3rd Sunday of Lent 2025
Exodus 3:1-8; 1Cor 10: 1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9
Today’s Gospel strikes me as a strange choice for a Sunday of Lent. On the equivalent Sunday next year (Year A), we shall hear of Our Lord’s encounter with the woman of Samaria: the following year, it will be His cleansing of the Temple. Both of these were significant events in the life and mission of Jesus. Here, by contrast, we have no event recorded. Instead, we have a warning and a parable; important indeed, but lacking that powerful descriptive force which we associate with Lenten Sundays.
(Incidentally, I do recall that thirty years ago, I had gone to stay at Boarbank Hall in the middle of a particularly severe attack of clinical depression. There, the priest who presided at Mass had the invariable habit of picking out one sentence from the readings to repeat before the dismissal, in order that the people could take it away and ponder it. On this occasion, he lighted on the sentence “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did”, exactly what I needed to hear—I DON’T THINK—as I was wallowing in the depth of misery.)
Repentance, a change of heart, mind, and outlook, a rearrangement of our priorities, is an important Lenten theme. The parable too is significant. Am I bearing fruit by my way of life? Can people see that Christ is living in me? If not, how will I repent, and change, and when? The time is growing short.
Nevertheless, I feel that the First and Second Readings may provide more material for reflection. In the Book of Genesis, Moses encounters God in the burning bush, a significant milestone in salvation history. Why was the bush aflame, but not consumed by the flames? Is this an indicator of God’s love, which sets us ablaze, but doesn’t burn us up—instead, it fires us up, and continues doing so.
What does God mean when He speaks of holy ground? Is all ground holy because, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”? And are there particularly holy places, such as churches where Christ abides in the tabernacle, which are to be entered with particular reverence? I strongly suspect that the answer to both that second and that third question is “Yes”.
This passage is important too because it sets in train the events which will culminate in the Exodus, the escape of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt, and their pilgrimage to the Promised Land. This in itself symbolises, as St. Paul explains to the Corinthians, our own escape from slavery to sin, and our pilgrimage to the Kingdom.
Moses wants to know God’s name, in order that the Israelites may have their own tribal god, like those of the Egyptians and the tribes which surround them. God will have none of this. He is not a tribal god: He is I AM, the true, living and only God. He does not have a name like the false gods of the nations: He alone IS.
That makes a nonsense of the practice, popular a few years ago, of filling in the vowels in the title by which God reveals Himself and giving Him the name Yahweh. That is to do what God explicitly refused to do—to give Himself a name and so reduce Him to the status of one of the tribal gods. It is a practice which has been banned by the Church, not only because it is offensive to the Jewish people, but also because it is indeed nonsensical. Hence God’s title is rendered as “THE LORD”.
This in turn gives rise to the I AM sayings attributed to Jesus in St. John’s Gospel: “I AM the bread of life”, “I AM the way, the truth and the life”, “I AM the resurrection and the life” and so on. In His use of I AM, Jesus is claiming identity with the God of the burning bush.
Turing to St. Paul, we find him depicting the Exodus as the template for our pilgrimage to the Kingdom. He reminds the Christians of Corinth that God led the Israelites through the wilderness in a pillar of cloud, which in time took them through the sea. He regards their journey under the cloud and through the sea as a form of baptism. He then mentions “the spiritual food and the spiritual drink”, as they were fed with manna and drank water from the rock. Here we have a foretaste of the spiritual food and drink of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist.
Paul specifically states that Christ was the rock from which they drank, and that Christ followed them through the wilderness. This refers not only to Moses’ striking of the rock at Meribah to draw water from it, but to an ancient legend that this rock followed them. Finally, we have an important warning which we all need to heed: “Do not grumble”, because nothing is more destructive. If I were to leave you with something particular to take away, it would not be “You will all perish” but “DO NOT GRUMBLE”.
