3rd Sunday of Lent 2022 – Sermon by Father Levine

Fr. Joseph Levine; Holy Family Catholic Church, Burns, Oregon, and Missions; March 20, 2022

Remove the sandals from your feet for the place where you stand is holy ground.

If we can understand these words that God spoke to Moses, then we can also understand the
urgency of Jesus’ call to repentance.

Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Perish not just as the Galileans Pilate
massacred in the Temple, or as the men upon whom the tower fell, but perish as the Israelites
who were struck down in the desert and never entered the promised land. When Jesus speaks
about ‘perishing’ he is referring not to temporal loss, but eternal loss, failing to attain the
promise of God.

Remove the sandals from your feet for the place where you stand is holy ground.

This is a lesson in the fear of the Lord that respects (such a weak word in this case) God’s
holiness. If you must go barefoot on a hot day in the desert, you will walk very carefully. The
fear of the Lord teaches us to walk carefully in the presence of God. Whoever thinks he is
standing secure should take care not to fall. 

Certainly, there is a part of the fear of the Lord that is like the fear we have in the presence of a
powerful man, who can make decisions to harm or help us. If you have an interview with such a
man you will be very careful about how you dress, how you act, and what you say.

Of course, God is infinitely more powerful than any man; he is the Almighty. His judgment in
our regard is most consequential and inescapable. In the end we must all answer to him and
what weighs in the balance will be eternal happiness or endless misery.

Yet, if this is all we grasp of the fear of the Lord, then we have only grasped the smaller part.
This is only the beginning of fear of the Lord, the beginning that will be cast out by perfect love.
(cf. 1 Jn 4:18)

If we only think of God in terms of power, then we have a distorted view of God, looking at him
as though he were no more than the biggest bully on the block. 

A bully or a tyrant is capricious and fearful. Precisely because his own power his insecure;
precisely because he knows that one stronger than himself can come and bind him and plunder
his treasure (cf. Mk 3:27); precisely because he knows that those who are subject to his tyranny
might discover their own power and overthrow him; precisely because he is a slave to his
passions, like Herod, how beheaded St. John the Baptist; precisely because he is not governed by truth – for all these reasons he acts in an unpredictable and arbitrary manner, making use of
his power to make it felt and to compel others to submit. (cf. Mt 20:25)

This is actually the sort of power possessed by the greatest of all tyrants, the devil. Like all
tyrants, he knows his time is short. (cf. Rev 12:12) Nevertheless, he is the one who from the
beginning has poisoned our mind with lies about God, portraying God in his own image, as a
tyrant. So he told Eve long ago, You will not die. God knows that on the day you eat of [the fruit
of the tree] your eyes will be opened, and you will become like gods, knowing good and evil.
(Gen 3:5) He insinuates that God is fearful of losing his power and so is trying to keep us from
the good things that will make us powerful. 

Contrariwise, the truth of God and his holiness was revealed to Moses in the burning bush and
made manifest by the revelation of his name: I AM. 

The name I AM reveals that God is not just one more being among the countless beings in the
whole universe, but that he is the source of all being, all existence, and therefore of all
goodness. He is the Creator. In him there is light and there is no darkness at all. (1 Jn 1:5)

The rocks, the hills, the rivers, the cattle, the wild beasts all come into being and pass away.
Their existence is ‘on loan’ we could say. It is the same with us. Our very existence is a gift that
we have received from God. Every bully and tyrant was created by God. Even the devil is
created by God. He did not create their evil, but he creates their being and sustains it in
existence.

God as the source of all that exists is the Creator who contains within himself an infinite ocean
of existence, wisdom, and goodness. He stands outside and above all that he has created. He is
truly ‘transcendent’. 

Often we hear the question, “Who made God?” This question tries to grasp God as though he
were just one more of the things that was made. It misses the point. 

If we saw God as he is in himself (such is the heavenly vision that makes the angels and saints
supremely blessed) we would understand the foolishness of the question. God is not made; he
requires no explanation; he simply “is”; he is the only one who can say, without qualification: “I
AM”. His existence provides the explanation for everything else. 

