Year C. 4th Sunday of Lent March 25th, 2001 Title: Joshua 5: 9-12
Title: “Stop, to smell the flowers”
The first Passover in Canaan was a “memorial” of the night forty years earlier when God began to deliver the slaves, and so a memorial of where they were coming from. It was also a “moment,” a momentous new beginning that opened the future and so a celebrative anticipation of where they were going. The same divine providence, once manifested by the giving of daily manna, will take a different form appropriate now to new conditions, namely, their ability to grow their own crops. God will continue to be active in their lives, but in new ways. He has not deserted his people as they leave the desert.
Once they saw past the different details, once they “crossed over,” they could see that Joshua was doing the same things Moses once did. Moses had Passover, so did Joshua. Moses led them through the sea and Joshua led them through the river. Moses removed his shoes at the divine command because the ground was holy, so did Joshua. What God did through the leadership of Moses, he did through Joshua and will do through his successors. Joshua is portrayed as a mirror image of Moses, yet without flaw or hesitation, the ideal leader who keeps Moses’ teaching in its entirety. A minor figure in the Pentateuch, he now emerges into the limelight, much as did Jesus vis-à-vis the Baptist. To his contemporaries Jesus, the Greek form of his name, would have been called “Joshua.”
The people celebrate their new status by reviving and revising old customs, even borrowing one from another culture to express their dreams for the future by remembering the experiences of the past. In celebration the past and future meet.
In verses two to eight, not in the liturgical text, during the forty years of wandering in the desert circumcision fell into neglect. It was a rite of passage practiced by most peoples in the region, including the Egyptians. The most notable group who did not practice circumcision were the Philistines, Israel’s archenemy and contender for the same land. It was a rite of passage, performed at the onset of sexual maturity symbolizing the male’s eligibility to marry, becoming a warrior and entering a new status as an adult member of the community. The Hebrews gave it even deeper significance. It was a “sign” of God’s everlasting covenant going back to Abraham. In later times it was performed on infants eight days after birth. It came to have spiritual meaning as “circumcision of the heart,” meaning an opening of one’s self to God’s love and service. The physical operation on the flesh was seen as an analogy to a spiritual cutting away that opens the heart and removes the rebellious nature that separates one from God. As such, symbolically at least, it would extend to females as well. Those closed to God- Jew or Gentile- could be called “uncircumcised” whether physically true or not. In this text Joshua has all the men circumcised as a rite expressing a new relationship with God in the new land.
In verse nine, “Today I have removed the reproach of Egypt from you,” the Hebrews have crossed the Jordan and are in the Promised Land. The “reproach” refers to their slavery status while in Egypt. It may seem to refer to their being uncircumcised and now newly circumcised. However, the generation that left Egypt would have been circumcised since even the Egyptians practiced it.
In verse ten, “encamped at Gilgal,” along with Shechem, Shiloh and Bethel this was a very ancient place of worship, possibly originally a Canaanite shrine. Samuel anointed Saul as the first king here, though, historically speaking, later than this. Probably, the Ark of the Covenant was kept here at one time. Thus, it was a holy place made more holy by the fact that the Passover, last celebrated in Egypt, was celebrated for the first time in Canaan - after forty years of wandering and upon entrance into the land to begin a settled life of farming. Having crossed the river at the end of their journey, just as they crossed the sea at the beginning, they celebrate this ending by the very rite they used to begin because it also marked a new beginning- from nomad to farmer, pioneer to settler, traveler to dweller.
On the evening of the fourteenth of the month: The fourteenth would be the first day of the full moon, a beginning of the first month of the year, another beginning, Nisan. The wilderness generation becomes the new Israel.
In verse eleven, “on the day after the Passover they ate of the produce of the land,” this would be the fifteenth of Nisan. Besides the Passover celebration, and in accordance with what became a fixed tradition, the Feast of Unleavened Bread was connected to Passover. It probably was taken from the Canaanite harvest festival and given additional meaning by associating it with the Exodus tradition. Up to the time they became farmers the Hebrews would have no reason to celebrate a cereal feast of harvest. Now it would remind them of the haste of their departure from Egypt and the bitterness of their oppression.
“In the form of unleavened cakes and parched grain,” the author is not concerned with explaining where they got the cakes and grain. Clearly the story is telescoped. The absence of leaven goes back to the original night of “passing over” and the haste of their departure. There was no time to allow the bread to be leavened.
