3rd Sunday of Lent 2022
Exodus 3:1-8; 1Cor 10:1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9
Some years ago, I surprised a burglar in the presbytery at Holy Family, Morecambe. Come to that, he surprised me. You don’t expect to walk into your house in the middle of the afternoon, and find it being burgled. We had the briefest and most bizarre conversation.
“What the h**l are you doing here?” I exclaimed.
“Breaking in” came the reply, which at least had the virtue of being honest. Then he pushed past me, and ran off across the car park and down the road. I dialled 999.
Now if I had been able to give the police an accurate description of the man, it would have been helpful. I didn’t, because I had a far more powerful tool at my disposal: I knew his name. He was one of the regulars, constantly knocking at the door with increasingly elaborate and far-fetched stories as an attempt to gain money.
Consequently I said “A bloke called Such-and-such has just broken into my house, and is now running down Westgate. Would you like me to give you his address?” to which the reply came “No, we know his address. We will send someone to his flat to wait for him to come back.”
The ancients believed that, to know someone’s name, gave you power over them. That incident proved that they were correct. Ironically, in homilies, I had twice used the example of an imaginary burglar breaking into a house where the householder knew his name, to illustrate the point, though I never imagined that such a scenario would play out in reality.
This is the point of God’s self revelation to Moses at the burning bush. Moses wants to know God’s name, in order that the Israelites may worship Him as their own tribal god, just as the other nations worship their tribal gods—but God will have none of it. He doesn’t have a name because, unlike the tribal gods of the nations, He exists, and He cannot be controlled, as their names would allow them to be controlled, if they existed.
The God of the burning bush is the one true God, self sufficient, pure existence, beyond the reach of any name. “I AM WHO AM” He replies: “I AM the one who exist, who have no name, over whom no one has power”.
That is why it was nonsensical when the custom arose in the 70s, and which has now been forbidden by the Church, of translating the non-name of God as Yahweh, thus doing precisely what God refused to do. To give God a name, to call Him Yahweh, is to reduce the true God to the level of the non-existent tribal gods: no wonder the Church forbade its use.
But here’s the rub. In the fullness of time, God gave Himself a name, and so gave people power over Him. That name is Jesus, a name which, says the Letter to the Philippians, is above all names and every knee shall bow to it; yet it is also a name which gave human beings power over God, to do with Him as they wished, to mock and scourge Him, and to kill Him as a criminal.
Thus did God, in the person of Jesus, prove the old adage that to know someone’s name is to have power over them; but in today’s Gospel, he rejects another ancient belief, namely that suffering is punishment for sin. Those victims about whom we hear were not, Jesus maintains, being punished for their sins.
Bizarrely, however, that belief persists today. People will talk eagerly about karma, the belief that “what goes around, comes around”, that bad people will get their come-uppance. On the reverse side of the coin, people who are suffering, or who believe that they are—a more usual situation—will plead “I don’t know what I have done to deserve this” or “Why me?”
Suffering happens. I would never be glib about it, yet it often seems to be the case that people who are genuinely suffering deeply are more likely to be philosophical about it, and, if they have faith, to recognise it as a share in the sufferings of Jesus, the God who accepted a name so as to become compassionate with us, to give us the means and the power of approaching Him, and to be the healer of all our wounds because He has Himself been wounded.
