What God Gives, and What The Desert Cannot Take
Further Meditations on the Prologue of the Decalogue
God is, and all else is borrowed.
The Jealousy of God
Before we move to the 1st commandment, already, we are struck with a naming of God that will travel with us: “ I am the Lord Your God, the one who has brought you out of Egypt, out of slavery.” In this naming, we see God identified according to a relation between Israel and God which makes something out of nothing, an enslaved people swallowed up by the Nile into a people living on the driest land1. It is a relation in which God is named, tied into what this people are.
It is an entangled relation, one in which there are stakes. It is one in which God’s self is put forward, not as an abstraction, but as one who has metaphorical skin in the game. In human relations, there is a sense of ownership, but this cannot be with God. I think.
It is for this reason, then, that the language surrounding jealousy—which appears behind the scenes here as God is tied to Israel— has always struck me as such a puzzle. For God is literally the one in whom all things hang together, the creator of what is, the one in whom there is no need or lack. This is bedrock for a doctrine of God: God is characterized by what theologians call aseity, without an origination, and thus, needs nothing outside of God. God has no need of our offerings, of the cattle on a thousand hills. So, where could jealousy even find a foothold here? How could it make sense, in light of God being God, that Exodus 20:4 will make this explicit:
“I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”
In this verse, jealousy functions as a reaction against idolatry, as it does most of the time that the Lord is described in this way. It’s a way of God naming the stakes of what is being traded away. And so, in the prologue’s entanglements, in which God’s name is on the basis of what God has done with Israel, we can see how—if this was a human—the logic would follow.
But this is God.
Most of the time, this is described as either an anthropomorphism (projecting human traits onto God), or as a real feature in God (that God is like us, only more so). Both of these I think have their real limits: treating characteristics of God like projections gets very pick-and-choosy, and God also isn’t a creature, prone to fits of passion like humans.
A better way forward, it seems, is to treat the prologue as the name of God: that God’s name, I AM, provides us with a hint as both to what jealousy is here. One can read Exodus’s repetition of God’s name in this way as just a grammatical tick, but what if we are meant to see this as rehearsal of God’s name as disclosing something of the foolishness of what is about to be forbidden?
In other words, what if jealousy, when it comes to God, is making clear what God has given, not about what God needs?
God’s Name: All There Is
Thomas Aquinas, in teasing out the riddle of God’s name treats it akin to what we find in Hebrews: the one who was, is, and is to come. This was common practice for many centuries among Christians, and offers us something of the weirdness of God acting in history. For God just is. There is cause of God’s actions any more than there is something that funds God’s existence. God is a slow-moving train in whom there is no fuel needed, no destination in sight except the sharing of who God is with all that is2.
This is the God who acts: the one who is, who has no need to do what has been done, except that it is utterly fitting of God to do so. God’s action in history is the unveiling of who God is, and in doing so, the profound follies of time. For in God, all that is needed is given: manna, companionship, direction, a future. And it is given to us according to time, given as it is needed. This is just who God is: the one without time acting in time, filling time with the abundance of all the time in the world.
There is no threat to God which time could pose, then. For even death itself—the ultimate loss—cannot hold back that which God gives. There is nothing that God could lose, but there is everything that we can lose in time. Israel is gathered up in the presence of God, and given all there is to be given: God’s own name, belonging to the one who has no need at all3. Jealousy, here, is a mark of judgment upon having traded that which could never lose—God—for that which we will inevitably lose if we try to keep it: possessions, safety, our own lives.
It is not that God is hurt by Israel’s turning away so much that God tells Israel what it is trading: God for everything else. But as we will see with Israel, in God, all that is needed is given without loss.
This cloud—metaphorical, and physical—will hang over the Decalogue: that God is the one who has given, and living in time as if this was true is the only wise way there is. That we know this as God’s jealousy says less about what God stands to lose in this than what we stand to lose in trading away an inheritance for a pot of soup.
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It’s always struck me that Jonah was about Israel, not just in its vocation toward the Gentiles, but as an image of Israel’s own journey.
Think Snowpiercer, an endless train circling the globe, providing for all its inhabitants, only with less class warfare and cannibalism.
One might be tempted to draw a comparison between this moment and the opening of Mark, in which Israel is summoned to behold the giving of all that God is in the baptism of Jesus, followed by Jesus’ demonstration that there is nothing that time in the desert can take away from that.