Deuteronomy 30:9-14 Commentary

Some bible verses should come with content warnings and I think this week’s Hebrew Scripture lectionary text is a good example. Sometimes Scripture puts promises in God’s mouth that do not match our boots on the ground experience of God.  “The Lord your God will help you succeed in everything you do—in your own fertility, your livestock’s offering, and your land’s produce—everything will be great!” Don’t keep scrolling. Stop and grab a pen and paper. Write down the names of every person in your congregation has not succeeded in building a family through pregnancy. Every person whose business is under water. Every person who isn’t seeing yield on investment: who puts in hours on homework and still gets a C on the test, who desires and diligently pursues marriage but remains single. Who puts in hours of PT and OT but still struggles with mobility after a fall, a stroke or a hospitalization. What do we do with the fact that God has promised us success and we aren’t successful in truly painful, debilitating and life-altering ways?

Maybe continuing to read the text will help? Good thought in general but it doesn’t turn out to be that helpful this time.  Because the next lines describe how eager God is to treat us well “because you will be obeying the Lord your God’s voice, keeping his commandments and his regulations…”. If it as this text makes it seem, that God will bless us when we obey, we have a huge theological problem on our hands. In fact, this theme of obedience-contingent blessing in this text picks up previous promises of good things in Deuteronomy 28 and the exhortation toward obedience in chapter 29.

But wait, there is more and, this time, if we keep reading it will help us. At least somewhat.  It is as though Moses expects our complaint and pre-empts it. When we think about obedience, we tend to think about big sacrifices, hard things, impossible tasks.  He says, “this commandment that I’m giving you right now is definitely not too difficult for you.” We don’t have to go up to heaven to get it.  We don’t have to circumnavigate the globe to discover it.  Perhaps a closer translation of the Hebrew would be that the commandment is not to “wondrous” for us, like a miraculous revelation or extra-biblical teaching.  Robert Alter writes, “The crucial theological point is that divine wisdom is in no way esoteric—it has been clearly set out in ‘this book of teaching’ and is accessible to every man and woman in Israel.” Of course it didn’t stay that easy.  A simple rule to guide obedience in a particular context became codified, hard like stone tablets.  From the two, God’s people developed hundreds of addendum, parsing and building whole systems for earning favor through ritual purity, etc.

While other ancient near-eastern civilizations were enamored by the secret wisdom of the gods, God’s people were no less predisposed to cultivate an advanced-placement level spirituality.  What was once the mythology surrounding epic heroes, is now the ordinary obedience inscribed in a book and, as we shall see, eventually inscribed on every human heart.

“Not at all! The word is very close to you. It’s in your mouth and in your heart, waiting for you to do it.”

Finding the Hebrew Scripture text difficult, I confess I went to confer with the other readings.  Unfortunately, The Parable of the Good Samaritan is a story that—if not intended this way—is often used to make a similar claim.  Be good and inherit eternal life.  But then I started to wonder whether the Deuteronomy text might be a helpful lens on the familiar parable.  The original question comes from a legal scholar, interested in parsing nuance and enforcing strict adherence to the law.  Then the people who pass by the injured man, making a point to put distance between them, are a priest and a Levite (religious professionals) likely concerned about ritual purity and, similarly about strict adherence to the law.  In other words, people who have constructed systems demanding big sacrifice, hard things and impossible tasks (take, for example, the miasma of ritual purity).

The Good Samaritan was not guided by legal or religious standards necessarily.  His instinct was similar to one I suspect we’ve all encountered — a merciful tug toward the humanity of another person in need.  And perhaps this is what Moses means by the word being very close to you.  Not only that, we might flip to Colossians to observe Paul’s prayer for the church at Colossi: praying for the Christians there to cultivate — not another external system of rules to guide behavior — but the God-given instinct toward goodness that is so frequently marred by our brokenness and sinful choices.  Paul prays that Christians will be filled with knowledge of God’s will, with wisdom, understanding, fruitful in endurance, patience, thankfulness.  When we are free of pretention, attentive to the Spirit, we are free to act with a helpful kind of mercy toward people in need.

In a recent edition of Comment magazine dedicated to the topic of discernment, editor-in-chief Anne Snyder observed: “There is no shortage of intelligence today—whether human or machine. We see more college degrees walking around than at any other point in human history, and brilliance in the form of new discoveries, inventions, and sharp analysis abound.  But wise people, those who taste truth before it’s trending, who can name evil without mirroring it, who forgo fashionable opinions for a deeper attunement to the Holy Spirit and to the human person—such people are rare. Sometimes, it seems, increasingly so.”

Illustration:

There’s an (likely) apocryphal story about a young pastor who had someone stop by the office. When the person posed a question, she was eager to do what she’d been taught in seminary. So she reflected back, “you feel disoriented and uncertain.”  Taken aback, the man with the question slowly said, “Yes…I suppose so.” The young pastor eagerly grabbed her Bible and say, “let me read you my favorite psalm for times like these.” The man grew antsy, shifting back and forth while she read through all 16 verses of Psalm 91. Pleased with herself, she set the Bible down and asked the man if he would like to have her pray for him.  Frustrated he replied, “Sure, lady. But I’d really be more comfortable if you let me go to the bathroom first. Where is it?!”