Then Moses
said to God, ‘I am to go, then, to the sons of Israel and say to them, “The God
of your fathers has sent me to you.” But if they ask me what his name is, what
am I to tell them?’ And God said to Moses, ‘I Am who I Am.’
Exodus 3:14
- 15
In the epic that is the book of Exodus, the mountain-top encounter
between Moses and the God of his ancestors, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is one of
the pivotal moments of the Hebrew scriptures.
In this pericope, a
typical biblical calling narrative, Moses, while looking down on his
father-in-law’s flock, sees a burning bush that is not being consumed by the
flames. As he approaches he hears a voice emanating from the blazing bush. It
is the voice of God. Gods (with a lower case g) were many in the ancient near east,
but the Hebrew people had maintained their fidelity to the God of their
forebears long into their exile in Egypt. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
had heard their plea, and he had chosen Moses to set them free. Moses was
acutely aware of his limitations, he had a stutter, he was unsure how he was to
convince the Hebrews to follow him. Moses wanted to be able to tell the Hebrew
who exactly had sent him, and it is to this question that voice from the
unconsumed bush revealed his name: I AM WHO I AM – represented as the
tetragrammaton, YHWH, which we say as Yahweh.
This is the beginning of a story that is critical to Israel’s
identity – the slavery, the liberation from bondage, the establishment of the
covenant and the gift of the Law, memorialized in the Passover and linked
intimately to Last Supper and the Paschal mystery which is the cornerstone of
our Christian faith.
There is a voice in a burning bush calling each of us. It will
happen just as it did for Moses, while we are about our work and everyday life.
It will be a person, a situation, an intuition, a need, and if we listen as
Moses listened, if we hear as Moses heard then we will discern the right
response. You may not liberate a nation, but you may help set someone free from
loneliness and bereavement, you may not perform miracles of nature, but you may
provide comfort and compassion, you might not seek manna from heaven, but you
may give generously to charity and those in need.
And yes, we may have difficulties of our own, people might not believe
our motivation. The proof is to be armed with faith, to know that the God of
our ancestors walks with us, that we will be provided with the courage to
respond. And again, this Lenten season invites us to the burning bush, inviting
us to make a leap of faith
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