3rd Sunday Lent C - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2007

I love this story from Exodus that we heard in the first Reading today. In fact, I have loved it for more than fifty years. It was the first ever text from Scripture that seemed to jump off the page and hit me between the eyes – something the professors at the University had never managed.. I was reading a book by a French author; I think his name was Père Colombe. I was studying in Rome at the time. The book was about catechetics, and the catechetical revival at that time was just getting under way  - in Germany and in France, especially - ten years before it got the rubber-stamp from the Second Vatican Council. The book’s title was either, From Life to Catechetics, or From Catechetics to Life – I can’t remember now. Anyhow, the author was using Scripture, (today's passage, in fact) and for the first time in my life, Scripture came alive for me. I have been profoundly grateful for him ever since. He started a process that has never stopped. 

Anyhow, to the text – today! Moses, way out in the bush, in the wild, empty desert of the Sinai Peninsula, looking after sheep and goats for his father-in-law ... maybe missing his wife intensely ... Doing it tough. Back where he came from, in Egypt, he now had a price on his head for murder. Dangerous to go back there. He knew he wasn’t Egyptian: - he was a Hebrew, though he never knew his father or mother, or any other Hebrews, for that matter. In Egypt Hebrews had become slaves – they had been that way for quite a while.

One day, out in the Sinai desert, he had an experience.. and he knew he was on holy ground, a sacred space. As the story said: there was a bush blazing but it was not being burnt up... “I must go and see this strange sight, and see why the bush is not burnt up”, said Moses... God called to him from the middle of the bush: “Come no nearer; take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground”.

Most of you, at some time in your life, have probably had an experience like that – not as spectacular or clear cut .. but a sense of being in on something beyond yourself... Perhaps triggered by a sunset, or the birth of a child, or the ocean or the bush – something that touched you but that you struggle to, or can’t, put into words; and that somehow does something to you – leaves you different.. More often than not, shared with no one and not followed up.

In Moses’ case, the Book of Exodus said it was an experience of God - and what a God! the God of Abraham, and Isaac and Jacob - the God of men who dreamed, who believed, and who hoped the impossible – that they would be blessed, and through  them the world would be blessed. They were landless! Abraham had been childless, (and, when he got a son, Isaac, had thought that God wanted him to kill him in sacrifice!). Jacob, in his turn, just missed out on being killed by his brother.

This God, who summoned towards the future, was a God who was also attuned to the present - a God who cared that people were oppressed and hurting and powerless,  without leadership, to do anything about it. This God would be a liberating God.

We believe in the same God – a God finely attuned to the suffering of the world, and caring profoundly for the oppressed – a God who is quintessentially a liberating God.

Back then, God worked through people who dreamed, who believed, and who hoped - who hoped that the world would be blessed through them.

God has not changed. God is the God WHO IS – who cannot be different: I am who I am. We know little of that mystery, beyond what God has told us. The God who sets people free from oppression still hopes for a better world, a blessed world, where people respect themselves and respect each other, and seek to build their lives on truth, justice, love and freedom. 

God relied on people like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. God still relies on people who can dream, and believe and hope. God relies on you, and me. Marvellous – isn’t it!