Homilies on Exodus 3.1–3.3

On the text: “But I am of feeble voice and slow of tongue.”

1. As long as Moses was in Egypt and was being educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, he was not of feeble voice nor slow of tongue, nor did he profess himself ineloquent. For as far as the Egyptians were concerned, he was both sonorous of voice and incomparable in eloquence. But when he began to receive divine things, then he perceived that his voice was thin and feeble, and understood that his tongue was slow and impeded; then he declares himself mute, when he began to recognize that true Word which was in the beginning with God. But so that what we say may be grasped more easily, let us use a comparison of this kind. If a rational human being, however unskilled and untaught, is compared with dumb animals, he will seem eloquent in comparison with those that lack both reason and speech; but if he is compared with learned and eloquent men, thoroughly proven in all wisdom, he will seem both ineloquent and mute. But if someone contemplates the divine Word itself and looks upon the divine wisdom itself, then, however great his learning and however great his wisdom, he will profess himself a dumb animal before God, far more than cattle are before us. This, no doubt, was Moses. Blessed David too, seeing this and weighing himself in this order against the divine wisdom, said: “I have become like a beast of burden before you.” Accordingly, then, Moses too, the greatest of the prophets, says to him in the present reading that he is of feeble voice and slow of tongue, and that he is not eloquent. For all human beings, in comparison with the divine Word, are to be considered not only ineloquent but mute.

Since, then, he had advanced so far in understanding as to know himself, in which lies the greatest part of wisdom, the divine favour rewards him. Hear with what excellent and magnificent gifts: “I,” he says, “will open your mouth and instruct you in what you must say.” Blessed are those whose mouth God opens so that they may speak. God opens the mouth of the prophets and fills it with his speech, as he says in the present passage: “I will open your mouth and instruct you in what you must say.” And through David too God says: “Open wide your mouth, and I will fill it.” Likewise Paul too says: “That speech may be given me in the opening of my mouth.” So God opens the mouth of those who speak the words of God. But I fear that there may be some whose mouth, on the contrary, the devil opens. For whoever speaks a lie, it is certain that the devil opened his mouth to speak the lie. Those who bear false witness, who bring buffoonery and obscenities and other such things out of their mouths: the devil opened their mouth. I fear that the devil also opens the mouth of whisperers and detractors, and of those too who utter idle words, for which an account must be rendered on the day of judgment. And as for those who speak iniquity on high, who deny that my Lord Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, or who blaspheme the Holy Spirit, to whom it will be forgiven neither in the present age nor in the age to come: who would doubt that the devil opens their mouth? Do you want me to show you this too from the Scriptures, how the devil opens the mouth of such people as speak against Christ? See what is written of Judas: how it is related that Satan entered into him, and that the devil put it into his heart to betray the Lord. He, then, opened his mouth so that he spoke with the chief priests and Pharisees about how he might betray him, once he had received money. Hence it seems to me no small grace to understand which mouth God opens and which mouth the devil opens. It is not without the grace of the Holy Spirit that one distinguishes mouths and words of this kind. And therefore among the distributions of spiritual graces this too is added, that to some is given the discernment of spirits. So it is a spiritual grace by which spirits are discerned, as the Apostle says elsewhere too: “Test the spirits, whether they are of God.” But just as God opens the mouth of the saints, so I think God also opens the ears of the saints to hear the divine words. For so the prophet Isaiah says: “The Lord opened my ear, that I may know when a word must be spoken.” So too the Lord opens eyes, as he opened the eyes of Hagar, “and she saw a well of living water.” And the prophet Elisha too says: “Open, Lord, the eyes of the servant, that he may see that more are with us than with our adversaries. And the Lord,” it says, “opened the eyes of the servant, and behold, the whole mountain was full of horsemen and chariots” and heavenly help. For “the angel of the Lord encamps round about those who fear him, and delivers them.” So, as we have said, God opens mouth and ears and eyes, so that we may speak or see or hear the things of God. And I do not take idly what the prophet says: “The instruction of the Lord,” he says, “opened my ear.” This seems to me to concern us, that is, the whole Church of God in common. For if we are engaged in the instruction of the Lord, the instruction of the