Homily for Tuesday, 28 July 2015– Ferial

Tuesday of the 17th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 33:7-11, 34:5-b-9, 28;  Psalm 103:6-7, 8-9, 10-11, 12-13; Matthew 13:36-43

We hear today from the book of Exodus of a particularly frustrating time for Moses as he leads the people of Israel home out of slavery in Egypt. Does it not seem that, at every turn, the people of Israel complain about something on their journey: The desert heat; not enough food; not enough water… “Moses, he looked at me funny”?! 

The people of Israel are badly behaved in other ways. They fail to trust on many occasions in God, through Moses, to lead them back to their homeland. But this is also a time at which Moses especially seeks the help of the LORD to lead Israel. A tent, “called the meeting tent,” is set up in the middle of the desert to be a place where the people could “consult the LORD.” The people of Israel had access to God like never before through this “meeting tent.”

Moses enters the “meeting tent” and, “for forty days and forty nights,” he is alone with the LORD. And what does Moses ask of the LORD? We hear that Moses asks for God’s mercy and forgiveness toward the “stiff-necked people” he is leading. Moses first acknowledges God’s name, “LORD.” And then Moses acknowledges the greatness of God’s mercy: “The LORD, the LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity.”

God’s mercy does not mean that the people of Israel will escape without consequences for their unfaithfulness toward God. And yet if, in the highly symbolic language of Exodus, God will punish the people “to the third and fourth generation for their fathers’ wickedness,” God promises to continue his kindness “for a thousand generations” toward those who remain faithful. God’s mercy; God’s forgiveness, even before we ask for it, always greatly (we could say infinitely) outweighs God’s wrath; God’s punishment.

And here in the book of Exodus God’s greatest act of mercy yet is to have Moses write on another set of tablets the Ten Commandments. Do we remember perhaps how, earlier in Exodus, Moses descends the mountain after receiving the original Ten Commandments on tablets and, when he sees the people making a golden calf idol, he destroys these tablets. Here, through Moses, God offers the people a new beginning. God offers them mercy and forgiveness, even if it is difficult for us to understand God offering a set of commandments as an act of mercy. This is the people’s opportunity by God’s mercy to renew their vows; their promise to remain faithful to God and just toward one another.

In a similar way we are continually given a chance at renewal, especially through the sacraments of reconciliation and Eucharist, because God is merciful toward us. God’s infinite mercy and forgiveness toward us are shown by Moses’ re-presentation of the Ten Commandments to the people and again through Jesus’ parable of the weeds among the wheat in Matthew’s Gospel.

God invites us not to pull up the weeds too early and so to risk destroying the wheat. God gives us a renewed chance at faithfulness, captured in the image of Moses writing the Ten Commandments a second time. Our God is infinitely merciful toward us and invites us to the same mercy and forgiveness toward one another and ourselves.