In verse twelve, “the manna ceased,” the celebration of the Passover, the first since the exodus, along with the crossing of the Jordan, closes the period of Moses and the wandering, which began with the Passover and the crossing of the Reed Sea. The conclusion of that epoch is dramatically signaled by the cessation of the miraculous manna. If the physical composition of the manna was the secretion of plant-lice on desert bushes, valued by the nomadic Bedouins for its sugar content, then there would be no chance of it happening once they left the desert. God will now feed his people, that is, exercise his providence over them, in new ways, among them- from the fruit of the land, signaled by this harvest feast of Unleavened Bread. They, too, accept new responsibilities, that is, the care of the land.
In verses thirteen to fifteen, Although these verses are not in the assigned reading they complete the picture. Joshua is visited by the heavenly commander of God’s army. In keeping with the unique position of Moses, to whom God appeared personally, only a divine representative appears to Joshua. The figure is probably meant to signify one superior to the angels, but less than God. Just as Moses’ career began with the theophany in the burning bush in Exodus 3:1- 4:17, so too Joshua as the new Moses experiences a revelation. The three scenes presented here- circumcision, Passover, and theophany at Sinai- provide the context for the new beginning in the long promised and finally delivered land. As noted above, Joshua is Hebrew for “Jesus” in Greek. It means “Savior” and he is a preview of what Jesus will do at a later time in history. By the time the typical couple marry and buy their first house they have been through a “desert experience.” It may not have taken them exactly forty years to actually move into their home, but it probably seemed like it. From all the grief they got planning and executing the wedding, the celebration of their new union and identity, through the struggles of that first year of encountering new incompatibilities in their now even closer relationship, until that milestone of having their own place, their “promising” land if not “Promised Land,” they have been through a lot. Yet, even after the down payment on the house and moving in, there is much more to be done. They have “arrived,” and yet not arrived. This new space where they will build a life and family together, where they will live, love, grow, suffer, fail and succeed is but the “home base” for all that. Nonetheless, it is cause for celebration. This parallels the experience of the Hebrews arriving at their “home base.”
Celebration is making visible and tangible what is hidden. It expresses the otherwise inexpressible. As such it requires the use of symbols. Ritual, symbolic gestures, and myth, symbolic language, the story, if you will, which explains the gestures, spin out the meanings which otherwise would go unnoticed and perhaps be lost. We dot our lives with “celebrations” in order to harvest the scattered fruits of our lives. While it is true that some celebrations become so prosaic as a result of repetition that we call them merely “observances” they nonetheless still offer the promise, upon reflection, of renewing us in our quest to live life at least one or two levels beneath the surface and one or two levels above the surface. The more important the event the larger and more symbolic is the celebration of it. Weddings, funerals, graduations, the first birth in a family, these are celebrated, marked, observed with “larger than life” panache. Others, like a second wedding, a second birth, a mere promotion, a routine birthday get less fanfare. Repeatable and repeated passages of life-seasons, holidays, anniversaries, everyday- can go uncelebrated. When they are remembered and reflected upon, we at least try to reclaim them from the routine category, polish them up a bit, look at them and quietly celebrate.
The Hebrews were celebrating three “rites of passage” at once to underline and highlight the importance of their moving into their new “house,” perhaps blissfully ignorant of all the work that had to be done on it and in it to make it a “home.” They reached back to their ancestor Abraham and revived circumcision, their family trait, their logo, their equivalent to a totem. They borrowed a harvest festival from their neighbors and reworked its symbolism to express their own unique meaning. They used the last meal their forebears celebrated when they left slavery and made it express not only their memories of a shared past but their hopes for a common future. The Passover meal would forever be the symbolic expression of all they believed as a people. The details of these celebrations are not given in the text. Though they were extremely important to them because the actions and accompanying stories to explain them expressed meanings otherwise inaccessible to them, it was the fact that they acted together, in concert, as a group, that mattered more. If they did not stop, and if we do not stop, to “smell the flowers,” to celebrate life and its values we become impoverished, then die as a group, family, society, people. A society that has celebrations- from the family meal to Independence day- in which many members do not take part, and those who do so perfunctorily, is a society in danger of dissipation, alienation and death.
This was a new state of affairs. No longer nomads they were to become farmers. No longer pioneers they were to become settlers. No longer travelers they were to become dwellers. And they knew it. They knew it would call for a new set of behaviors, the details of which to become clear as time went on. Yet, they also knew they had to stay the same in their basic orientation to what values glued them together and so they would celebrate these old truths in new surroundings and situations. They would keep the old symbols, rituals, myths to ensure they would lose nothing essential in the new mix. Our European, African and Asian forebears did the same when they first came to America. Our celebrations, especially the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, serve the same function in our lives. They bring us back to the center of life, renew us and fortify us to face the future. Amen.
