And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.
Exodus 34:6-7 (NIV)
The Name Said Twice
The embankment runs straight through country that bends everywhere else. Gravel on top now, blackberry down both sides, and a bench where the halt used to be. He walks it most Sundays with his daughter. Two hundred yards before the second gate he tells her there’s a culvert under the dip and that nobody has touched it in a hundred years, and then he asks her what she wants for lunch.
Where the ballast thins he steps off onto the grass without looking down. Somebody carted it away for a driveway and left the ash underlay showing, gray and fine, and he says so on the way past without slowing. His daughter asks him why ash. He gives her the answer he gave her last spring, in fewer words, and goes back to watching the far end of the line where the trees close over it.
On the mountain, with two fresh tablets in his hands, Moses gets the name read to him twice over. Compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, forgiving wickedness and rebellion and sin. And the guilty aren’t left unpunished, and he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents, to the third and fourth generation.
Both halves come out of one mouth on one morning, said to one man holding the replacements for the tablets he’d broken. Moses doesn’t get to leave the second half on the mountain. God keeps love for thousands and reckons to the third and fourth generation, and he read them out in that order himself. Moses came away with a name, spoken over him by the God whose name it is, and with a picture of what that God is like around people. Someone tracing a hard family backward through four generations holds the same name, and an answer about why would have to come from somewhere else.
At the bench she asks him whether he misses it. He says no. Then he says he misses creosote on a hot day, and that they stopped using it because it was poisoning people. She asks him what’s good about it. He says nothing is, and that he misses it anyway.
A Prayer to Remember
Lord, you read your own name over Moses, both halves of it, on one morning with the new tablets in his hands. Give me the whole of it, the mercy and the reckoning in one breath, and say it over me in your own voice. You said it about yourself, with Moses standing there to hear it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
