Third Sunday of Lent, February 28, 2016, Year C
I would like to reread the bible passages we just heard. When you look at the first reading (Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15), you are confronted with one of the most important texts of the Bible: God is THE ONE WHO IS, YAHWE…, who is present for his people, who cares for his people. One aspect of this text is important for me: I do not believe that the bush was set on fire just the moment when Moses got close. I believe that the bush had been set on fire a long time before – the bush was always burning. My point is: no one, except Moses, had ever looked carefully enough at the bush to actually see its fire. I do not want to discuss if it was a kind of illusion: when you look to the bush, the sun might have produced this illusion. This is not important. Important for me is that Moses sees something others did not see. To say the least, Moses was different from others around him, he looked at the world differently In the gospel (Luke 13:1-9), the historical Jesus also expected his followers to be different. That is why he constantly calls upon them to "repent." That is what he does in today’s gospel: “Repent!” The Greek word metanoia (μετάνοια) repent - means more than just "I'm sorry I did it; I'll never do it again." In the Bible, in the New Testament, it refers to a 180-degree change in one's value system: What I once thought im-portant, I now see as insignificant. What I once judged unimportant, I've now put at the center of my life. Jesus, the carpenter for Galilee, demanded that the first step in imitating him was to adopt his value system: to see people and things as he saw them. Among all the evangelists, Luke seems to have regarded repentance as a gradual process. That seems to be why he made a huge part of his gospel a journey narrative. Just as his Jesus constantly is on the road to Jerusalem, where he dies and rises, so the followers, the friends of Jesus, are on their own roads to Jerusalem. Jerusalem as that place and time in their lives where they likewise die and rise with Jesus, where they like-wise become new men and women with new perceptions of the world around them. No doubt Luke enjoyed telling the story of the patient gardener. Like that unbearing fig tree, a lot of the original readers of Luke also needed to be cultivated and fertilized so they would experience a metanoia in the future. Luke is the one evangelist who constantly stresses and underlines God's mercy. “God’s mercy”: is it an accident that his gospel is one proclaimed during this "Year of Mercy?” Unlike most religious teachers, Jesus wasn't overly concerned with just providing people with new information to store in their brains. His goal was to change the way his disciples, his friends saw the world. His goal was to change the brains of his disciples so that they were able to interpret the information already before their eyes – like Moses: he saw something that was always there. But he was the first to see the bush burning. And Jesus wanted to prepare his friends for what things would come: they should be able to anal-yses their world, to see the world as Jesus would have seen it. I still like the sentence Ignatius of Loyola once coined, he invites us to “see the world through the eyes of God.” And you need a certain training to see the world around you, to distinguish between what is important and what is not so important. Paul treats that problem in our I Corinthians (I Cor 10:1-6, 10-12) passage: Nothing was more significant in the history of Judaism than the Exodus from Egypt. Yet as Paul notes, the majority of those who experienced that unique act of salvation never seemed to have appreciated its significance. The people of Israel had not appreciated, had not seen the importance of the Exodus, they had not seen that their God had intervened in their favor. Just as some of Paul’s readers don't seem to be appreciating the significant things and people in their lives. "Whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall" – this is what Paul writes. Acquiring the value system of Jesus is a lifelong process. We never reach a point and time when our repentance no longer needs to evolve. Moses only encountered Yahweh because only Moses had the proper frame of mind which enabled him to come face to face with the God of his ancestors. Of course, this particular frame of mind of Moses had consequences: Moses, having seen the burning bush, having been so near to his God, received some heavy responsibilities. I would say that the value system of Moses was changed by this encounter. And when one's value system changes, one's responsibilities also change: looking on the world around us with this new value system, we begin to see needs and opportunities most people around us ignore. We simply look at people and situations with new eyes. Maybe, more and more, with “the eyes of God”. Perhaps that “responsibility thing”, that challenge to change our way of living, is the reason some of us walk by a lot of bushes in the course of our lives. Because we know that we would have to change our lives, we prefer to never notice the fire burning in the middle of the bushes along our ways. One last thought: Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, has a famous sentence: “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays” or “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” Couldn’t we say the same about our way of seeing the world: “To look at the world does not change the world, but it changes the one who looks at the world”. So I invite you to open your eyes, your ears to see the world, to listen to the world, to see the burning bushes along your way, and to let yourself be changed by what you see. Cf. Roger Vermalen Karban on http://www.fosilonline.com
Fr. Wolfgang Felber SJ