Awe-Fear-Reverence — Andrew Forrest

Exodus 3:6b

And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

What Leon Kass has to say about this verse is helpful:

We pause a moment over this experience. Awe-fear-reverence (the hard-to-translate Hebrew word is yir’ah) is the central religious passion, and no story I know better exemplifies the phenomenon of its sudden appearance. Yir’ah is called forth by an encounter with overwhelming power, with great authority, with deep mystery, with grandeur and sublimity—in short, with the “awesome,” in its original, nondebased meaning. Awe- fear-reverence is not a congenial passion: it implies, and insists on maintaining, clear distance from the object that elicits it. It acknowledges our weakness and inadequacy before something much greater than ourselves (“do not come closer”; “put off your shoes”). And yet it does not—like simple fear or terror—lead us to flee. On the contrary, despite the evident inequality, the very fact of our recognizing the superiority of the object builds a connection between us. We are both attracted and repelled; we want both to approach and to stand back; we oscillate in place, bound in relation to the thing that defies our comprehension and makes us feel small. We hide our face, but we hold our ground. Paradoxically, thanks to awe-fear-reverence and the bond it builds across the unbridgeable divide, we also feel less small. We are, in fact, lifted up, enlarged, magnified. This surely happened here to Moses. —from Founding God’s Nation: Reading Exodus, by Leon Kass

The second half of Exodus will be about what it will take for Israel to live with the awe-fear-reverence of Lord in their midst, and the New Testament will be about what happens when God himself puts on flesh and dwells among us.

(That’s worth thinking about over the weekend.)