17th Week, Tuesday, July 26
Exodus
33:7-11; 34:5-9, 28 / Matthew 13:36-43
Moses
communicates with God; He talked to God as to another Person.In his book Sadhana
(sad'-ah-na) the Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello has a prayer exercise called
"The Empty Chair." Ile developed it after hearing the story of a man
who had been bedfast for years. With the passage of time, the man was finding
it harder and harder to concentrate his thoughts in prayer. One day
a friend suggested that he place an empty chair near the bed
and imagine
Jesus sitting on it. Then the friend told him to talk to Jesus just as the two
of them were now talking. The sick man tried it and never had trouble praying
after that. It was in this kind of a personal manner that Moses used to talk to
God— "as one man speaks to another."
***
What are
some things that help us pray? "The man who has lost contact with God
lives on the same dead-end street as the man who denies him." Milton Marcy
***
Moses
is certainly one of the great figures in the Bible who can say that he knew how
God has protected him. Throughout his life, from the time as a baby, to his
fleeing from Pharoah, and the returning to Egypt to lead his people out of
slavery, Moses knew how God's hand was protecting him. It was through all this,
that he came to know God as a God of mercy and compassion, slow to anger, rich
in kindness and faithfulness. And when the Israelites sinned against God and in
spite of the evil that Moses saw the Israelites committed, yet Moses turned to
God to beg for forgiveness and mercy for his people. The situations that we
find ourselves in are not that different from that of Moses. We are confronted
by our own sinfulness, the sinfulness of others, and on the larger scale, the
sinfulness of the world.
***
Exodus
gives us here a beautiful example of God’s tender covenant love for his
sometimes-wayward people. He keeps protecting them and being present to them
(hence, the cloud). His presence is very intimate especially for Moses. Hence,
the radiance of Moses’ face.
***
Or
like how the gospel puts it, we see more darnel, we see more weeds than wheat. But
we are reminded that we must not let evil overcome us. Instead, we must conquer
evil with good. So let us not be discouraged with our acts of charity. We shall
reap when the time comes, as long as we persevere in our good deeds. Because
God, from whom all good flows, will never allow the good that we do, to be
destroyed by evil.
***
Jesus
explains the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Good and evil will always
coexist in the Church and in the world, until God’s good time comes. The word
of the Lord should perhaps help us to be patient and understanding with the all
too human aspects of the Church of the past and of our day. The good will
ultimately triumph; we have this assurance, while we already work in the
present to purify the Church and ourselves.
***
You are my people; I am your God: is the covenant. This will have some practical consequences. It will have to establish three things: The presence of God among his people, the priest of God and the service of God. All of these got a concrete form at the time the people were at Sinai. The presence of God had been told to the people from the time of the patriarchs and at the time of the exodus: I am going to be with you. The golden calf was of course a clear expression of the people that they wanted God with them m some concrete form. Actually, it was not a calf but a bull, and is only contemptuously called a "calf'. God told Moses: "Build me a Sanctuary that I may dwell among them" [Exodus 25.81. God is like a good teacher: He must find out the stage of development of his charges, so that he can build on it. His first development was the Tent: It was called the Tent of Meeting, or the Tabernacle of testimony. There God would meet Moses and speak with him. It was built so that it could easily move with the people during their journey to the promised land. John in 1.14 uses the word which literally would mean "He set up his tent among us", when the modern translation says: "He came to dwell among us".
***
Prayer
Lord
our God, sower and lover of all that is good, we are the times impatient about
the human weaknesses of your Church and its leaders and members. Help us not to
condemn too easily but to look at our own defects, and to work with all our
might to reveal in us and in your Church the genuine face of Jesus, by the
strength of your own Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
