The Bush Still Burns - Reflections on Exodus 3:1-15, Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

by John C. Holbert on Friday, June 19, 2026

         There is no more famous passage in the Hebrew Bible than this one from the pages of Exodus.  The “burning bush” episode has been discussed, preached, wondered about, and portrayed on film numerous times. I can still easily recall the scene from the 70-year-old “Ten Commandments” movie, by Cecil B. DeMille, as Charlton Heston, aka Moses, stands in awe before the bush, blazing rather peculiarly (pre-CGI), with a sonorous voice  pouring out of it, demanding that Moses go back to Egypt and “let my people go.” It can hardly get more dramatic than that!

         Let us examine just how the drama works here. Moses has fled the wrath of Pharaoh, due to his murder of the Egyptian overseer, and has found himself in Midian—east of Egypt— where he meets and marries the daughter of a local priest, Reuel (also named Jethro in other sources), Zipporah (“little bird”), and soon has a son. The son’s name is interesting—Gershom—two Hebrew words form the name, ger (stranger/sojourner) and shom (there). Each time that Moses and Zipporah look at their son, he is a constant reminder that the family apparently belongs somewhere else; their life in Midian will necessarily be brief. But Moses sees none of that now. He joins his father-in-law’s business, the herding of sheep. “He drove the flock into the wilderness and came to the mountain of God, to Horeb” (Ex.3:1). It will be another typical day in the desert, Moses watching the sheep graze in the hot and dry terrain, while he seeks shade to endure the ferocious heat. But this day will be far from ordinary.

         “A messenger of YHWH appeared to him in a fiery flame from the center of a bush (seneh in Hebrew, an apparent pun on the other name of the sacred mountain, Sinai), and he saw it. Amazingly, the bush blazed with fire but was not consumed” (Ex.3:2). Clearly, the burning bush was specifically designed to attract Moses’ attention, to draw him from his desert stupor. “I must turn quickly and see this great sight, just why the bush is not consumed” (Ex.3:3). Not only is the bush blazing without ceasing, it also finds a voice! “Moses, Moses,” calls Elohim from the bush’s heart, to which Moses replies with appropriate Middle Eastern language, “Here I am” (Ex.3:4). The proof that this is not your common desert bush, growing in a dry place, comes as God says, “Come no closer! Take off your sandals for the place you are standing on is holy ground” (Ex.3:5). 

         And now issues from the bush the unmistakable call of God to divine mission. “I am the God of your ancestor, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” and with that announcement “Moses hid his face, for he was terrified to look at God” (Ex.3:6). It is long tradition that if one sees God, one cannot live, though later in the tale, Moses will speak to God face to face, as one speaks to a friend. But not here and not yet. God then reveals to Moses why God has come to him in this astonishing way. “I have clearly seen the abuse of my people in Egypt and have heard the outcry due to their taskmasters. I know their pain”(Ex.3:7). These verbs reiterate the verbs found in Ex.2:23-25. God has “heard, remembered, seen and known,” and now the substance of the verbs has been made explicit. 

         “I have come down to rescue them from the hand of Egypt and to bring them up from that land to a land grand and spacious, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Ex.3:8). That promised land is, however, not empty; it is filled with all manner of peoples, peoples that will serve Israel either as neighbors or rivals or slaves; only the ongoing story will reveal which they are to be. In any case, thus far in God’s call from the bush, only the first-person pronoun “I” has been used—I have heard, I have seen, I have come down, I will bring them up. At this point in the story, I always picture Moses, face down in the sand, muttering quietly, “Good idea, God! Go for it! Bring those Israelites out of Egypt! I am behind you, way behind you.” But suddenly, the pronoun makes a radical change. “So, you go now! I will send you to pharaoh, so that you may bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt” (Ex.3:10).

         Now that is a horse of a different color, and Moses is not ready to ride. “And Moses said to Elohim, ‘Who am I that I should go to pharaoh, and thus bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’” (Ex.3:11). Who, indeed? This sharp reluctance to join God’s mission will be echoed through subsequent prophetic calls, from Isaiah in his temple (Is.6) to Jeremiah at Anathoth (Jer.1) to Jonah’s hilarious refusal to answer in a wonderfully satiric assault on so-called prophets called of God (Jonah 1-4). God’s immediate reply to Moses’s reluctance is a rather calm and mild claim, “I will be with you, and this is the sign for you that I myself have sent you. When you bring the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain” (Ex.3:12). That is hardly Moses’s problem! The issue for him is not what he will do AFTER he gets the people out, but how exactly is he to get them out at all! 

         Nobody is going to believe this! “When I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” after they have stopped laughing, they will ask, “Does this God have a name? What shall I say then?” (Ex.3:14). And from the blazing bush issues the famous and richly ambiguous answer, “I will be who I will be,” or “I am who I am,” or “I am the one who lives,” or any number of other construals of ‘ehyeh, ‘asher ‘ehyeh. One might also say that it may mean something like “I am the one who endures.” Whatever God’s revelation here may mean, Moses, after two expressions of reluctance will add three more reasons why he simply cannot and will not follow God’s call: they will not believe him (Ex.4:1); he is a poor speaker (Ex.4:10); in abject desperation, he finally bumbles out a ridiculous collection of words—“Please, my Lord, send, I pray, by the hand of him you would send,” reading quite literally, the upshot of which may mean “choose somebody, anybody else!” (Ex.4:13). Moses is having nothing of this call from the bush, but as we all know, he finally does go, and finally does get the Israelites out of Egypt.

         That bush is still burning—for us. And God is still calling, for the pain of God’s people remains all too real, and the forces of Egypt still wish them to stay in bondage. How will we respond?