One of the least helpful answers in all of history has to be God’s, given to Moses at the burning bush, when the latter asked him who he was.
‘I am that I am,’ said the Almighty.
What exactly is that supposed to mean? It’s just like an early girlfriend once telling me that, if I needed to ask what was wrong, I probably wouldn’t understand. It turned out that she was right, and we soon parted company, which was presumably not an avenue of choice open to Moses at that exact point.
If the Bible is to be believed, the conversation that took place between God and Moses at the bottom of Mount Horeb was the culmination in God’s long ascent towards being the top, and only, deity. Milcom, Qaus, Chemosh and Hadad were all dust beneath his wheels, and you might have thought that he would be deploying the smart one-liners.
‘Who are you?’
‘I am the one God, and I like 40 year old Lagavullin’, for example.
Or at least: ‘I am the one God, and I really don’t like to be disturbed out of hours’. Possibly even: ‘I am God, and, whilst you are here, just check out this burning shrubbery. Go and ask Baal if he could do that.’
But no. Just ‘I am that I am’.
I wonder how Moses reacted.
‘Come again,’ he might have said. Or: ‘what the hell is that supposed to mean?’ Or, if he was not the assertive type: ‘Right you are, God. Many thanks.’ But instead, Moses went along with it all and built an entire religion on it.
And it ran in the family. Most of us, when we occasionally have our collars felt by the police, tell them our name, as we are required to do. But Jesus, when asked in Luke 22 if he was the son of God replied: ‘you say that I am’. Name shyness obviously runs in the family.
‘Are you Roger Morgan-Grenville of Upperton?’
‘You say that I am.’
‘No, I didn’t. I asked if you were Roger Morgan-Grenville. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would have sufficed.’ And so on.
I put these points to you as I have noticed a possible connection between a wonderful book I am reading, and how our descendants might see the times we are living through, through the prism of history. The basic tenet of the book is that the Old Testament is simply the expression of the collective memory of the awfulness of mankind’s transition from hunter-gatherer to settled agrarian, and that the Ten (and all the other) commandments just the basis of keeping the place in order, looking after public health and avoiding embarrassing sexually-transmitted diseases. And you have to say, it worked pretty well; once they were out of the chaos of floods, slaying, plagues and pillars of salt, they probably got some quite useful stuff done.
But now it has happened again.
I met God in Oslo recently, outside the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize; (World Food Program, since you ask, rather than last year’s version who is waging a full scale civil war at this moment). God was in my traditional version of him: broad shoulders, spotless raiment, huge white beard, and half hidden behind a radiant cloud. I’m not sure what either of us were doing there, but we were, and his voice boomed out across the rainy tarmac to where I was sitting on my motorbike.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, which surprised me, given that I thought he knew.
‘I am that I am,’ I replied. No, really. That is exactly what I said. And then I repeated it for good measure.
And then I woke up.
Happy Christmas!
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