← Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies
Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies
You Can’t Grasp—or Hide From—God
00:14:49
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Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and his church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the Gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.
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Peace be with you. Friends, we come to the third Sunday of Lent and we have an extraordinary privilege during the sea cycle to read this account in the third chapter of the book of Exodus of Moses Encounter with the burning bush. It's one of the pivotal text in all of scripture. So much of our great tradition refers to. It flows from sheds light in every direction. So I want to just kind of walk through this text with you. Could I encourage you when you have a chance, open your Bibles Exodus chapter 3 and find this passage. Moses and the burning bush is telling us so much about God, about the spiritual life, about our relationship to the Lord. So all that's there. So we notice first, Moses is tending the flock of his father in law, Jethro, and he's out in the desert. Now we know from the book of Exodus, it's told in the typical laconicism of the Bible in a few elegant strokes you get a sense of the character of somebody. Moses was raised indeed as a prince of Egypt. We don't quite have to go to the whole Cecil B. DeMille Route to Imagine this, but he was raised in the courts of the pharaoh of Egypt. So very high level, sophisticated man. He also knows that his background is Hebrew and one day he sees this Hebrew man being mistreated. And very impulsively he kills the man who's mistreating him and buries him. Then finds out, oh, people know about this, and so he flees the country. Now what do we learn in those few little deft strokes? Well, this kind of high ranking, high level aristocrat, impulsive, he gets what he wants when he wants it, and that got him in trouble. And then impulsively he leaves the country and then he has to go throughand this is so typical of the Bible. Almost all the great heroes of the Bible, he has to go through a time of testing and trial in the desert. It's one reason why I think we read this during Lent. So during these desert weeks, as we prepare for Easter, we look at this desert figure you see before you can deal properly with God. You have to be purged of certain things in your own psyche, ego, soul. Certain things have to fall away before you're ready for an encounter with God. Was God with Moses all his life? Of course. But Moses wasn't ready to see him until he'd gone through the chastening of the desert, when things fell away, when props that he'd been using fell away. And he's ready for the encounter now. Here's how it happens. While he's there in the desert leading his flock, the prince having become a simple shepherd there, an angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in fire flaming out of a bush. He noticed that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed. Well, flame light is a typical symbol for God, right? Jesus says, I'm the light of the world. God is what illumines things. So that he appears in fiery form is not surprising. What's really interesting about this is the bush is on fire but not consumed. The bush has become more vivid and more brilliant, more luminous, more radiant, but it's not consumed. As God comes close, it becomes a more beautiful version of itself. There's a whole theology and spirituality behind this. I've often said this to you. Go back to the ancient myths, the Greeks and the Romans. When the gods or goddesses appear in the world, it's like a catastrophe because they're competitive with the world. Something's got to give way for the gods to appear. But there's none of that in the Bible. When God comes close, things are enhanced. They become more beautifully themselves, if I can put it that way. You know, listen to almost all the modern philosophers. You'll hear some version of, well, if God gets the glory, then it's going to be competing with my freedom. I've got to be less if I give glory to God. No, says the Bible, no to that. The glory of God is a human being fully alive. Well, see, you see that in this great image of the burning bush. Now, I'm going to come back to this when we hear what God calls himself. But hang on. So Moses decided I must go over to look at this remarkable site and see why the bush has not burned. Now, though he's been chastened in the desert, though he's had these years of preparation, can we still hear the overtones of the. The old Moses here, Prince of Egypt, I must go over and I must examine and I better find out why this bush is not consumed. This is the kind of aggressive probing. I'm in charge. I gotta figure this thing Out. It never works that way. Everybody. With the Lord, God, it can't. It can't. Because God, the creator of all things, can never become the object of our examination. I'm a scientist. I put something on the table, put a bright light on it, then I cut it apart. I examine it, I question, I find out on my terms. It never works that way with God. It can't. It can't. So Moses, still his old self to some degree, comes over. But now listen what the Lord says. When the Lord saw him coming over to look more closely, he called out from the bush, moses, Moses. And Moses, here I am. But then listen, God said, come no nearer. Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground. Hey, Moses, I'm here. And I'm here as this non competitive enhancing presence. Yes, all that beautiful thing is true. But you don't get me on your terms. You're not the one asking the questions here. You're not the one examining. Rather, take off your sandals. Now. Why? Well, if you're wearing sandals, you're wearing shoes. You can walk anywhere you want with great confidence. There's something about taking the sandals off that makes you more vulnerable. You're not exploring the territory here. You're in the presence of a power that you can't control. And then the place where you stand is holy ground. What does holy mean? In the Bible, it always means set apart. It means in its own space. It's like the holiness of the tabernacle, the holiness of the temple. Holy, holy, holy. Lord God of hosts, say the angels in Isaiah. Other, other, other. See, you're in space here that you can't control. This is not the world you're used to moving in, Moses. Then God continues. Listen, I'm the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. Well, okay, I've just heard that God is holy. God is other. He can't be manipulated. Take your sandals off. All that's true, but what else do I hear? This God knows my people. And Moses. See, he's coming from the Hebrew people who were miserable slaves in Egypt. They weren't world conquerors, world beaters. They weren't the high and mighty. On the contrary, they were lowly people enslaved in Egypt. And yet this one, speaking to me out of the burning bush knows them. He knows them and their ancient history. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This God is incomparably close, even as he remains radically other. Huh. See, now we're talking. Now we're getting into the space that Christian theology talks about in regard to God. Watch this, by the way, all through the Bible, God is that which can be neither grasped nor. Nor hidden from God, can be neither controlled nor avoided. He's not just up there. I can't control him. Nor is he just all around here where I can manipulate him. He's somehow both those things at the same time. And I can't do either of these bad moves, manipulating him or running from him. Hmm, the plot thickens, huh? Theologically, what we're talking about is getting more and more mysterious. He goes on, I've witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt. I've heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers. I know well that they're suffering. All right, here's the intimate God again. He knows their history. He knows their present suffering. All right, so Moses, understandably, is kind of being thrown off here. You know, keep your distance, take off the sandals, holy ground. And yet this God knows my name, he knows my people, he knows their history. So, all right, thrown off balance again. He dares to ask this God's name. If they ask me, what is his name, what am I to tell them? Now you can say, all right, fair enough. It's an innocent enough question. I've been addressed by a God out of the burning bush, and I know lots of gods. Gods of this country and this country and this place and that place, and gods of mountains and rivers. Okay, which one are you? In a way, it's a commonsensical question. Here's the most famous line, arguably, in the entire Old Testament. When asked this question, God says, I am who I am. Now, I've often said in one way, it's God saying, stop asking stupid questions. Right? God, the creator of all things, who can be neither grassed nor hidden from God, who is not one more item in the world. See, if I ask your name, what's your name? Well, you'll tell me something that distinguishes you from every other human being. You'll give me your history that makes you unique. I am a scientist. Well, what kind of rock is that? Well, it says it's the rock with these properties, and that makes it different than others or. What planet is that? Well, that's Jupiter. It's different than Saturn. That's the way our mind works. We categorize and we analyze and differentiate. Not with God we don't, though. What's your name? I don't have a name in that conventional way because I'm not a particular being among many. There's you and there's me and there's God and there's the planet Jupiter. No, no, no, it doesn't work that way. Because God is the creator of all things. I am who I am. Put it in the language of Thomas Aquinas. God is not a being at all. Thomas says God is not even in the genus of being. It's very interesting, isn't it? There's the genus, the category of beings. Well, that would include Jupiter and an angel and a rock and me and this podium. Right. They're all beings. Well, isn't God at least in that category? Aquinas says no. Why? Because of this text. What's your name? Which being are you? I'm not. I'm not one of the beings in the world. Because I gave rise to the whole world. I am who I am. Now watch. In light of that, why can God not be grasped? Well, because he's not like anything in the world. Why can God not be hidden from? Well, because he's in and through all things as their Creator. He's both. Here's Augustine, Superior Summo Meo, higher than anything I can imagine. And Intimior Intimumeo, closer to me than I am to myself. At the same time. At the same time, stop grasping, stop hiding and open your heart and your mind to this great mystery. I am who I am. Can you see, everybody, why Moses needed the discipline of the desert before he could be ready for this vision? Because in our sin, we're going to always do one of those two things. Grasping. I'm going to try to manipulate God or I'm going to hide from God. You can't do either one. Surrender in faith and love to the one whose very nature is to be. The One whose name is. I am the one who you can't control. You can't hide from. Now, when you move into that spiritual space, you're ready for mission. You see, it's only then that God can send Moses confidently on the mission to liberate his people. But he needed that long lens of the desert in order to bring him to the place where he could really understand the God that he's dealing with. And God bless you.
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Thank you for listening to this week's homily from Bishop Robert Barron. For more resources from Bishop Barron, please visit wordonfire.org.