17th Week, Tuesday, Aug 1
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."
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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
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Saint Alphonsus Liguori
Feast Day August 1
A successful lawyer before age 20, Alphonsus used his legal skills lifelong in his writing and the governance of his order and his diocese. He was ordained in 1717 and immediately became well-known as a compassionate confessor and down-to-earth preacher. “I have never preached a sermon,” he said, “that the poorest old woman in the congregation could not understand.”
Our faith will give us confidence in our difficulties, teaching us that whoever prays will be saved. May our faith make us always live with the thought of eternity. Let’s keep ever before our eyes this great thought—everything in this world comes to an end, whether it be prosperity or adversity. Eternity alone never ends.
In 1748, St. Alphonsus published his acclaimed Moral Theology that steered a middle way between the rigorism of the Jansenists and an irresponsible laxity. At age sixty-six, he reluctantly accepted appointment as bishop of Sant’ Agata and worked hard for thirteen years to renew his flock. His resignation in 1775 brought the saint no rest, as he had to fight to protect his community from the state. External politics threatened to divide and destroy the Redemptorists. But the community endured and today has missioners serving throughout the world. Exhausted by a life of extraordinary industry, St. Alphonsus Liguori died on August 1, 1787, two months before his ninety-first birthday.
