Today’s first reading (Ex 3:1-8b, 13-15) is one of those great ‘hinge’ stories of the Scriptural account of Salvation History.Having murdered a man in Egypt, Moses fled to the land of Midian.There he got a job tending sheep and, as part of the deal, he got a wife (sorry, but that is how it seems to have worked).Settling down to a normal, quiet, private life, he encounters God in the burning bush who sends him back to Egypt and on course for the incredible tangle of events known to us as the Exodus, the giving of the covenant on Mount Sinai, and 40 years of wondering in the desert in an attempt to make what should have been a couple of days journey to the Promised Land.
How telling this is, in so many ways.What strikes me is the contrast between the incredible, personal encounter with the living God made to Moses in that burning bush in the midst of the emptying of the wilderness and flowing from it the dramatic, public life Moses is led into by God.This is the rhythm, you might say, of Judeo-Christian spirituality.God deals with us as persons.He comes to meet us face to face, as it were.He calls out to us, as he did Moses, using our own name, “Moses, Moses” (v. 4).God meets us, calls us, and dwells with us a personal subjects.
Yet, always from the personal encounter there arises a call, a mandate to insert ourselves into the company of God’s people and to allow God to use us to build up his people.In other words, though the encounter with God that we discover in Scripture is always personal it is never, ever private.It is always directed at the formation of a people, a community who lives in the promise and under the life-giving law of God.
This story is repeated over and over.The person of Abraham is called in order to be the father of a ‘multitude of nations.’Moses, as we have said, is called personally to lead a people from slavery into promise.David is personally anointed that he might build for God a righteous kingdom.Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, all the prophets, have a personal call placed on their lives to announce a word from God to invite his people to repentance, healing, justice and new life.God knows us personally, calls us by name, and seeks to dwell within us.God does so that he might draw us into his people and through us, somehow, build his people up to be a holy nation, a people set apart, a royal priesthood to offer loving praise to God the Father.
Somehow, there are these two sides of the same reality:personal faith set in the midst of the People of God.The People of God not made up of a people of truly living and personal faith would somehow be a People without a soul.Personal faith without the whole People would somehow be a soul without a body.And further, personal faith simply must bear fruit for the good of the whole (see today’s gospel, Lk 13:1-9).
There is one more striking thing for me about this Moses affair.There is no figuring just why God chooses us personally to be part of his plan.After all, why pick a shepherd who is wanted on charges of murder to go very publicly into the very place he is wanted on those charges to influence the very people who are accusing him of the crime?Somehow, perhaps, the very call of God and our acting on that call are the first stages of our own redemption, the healing of our broken relationships, that is the ultimate plan of God for all his people.Somehow, it is in the very act of drawing into the community, where our brokenness is most known and experienced, that redemption, healing beings.
Sunday is the great day of Christian gathering.In baptism, we have been called personally by the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.We have been so called, though, to be made part of the great family of God.There is no telling why he has called me personally.There is no telling why he has chosen this particular people.He has though and so, to respond to that call, I must place myself within his People and at his service within his People.And so we gather at the family table, the altar, and share the family meal, the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist.