Exodus is told to a people who knew Egypt's holy places — temples gated and graded, with priests scrubbed clean and commoners kept out. Here, on the back side of the Midianite desert, there is no temple. There is a thornbush, a fugitive shepherd, and a voice. Moses is forty years removed from Pharaoh's court and has every reason to think his significant life is behind him. The narrator's point to Israel, freshly delivered, is that their God does not require an architecture to be holy. He makes ground holy by showing up on it. The wilderness they are about to cross is not a vacancy; it is a sanctuary waiting to be lit.

From the writers we read together

C.S. Lewis

Oxford literary scholar, Anglican lay theologian (1898-1963)

Lewis spent his fiction trying to recover a sense of holiness for readers who had been domesticated by a flat Christianity. Mr. Beaver's line about Aslan is the children's version of Exodus 3:5. The bush burns and is not consumed; the voice says do not come near. The God of Israel is not a tame God. He is good, but his goodness is not the same thing as his manageability. Moses is told to take off the one piece of equipment he has — the leather between his soles and the dirt — before he is allowed any closer.

There is a sentimentality in modern devotion that wants the burning bush without the command to stop walking. But Lewis insists, and Exodus insists, that the encounter with God begins with a halt. Whatever you brought with you to the bush — your competence, your résumé of failure, your forty years of Midian — gets left at the edge of the circle. What you receive in exchange is a name (I AM) and a sending. Holy ground does not make you comfortable. It makes you usable.