Home coming is always a wonderful experience. When people are returning from a journey to their home the hope that they will once again see their homeland, their relations and neighbours usually brings them the feeling of great joy. Students returning home from a boarding house normally come back with great excitement to see their parents and siblings whom they have missed awhile. Greater is even the joyful feeling of home coming for prisoners, asylum seekers, refugees, displaced persons, kidnapped victims and those who have been deprived of their freedom in the past.

Our first reading today narrates the call of Moses from shepherding the flock of Jethro, priest of Midian, to become the leader and shepherd of God’s people, anchoring their home coming from the slavery land of Egypt. Paul will pick up this theme again in the second reading, giving details of the experience of the Israelites on their forty years journey in the desert (Amos 5:25) and reminding us of the many devastating implications of the complaints of the Israelites as they journeyed through the desert. What was surprising is that the Israelites got so impatient and started grumbling against Moses and against God Himself. They were thirsty for water in the desert and longing for the food they had left behind in Egypt.

The sight of the Burning Bush from where Moses was called and commissioned to go and lead home the children of Israel reveal many things to us today. Some see in the burning bush a picture of the nation of Israel: they are God’s light in the world, persecuted but not consumed. However, the burning bush was also a picture of what God had planned for Moses: he was the weak bush but God was the empowering fire (Deut. 4:24, Heb. 12:29). As such, with God’s help Moses could accomplish anything. God spoke to Moses and assured him that He was the God of his fathers and that He has felt the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt. He was now ready to deliver them out of Egypt and lead them into the Promised Land and Moses would be His chosen leader to accomplish this task.

Incidentally, Moses gave five different excuses as to why he should not be sent by God. When God was sending him he answered God saying: ‘I am a ‘Nobody’, ‘I do not know your name’, ‘The elders will not believe me’, ‘I am not a fluent speaker’ and ‘Somebody else can do it better than me’. Moses forgot that what he thought of himself was not as important as what God had designed for him. Moses would even ask God about His name, meaning to know actually ‘what kind of a God He was? This is so because the Israelites had known God’s name as ‘Yahweh’ many centuries before this time (cf. Gen. 4:26). This is why in His answer God was only explaining that the name Yahweh is a dynamic name based on the Hebrew verb ‘to be’ or ‘to become’. He is the self-existent One who always was, always is, and always will be, the faithful and dependable God who calls Himself “I AM”. He is that changeless God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He is the Eternal God ‘who is, who was and who is to come’. Little wonder that centuries later Jesus who is also God would take the name “I AM” and complete it saying, “I am the bread of life” (Jn. 6:35), “I am the light of the world” (Jn. 8:12), “I am the true vine” (Jn. 15:1), etc.

As God was speaking to him, Moses was more concerned about his credentials and he worried so much about his speech impairment. Moses failed to know that if God could turn rods into serpents and serpents into rods, if He can cause and cure leprosy and if He can turn water into blood, then He can enable him to speak His Word with power. Moses was making the mistake of looking at himself instead of looking unto God. The God who made us is able to use the gifts and abilities He has given us to accomplish the tasks He assigns to us. This is why God went with Moses to enable him accomplish the great task of leading the children of Israel back home to the Promised Land.

In His compassion and love, God used Moses to set the Israelites free from the slavery in Egypt and rather than give thanks for this wondrous deliverance the Israelites grumbled and murmured, insinuating their preference for Egypt and so their corpses littered the desert. This is why Paul tells us in the second reading that this happening which was a warning to them should serve as a lesson to us today. We who think we are Christians today should be careful, lest we take God’s love and compassion for granted and fall prey to the Destroyer.

This is also why in the gospel reading Jesus would correct the impression in the mind of the Jews who thought themselves better than others, feeling that bad things only happened to evil people. He told them that unless they repent they will also perish like the Galileans that Pilate mingled their blood with the sacrifices or the eighteen people on whom the tower at Siloam fell and killed. Like the barren fig tree upon which the owner sought fruit and, while finding none was patient for another year, God is also patient with us in our spiritual barrenness and unfruitfulness but He wants us to repent and start yielding abundantly. We are a fortunate people because there can be no better opportunity for this expected spiritual regeneration than this period of Lent.

Like the Israelites who were led home from their slavery by Moses, we too can be brought back by the leading hands of Jesus if we renounce the ‘Egypt days’ of laborious sinfulness and do not complain about the superficial ‘sweet food’ we left behind in our sinful past. Although the new life of our journey towards repentance may cause us to be ‘thirsty and restrained’, we should be convinced that this is surely the road to true fulfilment and our eventual salvation in Christ Jesus. Do not look back into your ‘Egypt’ of sin nor complain for the lack of the ‘sinful meal’ you had while in that ‘Egypt’. Come home to God in repentance because unless you repent you too will perish.

This post is not 100% written by me