Category Archives: Icons

Remember—Even Before it Happens!

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God rests on 7th Day of Creation/ Mosaic Monreale (Sicily), Cathedral. – Mosaic, 12th/13th century. Centre aisle, south wall.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” (Exodus 20:8)

The 10 Commandments are prefaced with the proclamation that Israel ought to keep the commandments because “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” The delivery from Egypt is what obliges Israel to keep the commandments as an act of gratitude. But the Sabbath is different—Sabbath is hardwired into the DNA of creation because God rested on the Sabbath when making the world.

The command to “Remember!” the Sabbath is not the same word as in the command, “Do this in remembrance of me” at the Last Supper. Remembrance of the Sabbath is the Future Passive Indicative 2nd Singular form of the verb, meaning “you shall remember,” or “you shall recall,” “you shall think about,” “you shall be aware of.”

This form of “remember” is always looking ahead to something. The people are told to always live in expectation, in anticipation of the next Sabbath. The Sabbath is the chronological icon of the Kingdom of God: just as we are called to always live in expectation and hope for the Kingdom, the 10 Commandments tell the people to always live in expectation and hope of the next Sabbath. They-and we-are called to focus on the future, where we are going rather than being focused on the past, where we have been and what we have done. We look ahead and we hope.

Several years ago, I was on West 14 Street several times a week during the summer for various regular errands. There was a street-lady, disheveled and unkempt, who walked backward pushing the shopping cart of her possessions nearly every day. In the Old Testament, she would have been hailed as a prophet enacting a sermon everyday, a living example of how people spend more time paying attention to where they have been and despairing over or being proud of what they have done rather than paying attention to where they are going and hopeful about opportunities and challenges ahead.

In modern Greek, this form of the verb has become the word for “fiancé.” This suggests that the Sabbath is the “engagement ring” given by God to his bride, Israel. Many of the prophets refer to the forty years that Israel spent in the wilderness as their honeymoon period with God.

Sabbath has always been respected in the Christian liturgical practice even as Sunday, the weekly anniversary of the Resurrection, became the principal day of Christian worship. Of course, the Great Sabbath—the ultimate day of rest—is the blessed Sabbath that Christ spent resting in the tomb, during which he descended into Hell to harrow [demolish] it. The engagement of God to Israel is fulfilled when Death and all-that-opposes-God is destroyed and the wedding celebration described in the Apocalypse [Book of Revelation] begins.

(Readers will recall that the Greek text of the Old Testament was compiled in 300 BC while the standard Hebrew text as we now have it is only as old as the First Crusade , AD 1000. The Septuagint, 1300 years older than the Hebrew text that survives, is a more reliable witness—translated by Jewish scholars for Jewish readers—to the original text. I’m classical Christian thought, the medieval Hebrew is a commentary on the text rather than the source of the text itself.)

Moses = Burning Bushes and Building Bridges

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Moses encounters the Logos, the Word of God, at the Burning Bush in the icon of Our Lady of the Burning Bush in the upper right corner of the icon; see the detail from a contemporary icon as well.


Moses was the lynchpin between God and Israel; as the Serbian proverb goes, he was the neck that turned the head (connecting the head—God—to the body, which was Israel). His encounter at the bush, as he was tending Jethro’s flocks, becomes an image of the Incarnation as the bush that burned but was not consumed is a foreshadowing of the Virgin who gave birth to God without loss of her virginity.

According to Wikipedia (so it MUST be true!), the Hebrew word in the story that is translated into English as bush is seneh(סנה‎) which refers in particular to brambles; seneh is a biblical dis legomenon, only appearing in two places, both of which describe the burning bush. The use of seneh may be a deliberate pun on Sinai (סיני‎), a feature common in Hebrew texts. (That the burning bush is a bramble bush also associates it with the bramble bush which is an important part of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22.)

At the bush, Moses is commissioned to act as God’s mouthpiece, telling Pharaoh to “Let my people go” and telling the people of Israel what God wants from them. He is commissioned to build a bridge between God and the world—both the fallen world (Egypt) and the world being redeemed and healed (Israel). This role as the bridge builder between God and the world is essentially the role of a priest; one Latin word for priest is pontifex, which is literally “bridge builder.”

Even before Aaron is ordained as priest, Moses offers sacrifices to God on behalf of Israel. Moses builds the bridge between eternity and the world by his words and by sacrifice. In the Middle Ages, it was an especially meritorious act to leave money in your will to build a public bridge that did not charge a toll across a river. Building a toll free bridge was a priestly act, uniting two sides of the river as a priest unites worlds in the liturgical sacrifice and preaching. (Without a bridge, people might have to travel several miles—hours—out of their way to find a place to cross the river. A toll bridge, built by someone who wanted to make a profit on their construction investment, limited river crossing to the well-to-do; a toll free bridge was an image of Christ’s sacrifice freely available to all.)

Moses built a bridge between God and Israel. Israel, the priestly people commissioned at Mt. Sinai, built a bridge between God and the world. The Word-made-flesh, who spoke to Moses at the bush, built the ultimate bridge that brought together everything he was not with everything that he is. The Church, the Body of the Word-made-flesh, continues that ministry of bridge building.

Jethro and Moses … and Christ

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Bodelian Library, Oxford, MS Bodley 2708, Folio 39V
A good man? Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, is a devoted family man, well respected for his advice on governing and his benevolent leadership of the tribes of Midian. This early 13th-century illustration from the Bible moralisée depicts Jethro (seated under the arch on the right) rewarding Moses (left) for rescuing his daughters (six of whom are pictured in the center) and their flocks from rival shepherds.



Jethro, to most people, was the not-so-bright son of Jed and Granny on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” How many realize that Jethro was the name of Moses’ father-in-law? Jethro was “priest and prince of Midian,” the area where Moses encountered the Burning Bush.

Jethro comes to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, before the giving of the Ten Commandments, because he is bringing his daughter–Moses’ wife–back to him. Although the text does not tell us this earlier, she evidently took their children and went to her father for safekeeping during Moses’ confrontation with Pharoah; when Moses tells Jethro everything the Lord did for the people, including the plagues, this is all news to Jethro. If his daughter had seen any of this, she would have told him; evidently, she left Moses in Egypt before the plagues began. In thanksgiving for the deliverance of the people, Jethro offers a large sacrifice and invites all the clan leaders to the feast that follows.

The text tells us that Jethro is priest-and-prince. We already knew that he was wealthy because of the description of his large flocks when Moses first meets him. Whether Jethro was a wealthy herdsman who was therefore acknowledged as “prince” or was the prince and therefore was wealthy, we don’t know. But the linkage of royalty and priesthood only occurs one other time in the Old Testament: the priest-king Melchizedek who blesses Abraham and is seen as a “type” of Christ by the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Medieval rabbis were eager to avoid the embarrassment of Moses having a pagan priest-prince as a father-in-law and so they began to suggest that Jethro was circumcised after he heard the recitation of God’s mighty acts of deliverance–after he heard what became the Passover haggadah, in effect. This made Jethro, like Melchizedek, a legitimate priest before Aaron and his sons were made a legitimate priesthood. This makes Jethro, like Melchizedek, a foreshadowing of Christ–the Son of David who is both priest and king on the Cross. Jethro, however, was not the focus of the typology in the Epistle to the Hebrews because he did not evidently live forever, like Melchizedek did; Jethro was an imperfect type of Christ, the ultimate king-priest who is eternal.

Nevertheless, this makes for fascinating speculation about Moses–raised as a prince of Egypt– and his immediate family as Middle Eastern royalty and their connection to priesthood in both Moses’ father-in-law (Jethro) and his brother (Aaron).