3d Sunday of LentMarch 7, 2010
Ex 3: 1-8, 13-15
Ps 103: 1-4, 6-8, 11
1 Cor 10: 1-6, 10-12
Luke 13: 1-9
Provincial House, N.R.
“I have witnessed the affliction of my people…and have heard their cry of complaint…. Therefore I have come down to rescue them…and lead them…into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (Ex 3: 7-8).
Some of these words may be extra-familiar to us at this time. Not that we haven’t heard them often before; but they’re words cited by our Haitian confreres as they expressed their appreciation for the visit of the Rector
Major to them last month, one month after the death and destruction of the earthquake. Representing the entire Salesian Family, Fr. Chavez came down like God himself to visit them—the Haitians explicitly said he didn’t send a “Moses” to lift them up, but he came himself—and to assure them of coming deliverance. The Rector Major then cited their words as he wrote to all of us on Feb. 25, to encourage us to remain present to our devastated brothers and sisters, to continue our work and our sacrifices to bring them, if not quite into a land flowing with milk and honey, at least into a much better situation than they’ve been in the last 2 months.Two clear messages in the Scriptures this morning are that the Lord is very close to us, he is present among us, he is leading us to salvation; and if we choose not to heed his invitation to repent and be saved, we’re doomed.
The Lord announces to Moses that he has seen his people’s affliction in
Egypt, he has heard their cry of complaint, and he knows well what they’re suffering (3:7). His knowledge isn’t pure observation, distant, uncaring, and without effect. No, he sees and hears, and he acts. “I have come down” from my lofty throne in the heavens “to rescue them…and lead them”—not point out the road, not just send them a savior, but to lead them myself—“out of that land and into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey” (3:8). God will be among his people, like a good military captain with his soldiers. He’ll guide Moses at each step, he’ll act thru Moses’ staff, he’ll light their way, he’ll protect them from assault.Moses isn’t any too eager for his battlefield commission as God’s lieutenant and tries various ways to dodge it. One way is to ask God his name. You may remember that when Jacob wrestled with the angel of God at the ford of the Jabbok, on his return to Canaan from his exile in Mesopotamia, he asked the angel his name, and the angel refused to give it (Gen 32:23-31). You may also remember that Adam named all of the animals in Eden (Gen 2:18-20). To name something was to exercise power over it, to have the thing or the person at one’s command. But when Moses asks, God gives him his name (Ex 3:13-14). One commentator compares this to giving out your private phone number to someone you want to be specially close to you, or someone you want to reach you any time there’s a problem.[1] Moreover, the Lord God identifies himself as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob” (3:15). He has remained close to these friends of his, and that’s how he is to be remembered forever by his people—remembering, again, meaning being present to them in a real and active sense.
The responsorial psalm also celebrates the Lord’s closeness to his people. He pardons them, heals them, redeems them from destruction, crowns them with his kindness and compassion (103:3-4). He comes to the defense of the oppressed and makes his deeds known to Israel (103:6-7), i.e., lets them experience what he does for them.
Jesus is the ultimate presence of God. In him God comes down definitively from his heavenly throne to be among his people and save them. He isn’t God’s word spoken from a mysteriously burning bush that Moses mustn’t get too close to, but God’s word in human flesh with whom we can talk and share a meal, whom we can touch. He even remains with us in sacramental form and in the living word of the sacred Scriptures.This same Jesus, however, cautions his audience against a failure to repent. In his own day various tragedies befell people and made the local news (unfortunately, we have no other historical record of the events he mentions in the gospel today). But these tragedies aren’t divine retribution for the sins of the victims, any more than earthquakes today are God’s particular punishments. Yet tragedies and disasters may serve as warnings: we have here no lasting city, as the Letter to the Hebrews says (13:14), and eventually we must perish in a physical sense. Jesus also seems to be warning his hearers that their failure to repent, their failure to change their ways of acting, could bring disaster upon them, e.g., their looking for earthly salvation might lead them to go too far in their resistance to Rome and get them crushed (“If you don’t repent, you’ll all perish as they did!”—13:5). I suppose that’s comparable to telling our contemporaries that if we don’t relent in our reliance on nuclear weapons we may wind up destroying ourselves.
St. Paul uses the example of the people whom Moses led out of Egypt as a warning to his disciples in Corinth. God took great care to deliver Israel from slavery, to feed and water them in the desert. But they didn’t give up their sins—their idolatry, their grumbling about God’s leadership—and so they perished. (1 Cor 10:1-4) If the Christians of Corinth don’t truly give themselves to Christ, but cling to some of their old pagan habits, they too may find themselves not reaching the promised land. They can’t presume that God’s salvation is complete in them until they actually reach that land: “Whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall” (10:12).
We get those sorts of reminders regularly in our Salesian life: daily examens, opportunities for the sacrament of Reconciliation, monthly DORs, annual retreat, annual evaluations of our community and personal lives of prayer and poverty. These opportunities are like the vinedresser’s careful cultivation of the fig tree in Jesus’ parable—the efforts of the Lord to help us bear some fruit, the fruit of repentance, the fruit of discipleship, the fruit of Christian life, the fruit of the Salesian charism. We have that annual evaluation of poverty tomorrow evening—a chance to ask whether our tree bears the fruit of poverty, or the barrenness of material abundance and superfluity.
In such opportunities God comes close to us and calls to us, as if from the burning bush, as if in the words of Jesus: I’ve come to rescue you and lead you into a good and spacious land, flowing with milk and honey, to the banquet table of life. Come with me! Abide with me!
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