Verbs, I think, matter most. Asked for his name, God gave Moses a verb. And even those of us who are, as Cummings put it, “human merely being” can’t be contained in nouns, even buttressed by the best adjectives, but burst and blossom into verbs like Van Gogh’s trees and leaping fields when we are most alive.

Since its prophets and poets can be read for texts that seem to promise the Christian Messiah, and since the Gospels and Epistles allude freely to Adam and Moses and Abraham, the significance of the Old Testament cannot be denied. And yet Christianity has tended to define itself by implied or direct disparagement of the Old Testament. The unloveliness of appropriating the sacred literature of another religion in order to put it to such use is hard to overstate.

Verbs, I think, matter most. Asked for his name, God gave Moses a verb. And even those of us who are, as Cummings put it, “human merely being” can’t be contained in nouns, even buttressed by the best adjectives, but burst and blossom into verbs like Van Gogh’s trees and leaping fields when we are most alive.

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness so the Son of Man has been lifted up that we might also be for the world a light, a witness, of God’s love for the world. To be raised with Christ means the end of any attempt to passively stare at the crucifixion. You cannot stare at that in which you participate.

Since Moses was alone, by having been stripped as it were of the people’s fear, he boldly approached the very darkness itself and entered the invisible things where he was no longer seen by those watching. After he entered the inner sanctuary of the divine mystical doctrine, there, while not being seen, he was in company with the Invisible. He teaches, I think, by the things he did that the one who is going to associate intimately with God must go beyond all that is visible and—lifting up his own mind, as to a mountaintop, to the invisible and incomprehensible—believe that the divine is there where the understanding does not reach.