Preamble:
There are seasons when the light begins to change.
Not disappear. Change.
The day seems to measure itself against the night, and for a brief moment neither appears willing to overpower the other.
Creation itself seems to stand in balance.
And perhaps we should too.
There are times when a person ought to stop long enough to ask not simply:
Where am I going?
But:
Who is going there?
Because life has a way of giving us new names.
Leader, Teacher, Reverend, Boss, Graduate, Survivor.
Names earned through work.
Names carried through struggle.
Names spoken over us because somehow we made it through what once looked impossible.
Joshua knew something about that.
He had walked behind Moses through wilderness and disappointment.
He had watched a generation disappear.
He had carried the expectation of a teacher who could bring Israel to the river but could not cross it with them.
Now the river is before him.
Moses is leaving.
Joshua is rising.
The future appears to know his name.
And then Torah does something curious.
At almost the very moment Joshua is about to become Joshua in the eyes of everybody else, Moses' final song reaches backward and calls him:
Hoshea.
His old name.
The name before the authority.
Before the river opened.
Before the people stood in awe of him.
Before the title became larger than the man.
Why would Scripture reach backward at the very moment his life is moving forward?
A few verses later Moses gives us a clue:
“It is not an empty thing.”
Perhaps that is how sacred text teaches us to read.
Do not hurry past the strange thing.
Do not assume the small detail is small.
Sometimes revelation hides where the sentence refuses to behave as expected.
And so, standing near a river, at the turning of a season, with one leader preparing to leave and another preparing to rise, Torah places an old name in our hands.
Hoshea.
And asks us to examine ourselves.
When life enlarges your name, what happens to the person beneath it?
When the doors finally open, what must you carry through?
When the light shifts and the season changes, what must be weighed again?
And perhaps the deepest question is not whether Joshua is ready to cross the Jordan.
Perhaps it is whether Hoshea can cross with him.
