The very popular Broadway musical Cats while throughouly enjoyable, especially when the felines come slinking through the audience in all their outlandish variety, is remembered most for its hit song entitled, Memory. Now sing along if you remember the tune. If I tried, the cats in the neighborhood would certainly scatter! I love live theatre and remember well seeing this amazing production. Not in New York unfortunately but very good nonetheless. But, the eternal memory of this Sunday's events in the scriptures are key to understanding our future.
Our readings this Third Sunday of Lent are rich with memories. The central "memory" of the Jewish people is that of the Exodus. The call of Moses, release from the bondage in Egypt, the triumphant march through the walls of water in the Red Sea, and their entire desert experience. How many do you think got wet? Surely a little spray from the water walls along each side. "Moses, you want us to do what??" But they did in trusting faith and desperation with the Egyptians hot at their heels.
Today's first reading from the book of Exodus is classic. (Exodus 3) The burning bush, the mysterious (mysterium tremendum) presence of God, the sacred ground upon which Moses removed his sandals, and the name of God given: "I am who I am."
Now, I've often wondered what Moses thought when he heard God's name: I am who am. What kind of name is that? Sounds like a riddle. "I AM sent me to you," was God's request that Moses tell the Israelites. Well, it is a riddle in a sense, not to confuse but to reassure, for the God of "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" the living, eternal divine being who's constant presence and guidance throughout human history, reveals himself in the sign of a burning bush to the shepherd Moses. "You're the lucky guy who will go to the Pharaoh of Egypt and say, "Let my people go!"
This is the God who will save us and even better yet, will in the course of time, his not ours, send his very son. So, this entire desert experience: flaming bush, plagues and pestilence, stubborn Pharaoh, walls of water, pillar of fire, drowning Egyptian army, manna in the desert (insect dung some scripture scholars presume - yum, yum!) and arrival in the promised land - all begin to play out the great drama we call the Exodus. This leads St. Paul in the second reading from 1 Corinthians 10: 1-6,10-12 to say: ". . . all passed through the sea, and all of them were baptized into Moses, in the cloud and in the sea . . ." This profoundly significant saga does not end on the borders of the river Jordan - it leads to Christ himself, the new Moses. Heavy duty stuff!
I found that St. Thomas Aquinas, among the great theologians of the Catholic Church if not the greatest, recognized in the burning bush the "deepest mystery of a God who could never adequately and accurately be named or conceptualized." That so called name that God gave to Moses, who likely stood there with some puzzlement on his face, has been translated as: "I will be who I will be" or "I will be what I was." Hmm, that sure helps!
The point St. Thomas has made is that the very existence of the universe is kept in motion and being not by some combination of gas and electricty, aka our hybrid automobiles, some massive wind machine generating electricity in megawatts beyond our imagination, some mighty hydroelectric dam or nuclear power plant plugged into the sun, but rather by this God's personal existence. If for one nano-second, one miniscule instant, one itsy bitsy megagigabite, God ceased to will all things to be - well bye bye. All things would instantly cease.
This string of historical events we hear in the first reading carries through to our own day in the events of our time and in the lives of each and every believer. But, as Jesus reminds us in today's Gospel according to Luke 13: 1-9, repentance is the key to life. It is the key which opens the door to our ultimate future. So let us, " . . .cultivate the ground around . . ." our lives so that we may ". . . bear fruit in the future."
Let us, as our Jewish brethren, never forget. Now, how about a verse of "Memory" from that great musical.
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