For the same reason he has nothing to fear; he is incapable of fear because he cannot lose
anything. He has no rival. Nothing can compare with him. 

Remove the sandals from your feet for the place where you stand is holy ground.

Here we come to a second and most necessary degree of the fear of the Lord, the gift of the
Holy Spirit, that goes hand in hand with trust. Once we gain a distant glimpse of the greatness
and majesty of God we must learn to fear the Lord by thinking carefully about him and expressing ourselves carefully in his presence, knowing that nothing is hidden from his gaze,
while remaining confident that for those who love God, all things work for the good. (Rm 8:28)
This is not fear of punishment but fear of thinking, doing, or saying anything that will be
unworthy of his greatness. Hence, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,
for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. (Ex 20:7)

Yet this great and good God, who surpasses all that he made, is also intimately present to all
things, sustaining everything in existence at every moment. He bestows on man – even after
having been led into rebellion by the devil – an amazing gift that was revealed in the burning
bush. When he appeared in the burning bush, hearing the affliction of his people, God was
already breaking into the brokenness of his people. 

By sending his Son, Jesus Christ, to break into our brokenness, he not only frees us from the
slavery of sin and death, as he freed the people of Israel from their slavery to Pharaoh, he
comes to dwell in our midst. 

The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and we beheld his glory,
glory as of the only Son from the Father. (Jn 1:14)

The sacred humanity of Jesus Christ is the burning bush, a created nature united to the person
of the Son of God, without being consumed or destroyed. The Immaculate Virgin is like the
burning bush, in whom the Son of God dwelt for nine months; she is the Spouse of the Holy
Spirit, wholly transformed by the grace of God, living always in intimate union with him,
without being consumed or destroyed by his greatness. 

God also wants the reality of the burning bush to be realized in the life of each one of us. He
wants to make us blessed by his intimate presence; he wants to unite us to himself, transform
us in himself, without consuming or destroying us. 

When we begin to recognize this very great and precious gift of God (cf. 2 Pe 1:4) we draw near
to the summit of the fear of the Lord. 

When we recognize that we possess this great treasure in the earthen vessels of our sinful
humanity, (cf. 2 Cor 4:7) we will want to walk very carefully in his presence lest through our
carelessness the vessel be broken and the treasure lost. Here we discover that the very gift of
God’s love and mercy calls forth the highest degree of fear, leading us to be careful to receive
and correspond to the gift. 

The gift of sanctifying grace, through which we share the very life and nature of God, through
which the Holy Spirit dwells in us as in a temple, is nourished in us through the visible
sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood, the Holy Eucharist, another very great and precious gift
of God. The fear of the Lord teaches us to walk carefully in the presence of this gift.

St. Therese of Lisieux, who teaches us the confidence of a little child in the presence of God, our
Father, served for a time as sacristan in her Carmelite monastery, showing the greatest care,
reverence, and attention to the sacred duties she was allowed to perform. 

The book of the prophet Malachi contains one of the great prophecies of the Holy Sacrifice of
the Mass: From the rising of the sun to the setting my name is great among the nations, and a
pure incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering, for my name is great among the
nations, says the Lord of hosts. (Mal 1:11) At the same time, the Lord, through his prophet
rebukes the Israelites for their carelessness, for profaning the Lord’s table, bringing what is
polluted, bringing what is taken by violence, bringing what is blemished, bringing what is less
than the best. 

If we fail to show grateful care to delicacy and fragility of the gift of the Holy Eucharist and to
the gift of grace in our own soul, we will not be likely to show care for the gift in others. 

Unless you repent …. We are called, each one of us, to an examination of conscience in regard
to how we have received the gift of God and how we have received the Holy Eucharist. Have we
walked carefully with this sacrament? In our attitude? In our words? In our gestures? In our
manner of dress? In our actions? Have we lived consistently with the gift we have received?

Remove the sandals from your feet for the place where you stand is holy ground.

(Related: 2nd Sunday of Lent 2022 – Sermon by Father Levine)