Devout Catholics are familiar with holy cards and stained-glass windows depicting saints in awe before the Divine Presence. Lourdes and Fatima recall several Heavenly appearances. Scripture scholars advise that such a devout vision was probably not the manner in which Moses came face to face with God at Mt. Horeb, reported at length in this coming Sunday’s first Lenten reading. The passage has three stages: the burning bush, the message to Pharaoh, and the revelation of God’s Name.
Mount Horeb might actually be Mount Sinai, the “mountain of God” that will feature so prominently in the ensuing Jewish saga. Sinai was always an ideal site for a Divine Encounter. Horeb might simply refer to a “dry, barren region” at the base of Sinai’s elevation. Somehow, God begins to make his Presence known to Moses at the now famed burning bush through a messenger, perhaps not a traditional angel, maybe even a ghostlike hint of God himself. The “thorny bush” (in Hebrew, seneh) that gave off fire might well have given its name to the whole of Mt. Sinai.
After cautioning Moses about the sanctity of the event that was about to occur, God announced himself as “…the God of your fathers…,” a Hebrew way of identifying Himself as the God worshipped by the believer’s ancestors. The New American Bible sees here a close, personal relationship between the individual believer and the Divine Being as patron and protector, a God traditionally revered by the individual’s family and whose worship is passed down from father to son. God goes on to explain further, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,” thus emphasizing the continuity with the God who promised land and posterity to Moses’ ancestors. This phrase, so frequent in the New Testament, is found only here and in 3:15 and later in 4:5 in the Old Testament.
“Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God,” as certainly anyone would be. Moses indeed had a direct, if not visual, experience of God. In Exodus 3:6, the New American Bible speaks of the event respectfully: “Aware of his human frailty and the gulf that separates him from the God who is holy, he hides his face. To encounter the divine was to come before an awesome and mysterious power unlike any other a human being might experience and, as such, potentially threatening to one’s very identity or existence.” Moses’ theophany was perhaps not so much the later “vision” that Catholic saints would experience but perhaps a sensation throughout his whole being of the Presence of God.
God paternally then admits to Moses: “I have come down.” God has become aware of the plight of the Israelites in Egypt is prepared to lead the children of Abraham out of Egypt to a land of milk and honey, the proverbial Promised Land, the historic Canaan, the present day Israel.
The Sunday reading skips a few versus and then Moses is heard asking God a very logical question. “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 pointedly and memorably responds, “I am who am.” Then he added, “This is what you shall tell the Israelites: I AM sent me to you.” Continuing “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.”
While the phrase “I am who I am” resists unraveling, it suggests an etymological link with the Hebrew word meaning “to be.” Hence the name might be an assertion of God’s self-existence, the Uncreated One. Accordingly others have thought it means, “He creates.” Christian philosophers and theologians have over the centuries been quite comfortable viewing God as the foundation for existence itself: God as “the ground of our being,” to use Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s happy phrase. To this day, Jews do not utter the biblical Name of God, preferring to employ Adonai or Lord in their prayers and dialogues.
God the Father’s self-revelation to Moses is rivaled only by the later self-revelation of God as a Holy Trinity, brought to light through His Son’s Paschal Mystery and through His Spirit’s Outpouring. Blest be God! Blest be His Holy Name!
