Today’s readings: Exodus 3, 1-8.13-15; 1 Corinthians 10, 1-6.10-12; Luke 13, 1-9.
We have never touched on emotions when speaking of God in the theologies constructed throughout history. We have only used superlative and absolute terms, and God was the total other, untouched by what we poor mortals go through in life.
Needless to say, this is not the kind of God we encounter in the Scriptures. The God portrayed today in the reading from Exodus is one who listens and who bends near to hear our cries.
Today we have different and competing views of history, which in the wake of modernity may find it hard to justify the claim that God acts in history. Our temptation is to empty the historical process of any sense of mystery and to simply conclude that ‘might is right’ or that ‘history is written by winners’. This contrasts heavily with the view we are familiar with that we may propose but it is God who disposes.
The words of Exodus in the first reading where God is annoyed with the miserable state of His people in Egypt and He sends Moses to their rescue may sound too supernaturalist to the modern ear. Even Moses himself asks God to give him credentials, believing it would be hard for the people to take his claim seriously.
Today this makes us ask about our own credentials when we speak of God, when we as a Church address the powers-that-be, or when in the name of God’s Word we point fingers to modern-day pharaohs who still keep people in slavery. The words of Exodus should fuel Christians with a vigorous passion to believe in new beginnings and to refuse to accept the status quo wherever and in whatever sense.
At the same time, the Exodus event is not to be seen merely as portrayed spectacularly by Charlton Heston as Moses in the 1956 Paramount Pictures production The Ten Commandments. The long march to freedom combines human courage with God’s power over history. It happened in like manner with Moses, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and so many others who believed and had the passion and courage to make things happen.
As Walter Brueggemann writes, prophets like Moses dared to imagine a totally new beginning; they dared to speak what their contemporaries thought was either crazy or treason. At the end of the day it was in their speaking that they represented the voiceless.
For the early Christians, Jesus embodied precisely this prophetic tradition. He not only uttered the Word but he was the Word made flesh. But with the passing of time, the recurring flaw in our way of living up to our faith was to remove this Word from the public sphere, to reduce it to a matter of private spirituality or, worse still, to empty it altogether of its power in theologies and doctrines that had no impact on public issues.
This is a misreading of Jesus and of the Church’s mandate to challenge and be challenged by the miserable state in which myriads of people still live today. In the gospel today, Jesus is challenging the people’s way of thinking about God, suffering and guilt. This is the conversion of mentality we are asked to embark on in Lent.
Unfortunately people have been left with a formation verging more on superstition rather than on an authentic faith. What God are we still preaching and projecting today? The crisis of faith or of religion we all acknowledge in our times is not that God has become obsolete or discredited, but that our communities have become mute and that our preaching is not at all impinging on what really matters for the wellbeing of people.
It is only because of this that we keep asking ourselves about the relevance of faith-talk in this day and age. It is only because we have domesticated our religion that our speech lacks courage and prophecy, and that as a Church we lack the vision and discernment to see God’s intervention in history to save His people and witness to it.