The Word of God has the power to ground us more deeply in God’s love, grace, and plan for our lives. This has been my experience in getting settled in Rome recently, as I am here for a few months of study. Amidst the bustling around to gather together another set of ten documents for Italy’s bureaucracy and catching my bearings in a new setting, lectio divina has helped me settle in (not to mention little things like being stopped near the Colosseum yesterday by a woman whom I met a few times through our beloved Avila Institute family!) Each morning with the Bible open on my lap, the rising sun shines into my cell window overlooking a cloistered garden, and I find rest both in the warmth and light of the sun in the sky, and in the divine Son I find in the Scriptures. I find an at-homeness in being wrapped in the Word, and the events of God’s salvation history as my own personal story is part of this larger story too. My life too is enwrapped in the Logos, God’s loving meaning and purpose for all reality and all history. In this Word we enter into the very structure of our life with God. So we are exhorted, “This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous and have good success” (Josh 1:8).
Unexpectedly, I was drawn to the Book of Joshua yesterday and was surprised by what I found. What I found there was Jesus! I found Jesus present and at work in my life through prayerfully reading Joshua. I think we could all benefit from learning how to read the Old Testament with greater spiritual benefit, since it does make up 77% of our Christian Bible. So I offer my ponderings on Joshua chapters 1-6 to draw you more deeply into these chapters but also to embolden your own ardent search and joyful finding of Jesus throughout all the pages of the Sacred Scriptures. Is not this labor of seeking and this delight in finding, savoring, and plunging deeper in the Word all part of how our love for Jesus grows?
Our New Life in the Risen Jesus Throughout the Whole Bible
So much of the Bible is about the Resurrection! We so often miss it. The very fact that Jesus is alive and active in our lives today is a grace of his Resurrection as He continues to meet us through his resurrected, God-drenched humanity. There are so many passages we fail to see as opening up for us the power of the Resurrection in our lives. Jon Levenson, for instance, ponders a large variety of Old Testament passages of this kind, captured well in the title of his study The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, as a typological Old Testament theme. Any passage or psalm about the Lord’s victory, we can read in light of the ultimate victory of Jesus’ Resurrection and our share in it. The poor man cast down is raised up and brought to a fuller life in God. This is a Resurrection dynamic that appears in various ways throughout the Scriptures and can enrich with new texture and color our appreciation of our new life in the risen Jesus. Furthermore, Fr. Thomas Olivier Venard, OP suggests that a Christological proclamation of the Word of God itself now bears something of the energy of the Resurrection: “the efficacy of [the] proclamation is tied to the reality of the Resurrection, which is active in the discourse of those who announce it through a kind of transitivity of the energy of the resurrection to the discourse of those whom it impacts” (A Poetic Christ: Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language and Reality, p 19). My Christological/Resurrection proclamation of Joshua 1-6 here is meant to do precisely this. More broadly in our Scripture reading, we need to let the risen Jesus accompany us on our own road to Emmaus so He can reveal Himself and the plenitude of His saving mystery to us throughout the New and Old Testament and He himself carry out an anointed exegesis in us that releases this saving power into us (Lk 24:27, 45).
We are to find the Cross in our daily lives but we are also to find the Resurrection, Jesus’ Resurrection and our share in it. The poor and afflicted man who is raised up, found throughout the Scriptures, challenges us to find, in our own weakness, God’s power made perfect. It is a living out of the mystery of Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection (1 Cor 11-13). All the mysteries that Jesus lived were lived for our sakes.
Those many Psalms celebrating the victory of God, given to the man with all odds set against him, point us to God’s final victory of Love in our own lives through the grace of the Resurrection. The poor, afflicted man who humbly cries out in trust to God moves us into this same space of experiencing God’s hand raising us up. Paralytics, the deaf and blind, those with withered hands called to stretch out and find fuller flourishing point us to the grace of Resurrection and the abundant new life shared with us. Talitha Koum–“Little child, Arise!—mediates to us the grace of rising up in our daughter and sonship in the risen Son. The Dawn from on high shall visit and break upon us each day as we find the risen Lord anew in his new creation. The Scriptures help us live in this space as it breaks forth as a perpetual springtime.
