Word to the Wise
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 - Tuesday in the 15th Week in Ordinary Time
[Exod 2:1-15a and Matt 11:20-24]Pharaoh, too, heard of the affair and sought to put Moses to death. But Moses fled from him and stayed in the land of Midian......
Moses goes from rags to riches and back to rags again! His mother manages a lucky "find" by Pharaoh's daughter [thus escaping her daddy's cruel decree to kill male Hebrew newborns - hmmmm...maybe giving Herod a notion later on]. He's raised in the best of homes but seems to have kept his Hebrew identity in that pagan Egyptian court! Then he manages to kill an Egyptian who was mistreating a Hebrew slave and becomes a wanted man!
This is the stuff of great story-telling! And there's lots more to come! Giants invite big stories. In writing, later on, the story of Jesus, the gospel writers had the Old Testament as a model and the figures of Moses and Abraham, in particular, to help them. One need only read chapters 6 and 8 of the Gospel of John, or the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. The great figures of the Old Testament were seen as "types" of the Messiah who was to come and enabled the early community to make sense of Jesus' life and death and resurrection We learned a lot from Abraham and the patriarchs and now our teacher is Moses! Attention, please! AMEN