Lent Week 4: Thursday
(the reading we reflect on today belongs to the regular Lenten readings, and not to the Feast of St. Joseph; there are many resources on St. Joseph in this website; feel free to read and get your inspiration from them.)
Moses’ Prayer
Moses was many things for the people of Israel. He was a great prophet as well as a consummate leader. He mediated with God for the people. He led the people out of slavery. He was also a teacher in the realm of obedience and trust in the Lord in the difficulties of the desert. But do you know that Moses prayed for the people as their intercessor, too? The first reading today shows us a part of Moses’ prayer to God. Moses interceded before God for the people after the people, aided by Aaron his brother, fashioned a golden calf and worshipped it.
Moses’ prayer was permeated with a deep love for the people who deserved to be punished and with a sincere love of God who was offended. He was like a man torn between two loves in his desire to see goodness prevail.
The intention of Moses was clear: to manifest the Lord’s desire for forgiveness. Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “God’s salvation involves God’s mercy but also contains the denunciation of sin and evil, so that the sinner, having recognized and rejected his sin, may let God forgive and transform him.”
But Moses also showed strong solidarity with the people, even giving himself as an offering in exchange for God’s forgiveness of sinners. “With prayer, wanting what God wanted, the intercessor entered more and more deeply into the knowledge of the Lord and his mercy, and became capable of a love that extended even to the total gift of himself,” wrote the Pope. In a longer version of the passage, Moses prayed to the Lord on the mountain: “But now, if you will, forgive their sin―and if not, blot me, I pray you, out of your book which you have written” (Ex 32:32).
In this way, Moses points to the figure of Christ on the cross, who was there not as mere friend of God but God’s own Son; not just offering himself but in fact assuming the sins of the people he atones for. The Pope challenges us to meditate on this: “Christ stands before God and is praying for me. His prayer on the cross is contemporary with all human being, contemporary with me. He prays for me, he suffered and suffers for me, he identified himself with me, taking on the human body and soul.”
Let us take refuge in the prayer of Jesus; let us not only ask him to pray for us to the Father. Let us ask him to make us bold in our own prayer so as to beg the Father for our deep conversion and transformation, starting this Lenten season.