Boldly Lay Hold of the Gift God is Giving You
The Promised Land theme in Deuteronomy and Joshua points us to the Resurrection in a similar way: “Be strong and courageous and take possession of the Land the Lord is giving you!” With some variation, this basic message appears about 50 times in Deuteronomy and is carried over into Joshua 4 times in chapter 1. Whatever “promised land” God is holding before us at this moment, it is certainly pure grace and God’s gift. Yet it does take our humble yet bold cooperation in laying hold of the gift through faith and hope. Whatever the particularities of this gift, it is surely part of the new life given us by God through the risen Jesus. The New Testament too adopts this attitude of needing to claim God’s gifts of grace and “take hold of eternal life” (1 Tim 6:12). As a fellow novice classmate used to say, we need to “Carpe diem…Carpe DM…Seize Divine Mercy!”
Joshua accordingly begins strongly in chapter 1 with the call to lay hold of the gift of the Promised Land and in a way that beckons us to boldly lay hold of the grace of new life in the risen Jesus. This chapter is not the first one we think of when pondering Jesus’ Resurrection but it contains rich imagery and symbols of it. It provides a texture of details for us to enter into a refined yearning for and savoring of the richness of our own promised land and life in Jesus, in the already and not yet of eternal life. In terms of the categories of spiritual exegesis, to find Jesus and His Resurrection in such passages is the allegorical sense. To see the passage as actualized in our life in our own share in Jesus’ risen life and the particular “promised land” urging us on in this season of our life is the moral sense. And the reaching forward to our final Sabbath rest and the promised land of our final Resurrection is the anagogical or mystical sense (cf. CCC 117). The Letter to Hebrews confirms our path here as it indicates that learning from and engaging with the figure of Joshua (Jeshua) is very much about us engaging with Jesus and drawing near to the throne of grace and the true Sabbath rest, here and hereafter (Heb 4:4-16).
In case we are prone to miss the Resurrection theme, the divine Author helps us with mention of the classic “3 days” motif of the Paschal Mystery Triduum that is sprinkled throughout the Old Testament (as in Gen 22:4, 40:12-20; Ex 19:10-16; Esth 4:16; Jon 1:17; Hos 6:2). The Lord through Joshua (Jeshua) and Jesus (!) summons us too: “Prepare your provisions, for in three days you are to pass over this Jordan to go in to take possession of the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” “Now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving them.” “I will not leave you or forsake you. Be strong and courageous.” “The Lord your God is providing you a place of rest and will give you this Land.” “Only be strong and courageous.” “You shall possess it, the land that Moses the servant of the Lord gave you beyond the Jordan toward the Sunrise” (Josh 1:11, 1:2, 1:5-6, 1:13, 1:18, 1:15).
We are invited each morning, with the Benedictus, to enter into this Sunrise: “in the tender compassion of our God, the Dawn from on high shall break upon us” (Lk 1:78). I have been doing this each day beside my cell window overlooking my interior garden in the heart of the Church as the sun in the sky rises. The books of creation and Scripture both help us here as also the Light of our new life in the resurrected Jesus rises over and shines upon more and more of our lives as the Dawn breaking upon us. Here, “the Sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings, and we shall go out leaping like calves” (Mal 4:2).
Rahab’s Faith and a Sacred Remembrance of God’s Mighty Deeds
After the call for us also to lay hold of God’s victory in the Paschal Mystery, we have in chapter 2 an account of Rahab’s faith precisely as faith in the God of the Exodus event, as Rahab herself declares, “I know that the Lord has given you the Land…For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt” (Josh 2:9-10). In this faith in the God of the Exodus deliverance is an implicit faith in the Paschal Mystery and Jesus’ ultimate deliverance, which is why Rahab is an important model of faith in the New Testament (Heb 11:31, James 2:25). Rahab then instructs the spies to “hide three days in the hills” as she places herself and her family under the power of the Blood (the Blood of the lamb and of Jesus) through the scarlet cord marking her dwelling (2:16, 18). Israel then passes over the Jordan, as a New Exodus event, in keeping step with the Lord’s Presence in the Ark of the Covenant (3:11-17; 4:5-18), as Israel earlier had done with the Pillar of Cloud and Fire in the Desert (Ex 13:21-22). It is something we also continue to do in keeping step with the Spirit who overshadows us by remaining always with us and just one step ahead, leading us forward in God’s plan (cf. Gal 5:16-25; 1 Cor 10:1-6). There is rest even in movement and work as we walk in faith and hope with the holy Presence of God.
