These three lines were given to Moses for Aaron and his sons to speak over Israel at the tent of meeting. The people are still in the wilderness, still learning that the God who freed them is also the God who is with them. The blessing is not the priest's invention; it is words God puts in the priest's mouth so that, as verse 27 explains, "they shall put my name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them." The benediction is a transfer of the divine name. The priest is the conduit, not the source.

From the writers we read together

J.R.R. Tolkien

Oxford philologist, Catholic, author of The Lord of the Rings (1892-1973)

Tolkien believed that blessing was one of the oldest and most serious things words could do. In his legendarium, the Elvish farewell Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo — "a star shines on the hour of our meeting" — is not decoration; it is a real wish that light would fall on a real road. He wrote in a letter to his son Christopher that he had come to feel the smallness of human strength and the weight of the protection that watches over us anyway. The Aaronic blessing is the source from which such instincts faintly drink. "The LORD make his face to shine upon you" is what every benediction in every story has been reaching toward.

Tolkien's word for the moment when a story turns toward unexpected good was eucatastrophe — the sudden joyous turn. He thought the gospel was the eucatastrophe of human history, and that small graces in our days are rumors of it. Numbers 6 is a small grace spoken weekly over a wandering people: kept, shone upon, lifted up, given peace. None of those verbs are things Israel could do for themselves. They are gifts handed across the gap by a God who insists on putting his name on his people. You walk today under that name, whether or not you feel the weight of it.