Today’s readings are green. The first reading is of a greenery that does not burn in the fire that engulfs it. The gospel reading is of a fig tree that does not give fruit in tine. Unprecedentedly, I am beginning this reflection on the first reading of the Mass.
The burning bush is an enigma that Moses came across at Horeb. On his return of the day’s grazing, Moses finds this curious phenomenon of a bush on fire without the foliage being consumed by it. As he got closer to the bush out of curiosity, he was warned to leave his sandals behind because the place he was entering was a holy ground, where he need not worry about his feet touching unclean things. It also meant leaving behind the sandals that insulated him from touching the holy ground. Those sandals had kept the memory of the palace life alive in him. For forty years God had prepared Moses for shepherding God’s people unawares. Now, he has to leave the sandals that had distinguished him over the Egyptian slavish life of Israel. After casting them away, he had become one with his people and stood barefoot on the holy ground in front of the fire of God.
In that encounter, he was given a mission to liberate his people. From the encounter with I AM WHO AM, the fire within him burned with a passion to liberate God’s people. One experience of the burning bush had cleansed him, made him aware of his mission, and that fired up the rest of his life.
For us, the holy ground stands for a spiritual state. Moses had to remove what separated him from that ground—his sandals. What are the things we have to leave behind? What insulates us, or prevents us from relating with God? Our ideological stubbornness, our desire for power, rejection of renewal, sinful desires—these could be anything, varying from person to person. Leaving them behind is to begin the mission of God, to become God’s spokesperson.
This image of the burning bush had captured my early adulthood spiritual experience and my sense of mission. I remember, when I had to lead a holy hour in the seminary, I found a beautiful bushy plant and asked the priest to expose the holy sacrament in the middle of it. The image still remains with me. The image calls me back repeatedly to myself, to my vision of the mission.
For Moses, his own life had become a thorn to himself and others. He had killed someone to save his fellow Israelites. But his intentions were questioned by the ones who got saved. Misunderstood, he had to run away from the palace he grew in and ended up as a shepherd, a real tough job, in comparison to his royal former life. He was growing as a wild thorny bush. The burning bush might have told him that over his thorny wildlife is an enveloping power of the Eternal One, I AM WHO AM. One of my favorite spiritual gurus, Bobby Kattikaad, says, “Moses found the flames not only over the thorny bush but also over the thorny painful experiences of his life.” He found divine coverage over the rest of his life.
The burning bush reminds me of the Indian tradition of keeping the fire in a mud pot, before the invention of the matchboxes. The little flame inside a pot later became a symbol of preserving wisdom or the memory of divine presence in the heart. The story of Prometheus in Greek mythology is another symbol we might recall. He brings fire to the humans from the heavens. It is very childish to think that the story is just about fire. It is more about what is preserved inside without getting exhausted.
In the gospel today, Jesus asks the listeners to overcome their perspective of sin and retribution, much like Moses was asked to leave his sandals behind. They had to get out of the idea that the people who get killed are more sinful than the ones who are living, ultimately making God a murderer of all the sinful people. Jesus demands us to throw away this perspective. On ground of sinfulness, he said, anyone there was as vulnerable as those who got killed. Jesus says it was lack of conversion that leads to perdition, not sinfulness itself. It was the ideological stubbornness of pharisaism that Jesus was challenging and made serious dents in the security of “holier-than-them” attitude.
Jesus, then, tells them the parable of the fig tree, inviting for conversion of their hearts to become fruitful for the kingdom of God. Fig trees blossom and fruits begin to grow before the leaves appear in the spring. It reminds us to bear fruits of the gospel even before we appear to be sturdy with leaves. The Lord waits, and nurtures us until we bear fruit. Bear we must, the fruits of the gospel.