As the Lord led Israel through the Red Sea out of slavery in Egypt, so in a new Exodus, in like fashion, He leads them through the Jordan River into the Promised Land. It is the same God with a unified purpose and plan of salvation throughout the ages. Later Isaiah will speak of a further new Exodus that is ultimately fulfilled in Jesus’ passing over to the Father through the Cross to open the way to us for the ultimate deliverance from sin and death and entrance into His abundant divine life now shining forth through his risen humanity. The Paschal Mystery recapitulates all that went before and the Old Testament now shines with Christic light and opens up variegated dimensions of God’s saving work in our own lives today. This of course culminates in the Eucharist yet there is the need to keep the truth of God alive in our mind and heart throughout the whole day. Once we are rooted in the Eucharist as Source and Summit of our salvation, the urgency of the Word strikes us anew to help us live this mystery during the many other hours of our day outside an explicit Eucharistic Liturgy (for, daily Mass lasts only 30 minutes) or a longer but still limited period of Eucharistic Adoration. As Bishop John Barres has often stressed, Eucharistic revival needs to be accompanied by a revival of our relationship with the Word of God. The two go together to live a full Eucharistic life.
In Joshua chapter 4, the 12 memorial stones are erected to keep a sacred remembrance of the saving work of God. The saving power of God is re-actualized in this sacred remembrance even for us today through the Eucharist and also our prayerful engagement with the living and effective Word. “When your children ask their fathers in times to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we passed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever” (Josh 4:21-24; cf. 5:10-12). We too can encounter the mighty hand of God today through the memorial stones of the Sacred Scriptures and the same God of salvation history at work in our personal history of salvation.
Praying for Redemption amidst Our Own Walls of Jericho
Finally in chapter 6, with the tumbling of the walls of Jericho, Israel continues to keep step with the Lord in docility to His commands, as the Presence of the Lord in the Ark of the Covenant grants them victory. The Lord assures them, “See, I have given Jericho to your hands” (6:2). Yet they still must lay hold of the gift of God through faith and hope through their cooperation of prayer and action. “Take up the Ark of the Covenant and let seven priests bear seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark of the Lord…Go forward. March around the city and let the armed men pass on before the Ark of the Lord” (6:6-7). The Lord’s elaborate instructions involved in circling the city for seven days involves also periods of waiting and silence (6:10). In the spirit of this chapter, when St. Vincent Ferrer was sent to preach to a town, he would spend days first walking through it and circling around it in prayer to release the saving power of God afresh upon this town in a sacred remembrance of His mighty deeds in the past. It is the same God alive and active today, accomplishing a similar pattern of salvation.
Jericho reminds us too of our own prayer practices and routines that we feel the Lord instructing us to undertake for various salutary causes, like family issues, cultural problems, and the salvation and holiness of souls. And it is the Lord’s Presence, not just in the symbolic Ark of the Covenant, but in His real Eucharistic Presence that will grant us the victory as the risen One continues His Paschal work among us. In conclusion, Joshua chapter 1 describes the vast expansiveness of the “promised land” in terms of stretching “toward the going down of the sun” and “toward the sunrise” (1:4, 15). On one level, this may simply be saying from West to East, but more profoundly it points to a saving Light that shines upon every aspect of human life. From the sinking sun and dying of the grain of wheat into the hiddenness of the earth, to its rising the next day to bear much fruit and light, and from the rising dawns to evening twilights of life, Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, who can turn it all into Victory. Through the variegated texture of Scripture, God continues to call out to us day by day, morning by morning, to lay everything open to the Light of Jesus’ triumphant Resurrection as we lay hold of the Dawn from on high breaking upon us. “In three days you are to pass over this Jordan to go in to take possession of the land that the Lord your God is giving you…Only be strong and courageous” (Josh 1:11, 18).
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