailing discontent of the people, who are now tired of eating the same thing every day, and the removed dispassion of the formless God who had liberated them. Moses says, “I am not able to carry this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once.”
He is caught between the fears and desires of the people, and the unyielding law of The Way Things Are, with all its terrible consequences. He absorbs the complaints that the people might hurl at this God, and being of compassionate nature, he cannot help but defend the people against the God's displeasure. He’s like Sisyphus rolling his stone up and down the mountain, but having to argue with everyone as he does so.
On this occasion, God suggests Moses should de-centre some power, so seventy people are gathered and they're swept up in spiritual ecstasies and begin to speak marvelous things amidst the community. Talk of this gets back to Moses, and his apprentice Joshua wants it stopped immediately. To which Moses replies, “are you jealous for my sake? I wish all the people were prophets and that YHWH would enspirit them.”
Maybe it's a matter of temperament, the difference here between Joshua and Moses. I remember reading the Book of the Kings as a child. Macbeths on every other page. Characters who desired mastery so deeply they would kill to become a king, and then they would quite likely be killed by another man with the same problem. The lesson I took was that I’d prefer not to be a king. It's true to say that I've never desired that kind of power. I've tended to be expelled from anything like it, if it ever by some confusion rolled my way, accused of subversions and jesterish behaviour. Power of this kind seems a miserable and poisonous thing to me, and yet I know I seek power in my own ways, and instinctively tighten my grip when I feel it passing from me.
Jesus’ declarations against titles and mastery, as noted previously, were rooted in the conviction that “you are all siblings”—adelphoi—you are all of the same womb. Moses’ loud objections to his own burdensome title were the same: “Did I conceive this people? Did I give birth to them that you should say to me ‘carry them in your bosom as a nurse carries a sucking child?’” No he did not. He is a sibling, of the same kind as the rest. To stand in that guise of something greater is a sorry task for any creature. Moses passes the baby back to God.
I love this, David. I would very much have liked to take your course, but I'm unfit for more computer time just now. These little windows in are very generous, and generative. Thank you.
I've been thinking about this series of yours, in relation to a conversation I had yesterday with a researcher who is working on a TV series about the British monarchy. (A long story – but the short version is that when I was twenty-five, I took part in a BBC debate as part of the Golden Jubilee coverage, and they came across the footage in the archives.) I found myself saying that, somewhat to my surprise, I find there's nothing in me that wants to abolish the monarchy. To my surprise because, in many ways, I think of myself as an anarchist. Yet the presence of something at the centre of public life that is so anachronistic, irrational, and indefensible by any modern logic – these things which, for many progressive friends of mine, would surely constitute the argument against the monarchy, seem to me to speak in its favour, at least compared to any conceivable result of a process to create a modern replacement for it. So I'm curious how this train of thought might resonate or jar with your own thinking, as someone who has been thinking about kingship in a longer perspective.