Word to the Wise
Tuesday, July 14, 2015 - Tuesday in the 15th Week in Ordinary Time
[Exod 2:1-15a and Matt 11:20-24]When the child grew, she brought him to Pharaoh's daughter who adopted him as her son and called him Moses; for she said, "I drew him out of the water." [Exodus]
JULY 14 ST. KATERI TEKAKWITHA
In the Old Testament, surely the figure of Moses is the most dominant! He stands like a giant in the grand narrative of Israel's deliverance from slavery and as the one who wrote down the covenant with God on Sinai, the Ten Commandments. For thousands of years, he was considered the author of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament (which Christian tradition calls the Pentateuch). But as with all famous figures, there would be interest in Moses the person. The story of his origins shows that God always writes straight with crooked lines. Moses is born when Pharaoh wants all male Hebrew babies destroyed. (The tables will be turned when the last plague, the destruction of Egyptian first-borns, takes place!). He is raised as the grandson of Pharaoh by a clever plot of his mother. He becomes a murderer when he kills an Egyptian who is beating a Hebrew, and becomes a fugitive!
Scripture scholars estimate the events of Moses' life to have occurred more than a thousand years before Jesus. Yet Jesus ministry is impacted in dramatic ways by what Moses' life and teaching. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, is written, in part, to show Jesus as a "new Moses." In tomorrow's first scripture about Moses' call in the burning bush, we will learn of an event with tremendous power. Moses is not simply a figure in an ancient story. He is a figure in our own life of faith. AMEN
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