The Mountains Cut the Sky like a Butcher's Knife

The mountains cut the sky like a butcher's knife dismembered a lamb. We halted. Moses stopped by the one where he said he saw the bush on fire. The mountain roared with clouds and thick darkness, like the darkness we could nearly touch back in Egypt. We could not touch it, or let our animals touch it, or we'd be shot dead with an arrow. No way did I want to go near that mountain, where clouds and fire raged. I saw a sapphire pavement, darker blue, and harder than the sky could ever be. Trumpets sounded. But they weren't our trumpets. I peed my pants and hid inside our tent, but there was no hiding. I felt the presence bearing down through the fabric. I could not hide. Please make it stop. My mother wrapped me up in her arms. I could feel her heart beating fast. I buried my head in her bosom. She smelled of cooking smoke and sweat and roses. But she didn't stop my terror. I climbed down and started pawing through the dirt with my bare hands, like I'd seen the dogs dig for rodents. I wailed for the earth to cover me. My mother pulled me up. I felt her breathe in. Breathe out. Trying to calm. How could she, when she was just as frightened? It was so hot. 

Our flocks milled and roiled. Our dogs could barely keep them from charging up the mountain. It was as if they didn't know enough to be afraid. But I made out the Voice said, "Don't let them touch the mountain."

Then Moses climbed up. How could he climb into that thunder and lightning and trumpet blast? How could his legs hold him without being shot through with terror. He said God was his friend. 

He said anyone could go to the tent of meeting, that boiled with smoke and fire. I saw Moses go in and out. But handsome Joshua opened the curtain and stayed. 

Moses' face hurt our eyes like sunshine on newly fallen snow. We squinted. Told him to cover up. Our eyes hurt so bad. How could a mortal man shine like the angels? When I was a little girl I wanted to see God, but then, I knew I couldn't bear the sight if he stood in front of me. Yet here was Moses, a man once removed from seeing God and he was scary enough.  

We'd said we'd do what God said, only don't make us face him. Moses wrapped a veil around his face. Only his eyes peeked out and those were hard enough to see. But he disappeared in the smoke and fire for days. My parents worried he died. They said we needed a god to go before us. A group went to Aaron and asked him to capture God like the ones we knew in Egypt. He said he needed gold, so we gave him our rings and earrings. He used my father's newborn calf as a model and smelted the form. It glimmered in the fires from the mountain. This was a god we could see and touch, a god that would bring us babies. Aaron said this is the god who brought you out of Egypt.  Oh did the adults dance and sing. I didn't like it. Mothers and fathers joined with other mothers and fathers. We didn't know who belonged to who. My uncle overwhelmed me. My back smeared the dirt. My father grabbed his shoulder, yanked him off. He gathered me into his arms, pulled my mother to our tent. 

Moses whirled off the mountain. No veil. His anger as terrifying as the light, only human, a face that frightened me but I understood, like the look on my father's face when he pulled my uncle off me, during that horrible dance.  Moses smashed tablets to the ground. They shattered in pieces, that glowed like sparks from a fire and died down. Moses smashed that statue, pounding it with a hammer. He threw the dust in the water. He hauled up buckets. "Drink it. Drink it." He shoved the water in our faces. Then he asked who was on the Lord's side? I hopped on my feet, praying. My father joined Moses and my heart leapt up. The rest is too hard to tell, so I won't. But many died at the hands of their brothers. We were just trying stop being so afraid of this God of fire and smoke. Gold, a calf, are so much easier to understand and control.

The Voice said we are so stiff necked, that He can't accompany us. He'd burn us to ash. He would send an angel to go ahead. My heart beat harder than when the mountain boiled with fire and smoke. We'd be lost without the bread from heaven, the water from the rock. 

But Moses begged on our behalf and God relented saying, "The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation" (Ex 34: 6 - 7). 

Then we built a holy place made of fabric and animal skins, just like God covered Adam, but this time he is covering himself, a holy place that travels with us. And the glory lifted when we needed to travel. It settled when we needed to be still. 

The mountain cut the sky like the hilt of three swords. Three of them. Bodies nailed down. Writhing in pain. This was no smashed golden calf, whose dust mixed with water, we were made to drink.

The mountain near the one where Abraham nearly slaughtered his son. Only this son of man was put to slow death by the powers that are not--the powers of religion, the powers of the state. This son of God put to death by us. His mother's sorrow. His friends' sorrow. Our sorrow. Waves of sorrow flowed  outward, covering the world.

The prophets say that on the day of the Lord, God will terrify us, that we will hide in the clefts of the rocks. But on that day,  it was Joseph and Nicodemus who took the son of man, son of God, and hid him in a cave, rolled a stone over the mouth. He climbed down to Hades, set the chisel plows in the dust of death, harrowing it, turning it over, killing death dead.

The writer to the Hebrews says we've not come to Sinai the jagged mountain with lightning flashing, but to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God. Just beyond my sight and hearing and smell I see the mountain where we are dancing and feasting and joyous. And light runs up the air between the ground and clouds, or  does it run down from the clouds? And while this mountain flickers just out of our mind's eye, we know it is more true than mountains we see cloaking the horizon.

The mountain rounds  the sky like a woman's breast that feeds us with the milk of peace. 

As the prophet Isaiah says, "And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it". (Isa 2: 2) Is he talking about us, since we are living stones, built on the stone which the builders rejected? Are we the mountain of the Lord's house? 

But still we wait for that milk of peace, where the son of man, the son of God. judges among the nations, where he settles our disputes, where we make combines instead of tanks, where our spears are bent into pruning hooks, where the war colleges teach husbandry, where we make peace with the people we'd rather not know.