The God Who Is
This chapter 12 of Mark describes Jesus in one confrontation after another. After the one about the unfaithful vine-growers, the Pharisees and Herodians (unlikely allies) tried to trap Jesus about paying taxes to Rome, and then the Sadducees came up with a long story about a woman who married one brother after another until she finally followed the seventh in death. I speculate that this was one of those perennial points of debate between the Sadducees, who did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the Pharisees, who did. Their participation together in trying to trap Jesus reveals that in their time as well as ours, politics made strange bedfellows. (Also, to me, it resembles the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.)
Jesus answered first by saying to the Sadducees, “You don’t know the scriptures nor do you know the power of God.” Once again, hardly conciliatory. This was a confrontation with the priestly establishment who were in positions of political as well as religious power, and Jesus described them as ignorant of their scriptures and of what God can do. (He went on to say that resurrected people are no longer involved in marriage, and are like angels, a fascinating statement, but beyond what we’re working on here.)
And then he said this: “But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’?” (Mark 12:26). Again, “Have you not read”—Jesus asked those in charge of religious observance if they were even reading their scriptures.
Jesus asked them a good question which goes right back to the rescue of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. The question exposed their superficial reading of the scriptures that were basic to their national identity, their claim of being chosen by God.
The context for the quotation is the story of Moses and the slavery in Egypt of the Hebrew people. Moses was born at a time in Egypt when the Pharaoh had decreed that all Hebrew boy babies were to be killed at birth. The heroic midwives Shiprah and Puah refused to obey the edict and instead reported to Pharaoh that Hebrew women delivered too quickly to need their services. Then Pharaoh required his own people to throw Hebrew sons into the river. When Moses was born, his mother hid him for three months, then placed him into a small woven and waterproofed boat and floated him on the river.
Pharaoh’s daughter took him out of the water and had compassion on him, even knowing him to be a little Hebrew boy. His birth mother became his wet-nurse for pay, and the princess adopted him and named him Moses. Moses grew up in safety, even privilege, though he knew of his Hebrew origin, and when he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, he killed the Egyptian and hid the body. The Hebrews denied his authority and Pharaoh wanted to kill him, so he fled the country to Midian, where he found water, a wife, and a job as a shepherd.
Some time later, he saw a bush burning without being burnt to ashes, and he went to investigate. God called him by name from within the burning bush.
It is worth wondering what Moses’s exact religious upbringing had been. It seems likely that his mother taught him about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, and the God they worshiped. It seems likely also that the princess taught him about Ra and Isis and Osiris, and the rest of the Egyptian pantheon. But this is the flashpoint of his understanding who his God is and will be going forward.
“I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6). This reminds Moses of his immediate father in Egypt as well as of his ancestors. So much history is embedded in those three names, so much of their personal relationships with this God. I think of Abraham leaving his homeland to wander at the word of God; of Abraham taking his son Isaac to be a sacrifice at God’s command; at Isaac being rescued from that sacrifice by the messenger of God; at Jacob running from the consequences of his duplicity only to be met by God in a dream, and then years later on the way back home wrestling with God’s messenger into permanent lameness. So much that could be explored, too much for this post. All of their stories are implicit in Jesus’s quotation, and he requires his opponents to look at the history of personal relationship and responsibility to God embodied in those patriarchs.
The emphasis on “I am” in the list is an insistence on the present tense of God. It also looks forward to the point in Moses’s story when he asks, “Who shall I say has sent me?” The reply, I AM WHO I AM, doubly emphasizes God’s irreducibility and presence, God’s creative and sustaining power.
Further, Jesus went on to say that “God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.” He linked this to an affirmation that the dead are alive with God, which his Sadducee questioners denied. But it is more profound even than that.
What else could this have meant to Jesus’s hearers? I think it meant that his questioners needed to look at their own personal relationships with the God of their patriarchs: each of them had had personal encounters with the “I AM WHO I AM” who spoke to Moses. They needed to acknowledge God being immediately present in the moment in which they were questioning Jesus. They needed to admit God’s claims on their obedience and loyalty. But what they did was take refuge in tradition and traditional understandings that allowed them to maintain their status quo. This is a lesson for all of us.
