Tuesday of the
Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
(Exodus 33:7-11.34:5b-9.28; Matthew 13:36-43)
At a funeral a woman gives a testimony about her
mother. She says that as children her
mother picked up her and her siblings from school every day. On most days, she continues, her mother
stopped at church before going home. She
wanted to visit the Blessed Sacrament.
The woman says that her mother was hardly a woman who would only pray
for good things. Rather she made them
happen. But she also found wisdom and
strength in her conversations with the Lord.
Moses evidently draws the same energy in today’s first reading.
Does Moses see God face to face? The reading says that he does, even that he
was accustomed to doing it. But it also
says that when God passed by, Moses “at once bowed down in worship.” Elsewhere in this same section of Exodus God
indicates the impossibility of a direct encounter. He tells Moses, “…you cannot see my face, for
no one may see me and live." But the question is moot since the only human face
that God has belongs to Jesus.
We have not been blessed to have seen Jesus in the
flesh. Or perhaps we are blessed not to
have seen him so because we might have rejected him. Nevertheless, we can find him today if we but
look. He is in the marginalized person
whom we might not want to meet. We will
find his face reflected in quality art which moves us to speak to him. And, of course, he is there in the Eucharist
in a most wholly and helpful way.
