LENT SUN 03- C
Letters from the Desert
(Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; Psalm 103; 1 Cor 10:1-6, 10-12; Lk 13:1-9)
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Many years ago, a well-known spiritual writer and mystic, Carlo Coretto, wrote a book entitled Letters from the Desert. It was quite popular when it came out, with its invitation to greater spiritual growth to his fellow Christians, perhaps not in a literal dry parched land, but at least in the desert of our lives.
The readings for today’s Eucharist, the third week of Lent, can also be seen as letters from the desert. We are given three strong, clear invitations: to repent; to trust God completely, and to live one day at a time.
In the first reading, Moses is literally in the desert, looking after the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, a priest from Midian. We are told he had led the flock to the far side of the wilderness, and God appeared to him there in a burning bush. It is interesting that so often, a message from God will come to us, not in the busyness of our everyday lives, but when we take time to slow down, empty ourselves of distractions, and listen more attentively and closely to both the written Word of God, and the movement of the Spirit of God within us.
Moses was curious, open, willing to learn, and God spoke to him on holy ground, from a burning bush. Moses received a call to go back to Egypt, to be God’s instrument in liberating God’s people from the oppressive rule of the Pharoah. Moses was being asked to trust God totally, and to obey the will of God, however inadequate Moses felt. To help him accept this awesome responsibility, God reveals God’s self to Moses, first as the God of his ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then as I Am who Am. Given the strong veneration that Indigenous tribes have for their ancestors, God was speaking to Moses in terms that would reach his heart, and elicit the response God wanted, humble trust and obedience.
In the Gospel, we see Jesus, who is not just the fullest revelation of God, but the Son of God, teaching the people and his disciples. In commenting on the belief at that time that misfortune was the result of personal sin, Jesus teaches them a most basic truth, in itself an invitation to action, that is, to repent.
The Greek word for repent is metanoia. It literally means to turn around 180 degrees and to go in the opposite direction then the one a person was on. Jesus is adamant about this need to repent. Unless we repent, he tells his audience, they would perish as did those others at the mercy of Pilate, or at the Tower of Siloam.
It is Albert Einstein who probably unwittingly shed light on the nature of repentance, with the comment that we can’t resolve an issue with the same consciousness that created it. Someone else paraphrased that insight with the comment that when we do what we’ve always done, we get what we’ve always got.
We know that the mission of Jesus was to inaugurate the reign of God here on earth. All his teachings and his miracles were to arouse faith in him as Son of God, as the Messiah, redeemer and Saviour of the world. The entrance to that reign of God was humble faith and love. Given that most people are on the same trajectory as the people that Moses tried to lead, and who over and over again did not get it – that God wanted above all a covenant relationship of the heart with God’s people – Jesus’ call to repent is the first step to entrance into that mystical yet very real reign of God among us.
Jesus knows our hearts, and knows how hard it is for us to really and truly change. He uses the parable of the fig tree to inform us that this process need not happen overnight. God is patient, and willing to give us the time that we need to finally change our ways and open ourselves up to how he wants to work in our live.
In addictions awareness circles, the term that is used when one is finally ready to let go and let God, is to hit bottom. It is to run out of our own resources, and to have nowhere else to go but up, and to a total dependence on God.
Ghada Boulos, our very accomplished tour guide in the Holy Land, surprised our group when she admitted she belonged to Overeaters Anonymous, and shared a little bit of her story with us. She told us how she at one point weighed two hundred pounds, and finally, realizing how this was a risk to her health and how powerless she was to rescue herself, hit bottom, and joined the self-help support group. Now she is a slim young woman in good health. She linked this process to many of the biblical figures she was talking about as she led our group through the sites in the Holy Land. Many of these biblical figures, like Zacchaeus, had listened to Jesus call to repentance, to change, to trust in Him as who he had revealed himself to be.
For his part, Paul in the second reading to the Corinthians invites his listeners to learn from the mistakes of their ancestors in the wilderness of Sinai. They were led to freedom by God’s presence in the form of a cloud, an experience so real and powerful that he calls it a baptism into Moses. They were also fed morning and evening, by manna and quail, an invitation to live one day at a time, trusting God and not worrying about tomorrow. Finally, they were to trust that God was with them, and would save them, by looking at a bronze serpent placed on a standard, a powerful and beautiful pre-figuring of Jesus the Christ who was crucified on the Cross for the salvation of the world. All this, St. Paul tells them, and us, was for our benefit. We must take heed, as did Moses before the burning bush, and act on God’s Word for our own salvation.
The Eucharist is in itself a mystery of transformation and an invitation to repentance. At the outset, we admit that we have sinned and that we stand in need of God’s mercy, healing and forgiveness. We then listen, like Moses, to God speaking to us, not so much from a burning bush, but through the Liturgy of the Word. Then we are fed, not by manna and quail, but through the very Body and Blood of Jesus the Saviour who hung upon the cross for us.
How can we not respond during this Lenten season to the invitation, from Moses, Paul and especially Jesus, to trust more deeply, to obey more closely, to repent from the heart and change our lives that we might live more fully in the reign of God right here and right now?
