What do today’s scripture readings (Exodus 32:7-14; John 5:31-47) address and teach us, especially in the Lenten context?
The First Reading (Exodus 32:7-13) depicts a strain
of events of the Israelites committing the sin of idolatry while waiting for
Moses to come down from the mountain top, God’s wrath in response to the
Israelites’ idolatry and Moses’ intercession to appease God’s anger by evoking
His covenants to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. On the other hand, the Gospel
Reading (John 5:31-47) is the sequence to yesterday’s Gospel Reading (John
5:17-30) and the Gospel Reading of the day before yesterday (John 5:1-16).
Thus, today’s Gospel Reading describes how Jesus argued against those who
accused him for blasphemy because of his act of healing the paralytic man on a
Sabbath day and his explanation of the act as Jesus attributed it to a work of
the Father undertaken by him (John 5:17).
Both the First Reading (Exodus 32:8-15) and the Gospel Reading (John 5:31-47) address human
problems with faith so that we can examine ourselves as we reflect on them.
First, let us look into the First Reading.
Moses was with God on the mountain top of Mt. Sinai
for 40 days (Exodus 24:18; 34:28). He was with God in receiving the Torah (the
Law). In the meantime, the rest of the Israelites were waiting for him at the foot
of the mountain but ran out of their patience. They even had thought that Moses
might never come down. So, they said to Aaron, brother of Moses:
Come,
make us a god who will go before us; as for that man Moses who brought us out
of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him
(Exodus 32:1).
And, Aaron called them to offer golden earrings out
of their possession and they offered as told by him (Exodus 32:2-3).
Then, Aaron formed molten calf out of the collected
golden rings and said to the Israelites:
These
are your gods, Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt
(Exodus 32:4).
Aaron even set up an alter and the Israelites sacrificed
burnt offerings and brought communion sacrifice for this (Exodus 32:5-6).
So, God said Moses:
Go
down at once because your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt,
have acted corruptly. They have quickly turned aside from the way I commanded
them, making for themselves a molten calf and bowing down to it, sacrificing to
it and crying out, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up from the
land of Egypt!” I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are
(Exodus 32:7-9).
God was angry at the Israelites as they quickly put
Him to the backburner, if not necessarily to the oblivion, and replaced him
with the molten calf that they called the “Lord”. They grossly violated the commandments (Exodus
20:2-5) that He gave within the past 40 days. To God, it must have even sounded
like an outright insult to Him.
So, God decided to destroy these corrupt unfaithful
Israelites, saying:
Let me alone, then, that my anger may burn
against them to consume them. Then I will make of you a great nation (Exodus
32:10).
As it was when God destroyed all corrupted humans by
the deluge (great flood) but spared Noah and his companions in the ark (Genesis
6:9-22), God was thinking to save Moses to make a fresh start with him, while
eliminating all corrupted people.
To this, Moses did not respond to God, saying, “Thank
you, Lord, for sparing me as a seed for new nation, from your wrath!”. Moses was not a self-centered person. His
hearts were for those who were set to be destroyed by God’s anger. So, Moses
pleaded to His mercy for them by evoking what God had promised to Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob (Exodus 32:11-13).
As a result of Moses’ intersession, God’s anger
receded, and he came down from the mountain top with two tablets (Exodus
32:14-15).
The problem of faith addressed in the First Reading,
as reflected above, is not simply the sin of idolatry but how easily and
quickly the human mind can trick us to replace God with an idol but still makes
us think of it as worthy as worshiping. This is, indeed, a psychological
problem that we all have inherited from Adam and Eve, who had gained
ego-consciousness as an immediate result of violating God’s commandment of not
eating a fruit from the tree of good and evil (Genesis 2:12-17; 3:1-7). Opening of their eyes and realization of
their nakedness led to shame (Genesis 3:7), as an immediate consequence of the
violation, and this is the first phase of the ego consciousness. Then, it
further progressed to fear (Genesis 3:10) and pathological ego-defense to
refuse to take responsibility by blaming others for their own sinful action (Genesis
3:12-13).
The ego-consciousness that we have inherited from
Adam and Eve, as a mark of the Original Sin, has been our inherent disposition
to fall. That is why we constantly need God’s grace.
