3rd Sunday of Lent
Readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15
1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12
Luke 13:1-9
Midway through our Lenten journey, we are challenged by God's call to struggle against oppression and to reform our own lives. As we listen to this Sunday's warnings to repent, let us sing with courageous confidence the refrain of the psalm: "The Lord is kind and merciful" (Ps 103).
To understand the terrifying challenge of Moses' call, we must recall the bleak situation of Israel and Moses. A powerful and paranoid Pharaoh had cruelly imposed slave labor upon the Israelites and planned to kill all their male children (Exodus 1).
Moses himself had narrowly escaped death through the heroic actions of his mother, sister, and the Pharaoh's daughter (2:1-10). And, when he attempted to help his people by slaying an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew and then tried to stop two Hebrew slaves from fighting, his efforts were rejected with the retort, "Who made you a prince and judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" (Ex 2:14).
Realizing that the murder was known to the Pharaoh, Moses fled to Midian, where he married the daughter of the priest of Midian and began to tend his father-in-law's flocks. His son's name, Gershom, meaning "I am a stranger in a foreign land," reflects his present status as an exile from his suffering people (Ex 2:22).
If Moses is to save his people, he must be called and equipped by God, and that is the point of today's burning bush story. His call begins with an experience of the holiness of God. When Moses turns aside to see the burning bush, God tells him, "Come no nearer! Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground." After God has identified himself as the God of the fathers, he announces:
I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers, so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them from the hands of the Egyptians and lead them out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
Understandably, Moses doubts that his own people will believe that he speaks for God, and therefore he asks, "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?" The old name, "God of the fathers," is inadequate for this new stage of God's action. God answers by saying, "I am who I am."
Moses is to tell the Israelites that "I Am" sent him and that the sacred name, "Yahweh," is to be his title for all generations. Yahweh is the transposed third person form of "I am who I am." The sacred name connotes God's freedom and unrestricted power. Equipped with this new revelation and numerous miraculous signs (Exodus 4), Moses will obediently undertake his task of freeing his people:
The epistle warns us that even those called by God can fall. Paul reminds the Corinthians, who were tempted to take part in pagan worship services (see 1 Corinthians 8-10), that even the Exodus generation, led by Moses, fell into the sin of idolatry.
Despite having God's cloud for guidance, passing through the sea, and being given manna and water from the rock (see Exodus 13:17), many of the fathers "were struck down in the desert" for their sin in making the golden calf (Exodus 32). Their example is a warning: "Let anyone who thinks he is standing upright watch out lest he fall!"
In today's Gospel, Jesus uses two recent tragedies and a parable to warn the crowds of the dire consequences of failure to repent. Both the Galileans cruelly killed by Pilate and the 18 crushed by the tower of Siloam were not necessarily terrible sinners, but their sudden deaths should alert the crowd to the seriousness of Jesus' call to reform.
Twice Jesus repeats the warning: "But I tell you, you will all come to the same end unless you begin to reform" (Lk 13:3, 5). Jesus' fig tree parable stresses that the time for repentance is running out. Only the vinedresser's intercession keeps the exasperated vineyard owner from cutting down the tree which has failed to bear fruit for three years.
The crowds, like the fig tree, have only one more chance for repentance. The vinedresser's words should remind us that during this Lent we, too, have only this opportunity for repentance from our sins.
Sir leave it another year while I hoe around it and manure it; then perhaps it will bear fruit. If not, it shall be cut down.
(This column originally appeared in The Providence Visitor)
