Are you ready for intimacy with God?
When, in the Book of Exodus, Moses heads over to check out
the burning bush, he is stopped by the voice of God: Come no
nearer! Remove the sandals from your feet,
for the place where you stand is holy ground. Remember that Moses is unfamiliar with God,
having grown up with the Egyptian royal family and thus unacquainted with the
traditions of his Hebrew ancestors. Yet
when Moses encounters God for the first time, in a shoeless state of utter
vulnerability, God immediately invites him to intimacy through direct contact
with the sacred, offering him a name for God to share with the people: I AM. Moses recognizes this charge as a sacred
call, and will go forth to lead God's people from their enslavement in Egypt,
and back to intimate relationship with God.
Prayer is another form of intimacy with God. When, in Psalm 103, the psalmist sings, Bless the Lord, o my soul, he is voicing
an interior invitation to enter fully into prayer, to speak with God from a
place of vulnerability. It is a posture
that has become unfamiliar to the Corinthians, who, according to Paul, think
they have reached their pinnacle as a community, and can thus stand secure. To the contrary, Paul tells them: like the community that will travel with
Moses through the desert, the Corinthians fail to trust in God, grumbling, complaining against the God
who has saved them. If they do not repent and change their ways, seeking
God in prayer, if they do not accept the vulnerability inherent in the cross,
Paul says, they will never find the intimacy to which God invites them.
Lent is a time of repentence; we are reminded of this in the
Gospel of Luke, when the gardener in the story of the unfruitful fig tree asks
to be allowed to continue to cultivate that tree; like Moses and Paul, he will
care for his charge, tending the tree until it bears fruit. Are the people
of Jesus' time ready for intimacy?
Perhaps not. But God continues to
offer us the opportunity to repent,
to remove the sandals from our feet,
to take away all that is dead in our lives -- and thereby prepare ourselves for
the intimacy of relationship, and the eventual joy of salvation in Christ.
This post is based on Fr. Pat's Scripture class.
Image source: Wordle
