Dionysus on a Bike

Numbers 16:41-50 – 5/19/2026

Aaron took [the incense] as Moses had ordered and ran into the middle of the assembly, where the plague had already begun among the people. He put on the incense and made atonement for the people. He stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was stopped.

Numbers 16:47-48 (NRSVue)

Numbers 16 is a brutal passage of Scripture. God kills tens of thousands of God’s own chosen people because the wrong family approached the altar. Thousands more die from a plague sent by God because the assembly was angry at Moses and Aaron for the deaths that already occurred. He were have a capricious seeming God, a God quick to anger who seems indifferent to the lives God destroys in a disproportionate overreaction to ritual laws being violated. We might be forgiven for thinking, like the Gnostics who came before us that this God of brutal punishment on a massive scale cannot be the same God who preached mercy, peace, and forgiveness in the person of Jesus Christ. This heresy that the Hebrew Scriptures refer to an evil, vengeful deity while the New Testament refers to a separate, opposed God of pure love and mercy makes sense. God killing thousands of his own people whom he led out of Egypt seems evil and cruel beyond imagination.

Christians deny what the Gnostics affirm. For the Christian, the God referred to across the entire Christian canon of Scripture is one and the same deity. The God who kills his people in the desert because the wrong family approached the altar is the same God who sent his Son to be savior of the world. This consistency in monotheism and the unity of God comes at a price. The Christian must somehow make sense of a God who would do what is recorded in Numbers chapter 16, a God who kills to avenge broken ritual purity laws.

The theological difficultly is lost on neither the author of Numbers nor Aaron and Moses. As God is preparing to smite the Israelites for the second time and kill thousands more by a fast-acting plague, Aaron and Moses are working on an emergency solution to save as many lives of their community as possible. Aaron, God’s chosen priest, is told by Moses to go into the middle of the assembly where thousands are dying and offer incense to God to appease him and put an end to the carnage. Moses’ and Aaron’s plan works. Aaron stands between the living and the dead with the incense offering and the plague is stopped.

This passage gives me pause. This fickle God who is angered to kill with vengeance by a small violation of religions rules and who is cajoled by some incense cannot be a God of love and mercy. This is not the act of a great and praiseworthy God. This is a petty being who is untrustworthy and not at all loving. This leaves us with a problem. Either we can go the gnostic route and deny that this is really the God we worship at all or we pretend that this event is not so bad, that this is acceptable behavior for the Lord of the Universe. I’m uncomfortable with either solution, both of which overlook a key component to today’s passage of Scripture.

Numbers 16 is an attempt to make sense of senseless, seemingly random tragedy, in this case a devastating plague.. As Lord of all Creation and all powerful ruler, God could have prevented these deaths and so the author of this text and their community look for reasons why God did not prevent those deaths, why he was willing that those deaths come about. The problem of evil rears its head. This passage is one of the classic solutions to the problem of evil. God allows natural evil like a plague and perhaps even ordains it in order to mete out deserved punishment for a wrong. The demands of justice make things like deadly plagues consistent with the existence of a perfectly good God.

This is a dissatisfying theodicy if we continue to think of God as a being with a consciously directed will like our own. However, Numbers 16 offers more than just the standard suffering-as-punishment justification for natural evil. Aaron, God’s chosen high priest, is able, at Moses’ urging, to stand between life and death and prevent more deaths from occurring. I find this line from the text so moving “He stood between the dead and the living.” Aaron and his offering were the division between life and death, a God of punishment and a God of sustaining and health.

God as transcendent is a God that remains, for us in our finitude, mysterious. God as transcendent can only be known through what happens; we cannot know God directly with human concepts and intuitions. What Numbers 16 shows is that God is not just in the plague, God is also at the same time in the one who stands between death and life. God is in the human being who cares. God is in the human being who cries out for life. God is in the person who intercedes on behalf of another.

If all we have is a God who brings about plague, we are left with a God of vengeance. Yes, God is in the plague and all the other bad things that happen to people, but that is because God is in all things. If we think of God in the plague, we have to keep in mind, at the same time, that God is in those who resist the plague, those who stand up against injustice, those who try to mitigate suffering through their gifts and service. God is all of that and good, not in the sense that nothing bad ever happens. God is good in the sense that Aaron standing in the space between death and life is good. God is good in the sense that a world in which things matter is good, where people matter to each other, and life is something sacred, something worth living.

This does not make the problem of evil disappear. This does not negate the tragedy and sadness of tens of thousands of dead. This does not undo the trauma that must be felt if someone blames this death on failure to follow religious ritual law. It is reasonable and right to reject a God who could have prevented that suffering and chose not to. Difficult scripture readings like today’s where the picture of God is troubling and defies what we know of God from the Good News of Jesus Christ forces us to reflect and purify our faith so that it is not a faith of easy platitudes, but a faith grounded in the reality that life is full of sorrow, unexplained loss, and senseless tragedy. Seeing death through the eyes of a Priest who stands between the living and the dead can awaken a greater sensitivity to the paradox and tension that is our Christian faith.

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Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.