When the Lord calls, are you paying attention?
Credit to Author: RICARDO SALUDO| Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2019 17:19:49 +0000
Moses said to God, “But when I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ if they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what am I to tell them?” God replied, “I am who am.”
— The Book of Exodus, 3:13-15
What color is your soul?
That’s a trick question. Souls are spirit, not matter, lacking physical traits such as color.
God, too. He may show and tell in tangible signs, but He is not any of those manifestations. Except in His second person Jesus Christ, God is pure spirit, despite countless depictions as a bearded fatherly man.
Today’s first mass reading about Moses meeting God atop Mount Horeb, underscores the Almighty’s intangibility. Many Bible stories wrongly say that God was the burning bush unconsumed by fire. In fact, it was “an angel of the Lord” who appeared “in fire flaming out of a bush” (Exodus 3:2).
God revealed Himself only when Moses drew near the fiery but unburnt bush, calling “Moses! Moses! … I am the God of your fathers,” and telling him to go barefoot on hallowed ground.
And what the Lord said revealed two things: He loved His people, the Israelites, and wished to free them from bondage. And His name was “I am who am,” which sounds like Yahweh in the original Hebrew.
Disbelieving to disobey
We, too, meet God in much the same way, and if we pay attention like Moses, we will hear Him. Then what He says can impart the end — the purpose and destiny — for which we live, as it did for Moses.
And the Apostle Paul. Struck blind by Jesus Christ’s apparition on the road to Damascus, the former Saul could have dismissed it as delirium due to the long ride from Jerusalem. But he paid heed, and from persecuting the faith, he preached it across the Roman Empire.
Fast-forward two millennia: popular preacher Fr. Michael Gaitley first got the nudge toward religious life when choosing which college to enter. He told God if he got unseasonal yellow roses for his high school graduation, he would go to the devoutly Catholic Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. Yellow blooms came.
Have you encountered a burning bush or two? Some surprising event like a miraculous cure or a hugely improbable chance occurrence, which, perhaps, you thought nothing of after initially raising eyebrows?
One thirty-something got religion when his wife got well from a life-threatening illness after he prayed the Rosary for the first time ever. Again, he could have dismissed it as coincidence and kept to his undevout ways. But he didn’t.
In today’s world unmindful or unbelieving of God, however, many others close their minds to the idea that God not only exists, but might actually be calling them.
The dozens of incorrupt bodies of saints, like Padre Pio’s, exhumed intact before TV cameras in 2008, four decades after his death; the miracle at Fatima, recounted even by an anti-Catholic journalist; the unfading image of Our Lady of Guadalupe on the centuries-old tilma cape of Saint Juan Diego; 70-plus medically unexplained cures at Lourdes; the consecrated hosts turned to bloody heart muscle, as scientific testing verified — these and countless more unburning bushes, so to speak, are shrugged off.
Many who don’t believe may just be refusing to obey. They deny God not because they are sure He doesn’t exist, but because belief in Him demands obedience to Him. (Interestingly, for all their scientific skepticism, millennials are quick to swallow and share the latest fake news going viral.)
Moses, too, could have dismissed the bush and the voice on Mount Horeb as pure imagination, and spared himself from facing the fearsome power of Pharaoh and the frustrating transgressions of his fellow Israelites. Yet he believed and obeyed.
To be or not to be like God
We, too, are called to heed God and His will, which is, put simply, to be like Him, as God intended: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness …” (Genesis 1:26).
So, what’s God like? Take it from Him: “I am who am.”
For Bible experts, it means that God is the Being whose existence depends on no other. He is who simply is.
That doesn’t just mean that God created and sustains the universe. He is, in fact, totally outside creation, absolutely free from its bounds of space and time, unaffected by any creature, but exerting power over all.
As one Filipino translation of “I am who am” put it, “Niyong walang pinagmulan at walang hanggan” — He who did not come from anything, anywhere and any time, and is infinite.
Now, how in heaven can we earthlings be anything like that? Well, if God is not of this world, the more we are enamored of it, the less we can be like Him. Hence, we must shed worldly attachments.
As the Epistle to the Colossians (3:2) says, “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things on earth.” Give greatest value, time and effort on matters spiritual. Prayer, Sacraments, Scripture, works of mercy.
Now, that doesn’t mean shutting out and never bothering with the world. After all, the Creator obviously cared for all and sundry enough to bring everything and everyone into existence. And send His only begotten Son to redeem us.
Indeed, as today’s mass responsorial Psalm 103 declares, “The Lord is kind and merciful.” Especially to the failing and the fallen.
Right after praising God at the start, the psalm chants: “He pardons all your iniquities, heals all your ills. He redeems your life from destruction.” And in the next line, “The Lord secures justice and the rights of all the oppressed.”
So, listen. And when you do, the Lord blesses your faithful service. This writer’s mother Noemi set up Bahay ng Diyos Foundation (BDF) after literally hearing God’s call to help priests rebuild churches. Since its founding in 2006, BDF has aided more than 70 needy parishes nationwide. Praise the Lord!
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