Psychologically, our tendency to blame others for
our own problematic behaviors as demonstrated by Adam and Eve as a symptom of
evolving ego-consciousness (Genesis 3:12-13) is to replace what is true with
what is not. In the case of Adam and Eve, it was them to take full
responsibility for their failure to keep the commandment so that they could
have confessed their sin and asked for God’s mercy to reconcile. Instead,
because of the ego-consciousness that they had gained as a result of eating the
forbidden fruit, as tempted by Satan, they replaced their responsibility on
Satan. Of course, Satan had his share of responsibility for the violation
committed by Adam and Eve. Nevertheless, it is a pathological ego defense to
replace one’s responsibility to another.
So, the Israelites, who committed the sin of
idolatry while waiting for Moses to come down, replaced God to the idol of the
molten calf. Psychologically, we can
call it a sin of replacing what is true with what is not because of insecure
faith, which reflects the inner insecurity.
Psychoanalytically, the inner insecurity is due to fragile ego, a kind
of ego resulting from eating a fruit of the tree of good and evil.
Now, what is the human problem of faith addressed in
the Gospel Reading (John 5:31-47)?
Remember how the accuser of Jesus replaced what is
true with what is false in yesterday’s Gospel Reading (John 5:17-30)?
They accused Jesus for blasphemy, which is false,
for his claim of the work on Sabbath as an extension of the work of the Father,
which is true. There is a parallel
between this replacement of what is true with what is false to how the
Israelites replaced true God with molten calf and the replacement of personal
responsibility to others, as committed by Adam and Eve. See how the impacts of
the Original Sin have been affecting over generations and generations, spilled
out of the time of the Old Testament to the time of Jesus in the New Testament.
In today’s Gospel Reading (John 5:31-47), Jesus
addresses that his accusers’ problem – their inability to see the truth, their
tendency to replace what is true with what is false – is a good example for him
to say why human testimony alone is not trust worthy, except for the testimony
of John the Baptist (John 5:32-35). Even Jesus’ testimony, which is greater
than that of John the Baptist, is not his own testimony as it of his Father (John
5:31, 36-37). And, this is as true as the fact that his work is the work of his
Father, including raising the dead to life and judging who is worthy to
resurrection to life and how is not (John 5:17, 19-22). However, the
problematic ego consciousness of the accusers of Jesus keeps them blind to
recognize the truth in Jesus’ testimony, which is of that of the Father.
So, Jesus rebuked his accusers saying:
You search the scriptures, because you
think you have eternal life through them; even they testify on my behalf. But
you do not want to come to me to have life (John 5:39-40).
Basically, Jesus is telling that it is futile to
even engage in the scriptures if they remain blind – unable to see the truth –
as long as they are as stiff-necked as these Israelites, who replaced God with
the molten calf, abandoning the truth, God, and replacing with falseness of the
molten calf.
So, Jesus further confronted his accuser’s
pathological ego consciousness, which made them believe their own illusion as
the truth, thus, resulting in their false accusation of Jesus, with these sharp
words:
I know that you do not have the love of
God in you. I came in the name of my Father, but you do not accept me; yet if
another comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe, when
you accept praise from one another and do not seek the praise that comes from
the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father: the one
who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope. For if you had
believed Moses, you would have believed me, because he wrote about me. But if
you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? (John
5:42-47).
It is as if Jesus were saying to his accusers, “Don’t
you realize how stiff-necked you are for not recognizing the truth in me, in my
testimony, in my work, which is the truth of my Father, because my testimony is
of His, and my work is of His? And you read what is written by Moses (the
Torah) but you still don’t realize it? How badly blind are you? Though Moses
pleaded to the Father’s mercy for the stiff-necked back in his time, I am not
sure this time if he would ask my Father for His mercy on you!”
You can imagine how the accusers of Jesus reacted to
these rebuking words from him.
What about us?
This is not a problem of the accusers of Jesus.
Remember, we all have inherited the same disposition
that they had to displace the truth with a falseness while remaining blind to
this problem because of the blindness to the truth. And, this is what has been evolving from the
ego consciousness that Adam and Eve had gained as a result of eating from the
tree of good and evil.
To ensure that this disposition will not become a
problem to deviate from the path of God’s truth, we need to seek God’s grace
through Christ so that our eyes are open to the truth. Otherwise, we would fall to become stiff-necked and remain so all the way to the judgement. God's mercy only comes through the truth as we recognize Christ, who is the truth, as well as the way and the life (John 14:6). For us, it is not Moses but Christ, who brings God's mercy on us when we are with contrite hearts, as reflected in Psalm 51. For this, he laid his life to save us on the Cross.
After all, it is Christ Jesus himself is mercy and love, as he has proclaimed to St. Maria Faustina (Diary of St. Faustina, 1074).
No comments:
Post a Comment