Lord opens our ear too. But the ear that is opened through the instruction of the Lord is not always open; sometimes it is open, sometimes shut. Hear the lawgiver saying: “You shall not receive an idle report.” If, then, at any time idle things are spoken, if empty, foolish, shameful, profane, or wicked things are uttered, the one who knows the instruction of the Lord shuts his ears, turns away his hearing, and says: “But I, like a deaf man, did not hear, and like a mute who does not open his mouth.” But if what is said pertains to the benefit of the soul, if the discourse is about God, if it teaches conduct, invites to virtues, cuts away vices, the ears must lie open to words of this kind; and not only the ears, but the heart and the mind and the whole door of the soul must be thrown open to such hearing. Yet the law used the greatest moderation in its precept, not saying, “You shall not hear an idle report,” but “You shall not receive it.” For we often hear idle things. What Marcion says is idle; what Valentinus says is idle; and all who speak against God the Creator, what they say is idle. Yet we often hear these things so that we can reply to them, lest by the ornament of their speech they steal upon the simpler among our brothers. So we hear these things, but we do not receive them. For they are spoken by that mouth which the devil opened. And therefore we must pray that the Lord may deign to open our mouth, so that we can both overcome those who contradict and stop the mouth that the devil opened. So much on the text: “I will open your mouth and instruct you in what you must say.” Not only is it promised to Moses that his mouth will be opened by the Lord, but also to Aaron. For of him too it is said: “I will open your mouth and his mouth, and will instruct you in what you shall do.” For Aaron too came to meet Moses and went out from Egypt. He came to meet him. Where? In what kind of place? For it matters where the one whose mouth is to be opened by God meets Moses. “He met him,” it says, “at the mountain of God.” You see that the mouth of one who can come to meet him at the mountain of God is rightly opened. Peter and James and John went up the mountain of God so that they might be worthy to see Jesus transfigured, and to see Moses and Elijah in glory with him. You too, then, unless you go up to the mountain of God and meet Moses there, that is, unless you ascend to the lofty sense of the law, unless you rise to the summit of spiritual understanding, your mouth has not been opened by the Lord. If you stand in the low place of the letter and weave the text of the literal account into Jewish narratives, you have not met Moses at the mountain of God, nor has God opened your mouth, nor instructed you in what you must say. So unless Aaron had met Moses on the mountain, unless he had seen his sublime and lofty sense, unless he had perceived his exalted understanding, Moses would never have spoken the words of God to him, nor handed on to him the power of signs and wonders, nor made him a sharer in so great a mystery.

But since it would take long to speak of each thing in order, let us see what Moses and Aaron say when they have gone in to Pharaoh: “Thus says the Lord: Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.” Moses does not want the people to serve the Lord while placed in Egypt, but to go out into the desert and serve the Lord there. This doubtless shows that as long as one remains in worldly darkness and is engaged in the obscurity of business, he cannot serve the Lord. For one cannot serve two masters; one cannot serve the Lord and mammon. We must therefore go out of Egypt; the world must be left behind if we wish to serve the Lord. Left behind, I say, not in place but in mind; not by setting out on a journey but by making progress in faith. Hear John saying the same things: “Little children, do not love the world nor the things that are in the world, for all that is in the world is the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes.” And yet what does he say? Let us see how, or how far, he orders them to set out from Egypt: “We will go,” he says, “a journey of three days into the wilderness, and there we will sacrifice to the Lord our God.” What is the three days' journey we must travel so that, going out of Egypt, we may reach the place where we ought to sacrifice? I understand the way to be him who said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” This way we must travel in three days. For whoever confesses with his mouth the Lord Jesus and believes in his heart that God raised him from the dead on the third day will be saved. This, then, is the three days' way by which one reaches the place where sacrifice is offered to the Lord and the sacrifice of praise is rendered. So much for the mystical understanding. But if we also seek the moral sense, which is very useful to us, we set out on a three days' journey from Egypt if we so keep ourselves from all defilement of soul and body and spirit that, as the Apostle said, “your spirit and soul and body may be kept whole in the day of Jesus Christ.” We set out on a three