December 12

Dead Wood Blooms

The rod of the man whom I choose will bud. That is how God ended a quarrel about who could stand before him, and it is a strange way to end one. The dispute over the priesthood had already cost the camp dearly. God asked for twelve staffs, one for each tribe, with a name written on every one, and rested the whole question on whether a dried staff would do the one thing cut wood cannot do.

A staff has a history. It was taken off a tree, stripped and dried, and carried until the grip went smooth. A bare branch still on the tree in December is only waiting for spring; a staff is a long way past waiting. It was an honest test for that reason. All twelve were equally finished, every tribe came to it on level ground, and the outcome was beyond anyone's ability to arrange. God told Moses in advance exactly what to look for.

"The rod of the man whom I choose will bud, and I will rid myself of the grumbling of the people of Israel, which they grumble against you."

The next day Moses went into the tent of the testimony, and there was Aaron's rod for the house of Levi: it had budded, and put out buds, and produced blossoms, and borne ripe almonds.

Numbers 17:5, 8

Moses walked in the next morning and found the whole of it at once. Buds, blossoms, and ripe almonds, on the same rod, on the same day. An almond tree needs months to get from blossom to ripe nut, and it needs roots to do it at all. This one had no roots and no season, and it had covered the entire distance in a night, inside a tent, before anyone came in to look.

God could have settled the matter with a verdict, and he settled it with an almond. The end he named sits inside the promise itself: the grumbling would stop. He made his choice known by giving life to a rod that had none to give.

Isaiah looked at the royal house and described a stump. A shoot will come out of the stump of Jesse, he said, and a branch out of its roots will bear fruit. He named the family by Jesse rather than by David or by any of the kings who came after him, and he pictured the tree already down. It is one claim about God made twice, centuries apart: what God chooses comes up out of wood that everyone else has finished with. Isaiah's shoot turned out to be a child, born in the town Jesse came from.

Israel woke to almonds on a stick that had no business growing anything. Tomorrow morning will be your own, with its own ordinary shape, and the God who did that stands over both. If something in your life has gone past the point where you expect anything from it, a prayer you stopped praying, a name you stopped saying out loud, bring it back to him in these weeks before Christmas and leave it with him. What he does with it is his to decide, and it may look nothing like almonds. Aaron's rod went in with his name on it and lay there overnight. Nothing more was asked of him.

Dead wood budded in a single night at your word, Lord. I bring you what I had given up on, and I leave it in your hands. Do with it what you did in that tent.