One of the pitfalls of living our faith in the
context of an organized religion is that it’s easy to forget what’s at the heart
of that faith. Sidetracked by the system of salvation that religion offers and distracted
by liturgical rubrics and pomp, we overlook our faith’s original simplicity.
One line in the Gospel (Lk 13: 1-9) reminds us of the
historical Jesus’ central message: "If you do not repent, you will all
perish."
Ministering as an itinerant preacher, Jesus had a "stump
speech" that always revolved around repentance. We presume that in all His sermons,
homilies and instructions, He demanded that people change their value systems. Only after
experiencing such a turnabout could anyone start believing that God is close at hand,
working effectively in our everyday lives.
Everywhere God
For Jesus, God is more than just the ultimate rewarder of
good and punisher of evil. He contradicts popular theology when He tells His audiences
that when bad things happen, we shouldn’t be looking for God’s punishing hand.
He believes we’re to look for God in every corner of our lives.
Taking His own faith seriously, this Galilean carpenter was
convinced that Yahweh was just as embedded in peoples’ lives in the year 30 as 1,200
years before that. One can’t be more "hands on" than the God appearing to
Moses in the Sinai burning bush.
"I have witnessed the affliction of my people in
Egypt," Yahweh informs Moses, "and have heard their cry of complaint against
their slave drivers, so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore, I have come down
to rescue them from the hands of the Egyptians and lead them out of that land into a good
and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey" (Ex 3: 1-8, 13-15).
For some inexplicable reason, those who chose Sunday’s
liturgical passage omitted one small detail: Moses is the person who will carry out the
rescue! Yahweh not only works in everyday lives, but also works through everyday people.
Scripture scholar Carrol Stuhlmueller always reminded his
students that the bush didn’t start burning just a few minutes before Moses arrived.
The Exodus author implies it had always been on fire. Moses simply was the first person to
look intently enough at this most common of objects to notice God’s fire in it. None
who had previously passed by the bush had detected its uniqueness.
Ironically, once Moses discovers Yahweh’s fire in the
bush, he also discovers Yahweh’s fire in himself. God is embedded both in the bush
and in the shepherd.
God with us
Paul reminds his Corinthian community of the implications of
not discovering God’s fire among us (I Cor 10: 1-6, 10-12). He makes the point that
many of our faith ancestors who followed Moses along the road to freedom never saw what he
saw.
"God was not pleased with most of them," Paul
writes, "for they were struck down in the desert." He contends, "These
things happened as examples for us."
No matter how inspired and unswerving, leaders can never
substitute their faith for the faith of the people. Real faith only happens when each
person discovers God working in his or her own life.
Jesus is convinced that this process of discovery
doesn’t develop at the same pace for everyone. This seems to be why, in the Gospel,
He gives us the parable of the non-producing fig tree. The gardener begs, "Sir, leave
it this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may
bear fruit in the future. If not...."
Though we usually zero in on the "if not," Jesus is
concerned with the "it may." He knows there’s a spark of God in each
person, and He believes it’s never too late to notice that part of us which has been
there from the beginning of us.