days' journey from Egypt if we take rational, natural, and moral wisdom away from worldly things and turn it to the divine ordinances. We set out on a three days' journey from Egypt if, purifying in ourselves our words, deeds, and thoughts (for these are the three things through which human beings can sin), we become pure in heart so that we can see God. Do you want to see things of this kind which the Holy Spirit indicates in the Scriptures? This Pharaoh, the prince of Egypt, when he sees himself pressed hard to let the people of God go, desires to obtain this as second best: that they not go far away, not travel the whole three days; and he says: “Do not go far away.” He does not want the people of God to be far from him; he wants it, if not in deed, at least in word to sin; if not in word, at least to offend in thought. He does not want them to travel the whole three days away from him. In some of us he wants to have at least one day of his own; in others two; in others he possesses all three days himself. But blessed are those who withdraw from him a full three days, and in whom he possesses no day of his own. Do not think, then, that Moses led the people out of Egypt only at that time. Now too Moses, whom we have with us (for we have Moses and the prophets), that is, the law of God, wants to lead you out of Egypt; if you listen to it, it wants to put you far from Pharaoh. It desires to rescue you from the work of clay and straw, if only you listen to the law of God and understand it spiritually. It does not want you to remain in the deeds of the flesh and of darkness, but to go out to the wilderness, to come to a place free of the disturbances and billows of the world, to come to the quiet of silence. For the words of wisdom are learned in silence and quiet. When you have come to this place of quiet, there you will be able to sacrifice to the Lord, there to recognize the law of God and the power of the divine voice. This is why Moses desires to draw you out from the midst of tossing business and from the midst of clamouring crowds. This is why he desires you to go out of Egypt, that is, out of the darkness of ignorance, so that you may hear the law of God and receive the light of knowledge. But Pharaoh resists; the ruler of this darkness does not want to release you; he does not want you to be drawn out of his darkness and brought to the light of knowledge. And hear what he says: “Who is it,” he says, “whose voice I should hear? I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go.” Hear what the prince of this world replied: he says he does not know God. You see what raw pride does. As long as he is not in the troubles of men and is not scourged with men, therefore pride holds him. But you will see a little later how much he advances under the scourges, how much better he becomes when beaten. He who now says, “I do not know the Lord,” later, when he has felt the force of the blows, will say: “Pray to the Lord for me”; and not only this, but, with others bearing witness, he will confess still more that the finger of God is in the power of the signs. Let no one, then, be so untaught in divine discipline as to think the divine scourges are ruin, or to believe the blows of the Lord are penal destruction. Behold Pharaoh, most hard: yet he advances when beaten. Before the blows he does not know the Lord; when beaten, he asks that the Lord be entreated for him. It is progress in punishments to recognize this very thing, that you have deserved punishment. “I do not know the Lord,” then, he says, “and I will not let Israel go.” But see in the Gospels how, when beaten, he corrects this saying. For it is written that the demons cried out to the Lord and said: “Why have you come before the time to torment us? We know who you are: you are the Son of the living God.” When they felt the torments, they know the Lord. Before the scourges he says, “I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go”; but afterwards he lets Israel go, and not only lets them go but even presses them to go out. For there is no fellowship of light with darkness, no part for the believer with the unbeliever. But what more does he add in his replies? “Why,” he says, “Moses and Aaron, do you turn the people away from their works? Go away, each of you, to your work.” As long as the people is with him and works clay and brick, as long as it is busy with straw, he does not think it perverted but walking on a straight road. But if it says, “I want to go a three days' journey and serve the Lord,” he says the people is being perverted by Moses and Aaron. This indeed was said to the ancients. But today too, if Moses and Aaron, that is, the prophetic and the priestly word, rouse a soul to the service of God and invite it to go out of the world, to renounce all that it possesses, to give itself to the divine law and follow the word of God, you will at once hear it said by those who are of one mind with Pharaoh and are his friends: “See how people are seduced and perverted! What young men! So as not to work, not to serve in the army, not to do anything that would profit them, they abandon