Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Year C
Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro,
the priest of Midian.
Leading the flock across the desert, he came to Horeb,
the mountain of God.
There an angel of the LORD appeared to Moses in fire
flaming out of a bush.
As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush,
though on fire, was not consumed.
So Moses decided,
“I must go over to look at this remarkable sight,
and see why the bush is not burned.”
When the LORD saw him coming over to look at it more closely,
God called out to him from the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
He answered, “Here I am.”
God said, “Come no nearer!
Remove the sandals from your feet,
for the place where you stand is holy ground.
I am the God of your fathers, “ he continued,
“the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”
Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Moses said to God, “But when I go to the Israelites
and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’
if they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what am I to tell them?”
God replied, “I am who am.”
Then he added, “This is what you shall tell the Israelites:
I AM sent me to you.”
God spoke further to Moses, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites:
The LORD, the God of your fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,
has sent me to you.
“This is my name forever;
thus am I to be remembered through all generations.”-Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15
Different people take different approaches to their adherence to and practice of the Catholic faith. There are some, fewer in number, whose inclination is to approach it from their rational understanding. They seek to learn and use the language of the forms of our faith: the creeds, the teachings of the Fathers, the documents of the Magisterium, the expositions of the Doctors of the Church. These souls love speculation and clear notions.
Others, and they are the greater part of the faithful, approach the Faith from their experience, from what was handed on to them from parents, grandparents, godparents, clergy, and teachers. They adhere to the Faith because of their concrete relationships with persons who are dear to them and had a deep spiritual influence over their lives.
This wonderful passage from the third chapter of Genesis offers us God’s perspective on these tendencies. His approach to revealing himself to us in terms of our human experience or our human abstract rationality is to favor neither one over the other, but rather to insist on both approaches as necessary for the full practice and presentation of the Faith.
After all, we are possessed both of a spiritual soul and a material body. The soul depends on the bodily senses for the beginnings of spiritual knowledge and the body depends on the spiritual soul for its existence and its activities as a living being.
Weighty theologians have discussed the meaning of the God’s rather abstract sounding self-definition, “I am who am.” And yet, even as the idea of “being” seems very general or confused or abstract, we also know that we could grasp no individual concrete thing unless it possessed the quality of “being.” Thus it is that right after God gives the grand, metaphysical name above any name, a name that the Jews dared not pronounce, he then defines himself in the historical and personal concrete, saying: “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
That is, he is the God who revealed himself to these concrete individuals, intervening in the concrete details of their lives and destiny, a God who has a relationship with and shares the very name of his beloved creatures.
The contents of our creed are at one and the same time deep mysteries that the faithful mind can seek to understand and fathom and real events in which we share by our participation in the sacraments and the life of devotion. We are neither eggheads lost in speculation nor sloppy enthusiasts on the lookout for dramatic experiences.
Perhaps the best way for us to work this out is by prayerful meditation on the mysteries of our faith. The easiest and most common way to do this is by praying the daily rosary. This prayer, brought by Our Lady from heaven, engages both our minds and our bodies, as we finger the beads, say the familiar and inspired prayers, and meditate on the meaning and power of the mysteries.
By now, many of us will have experienced a sense of not having kept our Lent as well as we ought to have. Then let us approach the Mother of God, the Burning Bush filled with the fire of her Son’s divinity and yet not consumed, and in her company and with her help lay hold in body and in mind of the divine realities our Savior came to reveal.