necessary and useful things and pursue follies and idleness. What is it to serve the Lord? They do not want to work, and they look for occasions for lazy idleness.” These were Pharaoh's words then; these his friends and intimates say now. Nor is the matter carried on by words alone; blows follow too. He orders the scribes of the Hebrews to be flogged, straw not to be given, the work to be exacted. These things our fathers endured, after whose pattern the people of God which is in the Church also often suffers. For you will find, if you consider those who have handed themselves over entirely to the prince of this world, that they enjoy prosperous successes, that everything, as they think, turns out happily for them; whereas for the servants of God often not even these lowly and small things of human sustenance succeed. For I think these are what the straw supplied by Pharaoh seems to be. So it often happens that those who fear God lack even this cheap food, like straw. Often too they endure persecutions by tyrants and suffer torture and savage torments, so that some, worn out, say to Pharaoh: “Why do you afflict your people?” For some, overcome by blows, fall away from the faith and confess that they are Pharaoh's people. “For not all who are of Israel are Israelites, nor because they are seed are they all children.” These, then, who are wavering and worn out in tribulations, even speak against Moses and Aaron and say: “From the day you went in and out to Pharaoh, you have made our odour abominable before him.” These people speak the truth, though perhaps they do not know what they say, just as that Caiaphas spoke the truth, that “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people,” but did not know what he was saying. For, as the Apostle says, “We are the good odour of Christ; but to some,” he says, “an odour from life to life, and to others an odour from death to death.” So too the prophetic word is a sweet odour to those who believe; but to the wavering and unbelieving, and to those who confess that they are Pharaoh's people, it becomes an abominable odour. And Moses himself says to the Lord: “Since I spoke with Pharaoh, he has afflicted your people.” For it is certain that before the word of God is heard, before the divine preaching arises, there is no tribulation, there is no temptation; for unless the trumpet sounds, battle is not joined; but where the trumpet of preaching has given the signal for battle, there affliction follows, there the whole fight of tribulations arises. So from the time Moses and Aaron began to speak to Pharaoh, the people of God is afflicted. From the time the word of God has been brought into your soul, a contest of virtues against vices is necessarily stirred up within you; before the word came that would reprove them, the vices continued in peace within you; but when the word of God began to make a separation in each one, then a great disturbance arises, and a war without truce is born. For when can justice agree with injustice, unchastity with sobriety, falsehood with truth? And therefore let us not be greatly disturbed if our odour seems abominable to Pharaoh. For virtue too is held in execration by vices. Rather, as it says later that Moses stood before Pharaoh, let us too stand against Pharaoh and not bend, but stand with our loins girded with truth and our feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. For so the Apostle exhorts us, saying: “Stand, therefore, and do not again cling to a yoke of slavery.” Again he says: “In which we stand, and boast in the hope of the glory of God.” And we stand confidently if we entreat the Lord to set our feet upon a rock, so that what the same prophet says may not happen to us: “But my feet were almost moved; my steps had well-nigh slipped.” Let us stand, then, before Pharaoh, that is, let us resist him in the contest, as the apostle Peter too says: “Resist him, strong in faith.” And Paul no less says: “Stand in the faith and act manfully.” For if we stand bravely, what Paul prayed for his disciples will follow, when he said that “God will crush Satan under your feet swiftly.” For the more steadfastly and bravely we stand, the weaker and feebler Pharaoh will be. But if we begin to be either weak or wavering, he will become stronger and more steadfast against us. And truly that will be fulfilled in us of which Moses gave a figure. For when he raised his hands, Amalek was defeated; but if he let them drop as if tired and lowered his weak arms, Amalek grew strong. So let us too lift up our arms in the power of the cross of Christ, and in prayer raise holy hands in every place without anger and dispute, so that we may be worthy of the Lord's help. For the apostle James too urges this very thing, saying: “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” Let us act, then, with all faith, so that he not only flees from us but Satan is crushed under our feet, just as Pharaoh was sunk in the sea and in the depth of the abyss; and we shall pass through the billows of vices and of the world as on a solid road, through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.