Hope you had a blessed week!
Time for another Catholic Meme Monday. ✝️ 🙏
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By: Desirae Sifuentes
Living in the Arizona desert, Lent has always held familiarity for me. The death themes of brown, sand, dust, dry… it’s a part of the Lenten season that never leaves. Jesus walked the desert for forty days, and I have many a time had the briefest taste of His experience when the temperatures go north of 112 and I’ve walked to my mailbox without water. The hot summer sun oppressively bears down upon me, and in the distance, an oasis looms that begs to quench my thirst. I know, despite how my eyes deceive me, I can chase that beckoning pool, but it’ll never quench my thirst.
It’s easy to understand the folly of chasing the mirage, and the wisdom of simply going home, but not every temptation is as simple to navigate as a walk to the mailbox. Some sins still get us. They promise wonderful things that only lead us deeper into the desert bereft of any relief. We wouldn’t chase sin if it weren’t alluring like the “oasis.”
Lent is the season to confront the sins that entice us as we walk in our desert (without our dessert). In a season typically rife with talks about Jesus’ wandering, I want to contemplate the effects of sin and God in our lives by looking further back to the prefigurement of Christ’s wandering, when the Israelites wandered the desert.
Recall: God plagues Pharaoh until he releases the Israelites to Moses and they flee to the desert. After singing the Song of the Sea where they express gratefulness to God, they realize their conditions in the desert were lackluster. They start to lament that He and Moses had saved them at all, desiring the good ol’ days back in Egypt. God hears their ungrateful cries and provides them with food and water.
After this, Moses leads them to Mt. Sinai where God offers to enter into a covenant with them. If they obey His commands, they will become a “kingdom of priests,” or those who represent God. The Israelites agree, and God tells Moses many commandments on the mountain. These weren’t oppressive rules, but instructions of how the people and God would relate to one another, similar to wedding vows.
As God is giving Moses the instructions to build the Ark of the Covenant, the Israelites get impatient. They ask Aaron to make them the golden calf, violating the first two commandments and threatening the covenant. God says to Moses “God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in covenant faithfulness. He forgives sin, but will not leave the wicked unpunished.” (Exodus 34:6-7)
In the end, the Ark of the Covenant is built and set up within a tent as God commanded. The book ends with Moses trying to enter… and being unable to. As the representative of the Israelites, their unfaithfulness to the covenant is fracturing their relationship with God, and not allowing them to be close to Him.
In Leviticus, God gives the Israelites many more commands and instructions. God promises He will be very good to them if they are good to Him, but he will bring wrath down if they are not. The people hear this and do good. When we look forward to Numbers, we see Moses speaking to God from within the tent containing the Ark. This means the people had stayed close enough to God and made reparation to bring themselves closer to Him again!
It doesn’t last. In Numbers, as they walk through the wilderness of Paran, the Israelites complain and eventually riot saying they don’t want to go to the promised land. God says the Israelites can have it their way. They will not enter the promised land, only the next generation will in forty years. Later, Moses receives the same fate as he, too, offends God.
There’s still more rebellion from the Israelites, so God brings a punishment of poisonous snakes upon them. To remedy this, God tells Moses to make a bronze snake and hang it on a stick, so that whoever looks upon it would be healed.
Then the king of Moab asks a pagan sorcerer to curse them. Three times this sorcerer tries, but he can only offer blessings. While the Israelites are down in their camp grumbling and turning against God, He is with this sorcerer protecting and blessing them.
Do you see the pattern? Time and again, the Israelites offend God, but He remains just and good to them. This is why these stories are so important and repeated so often throughout the bible. These stories illustrate that God will keep His word on his covenant promises, but He will also allow His people to separate themselves from Him and bear the consequences. This is true thousands of years later, and the words of Moses to the next generation in Deuteronomy are too.
As the new generation goes to the promised land without Moses, he speaks words of wisdom to them. He tells them many things, particularly to be more faithful to the covenant than their parents were. “Listen Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all of your soul, and all of your might.” This prayer is called the Shemah, which means “Listen” in Hebrew. In Hebrew “listen” means more than to hear, you must respond to what you hear–or obey.
Today, it isn’t enough to read your bible, you must obey the will of the Lord. Similarly, Love means more than an emotion or feeling. It’s a wholehearted devotion to God, a decision to align your will, emotions, mind, and heart to Him. We’re called to this same alignment now. This quote became a very important prayer to the Jewish people because it concisely stated what we know to be true. We are a people set apart. Israel’s obedience to this would make them a unique people among the nations, as it makes Christians unique in the world now.
As the new generation will be intermingling with the idol-worshipping Caananites, Moses urges them to worship God alone. Idols degrade humans and destroy communities, but worshiping God alone leads to blessings and life. These idols are sin, like the mirage in the desert: enticing, and tempting, but they bring devastation.
Moses instructs on God’s laws, which sound pretty average today but were radical and revolutionary for ancient Egypt. They’re better compared to similar rules at the time, like the Code of Hammurabi, where you can see how different circumstances, beliefs, norms, and people generally were back then. This gives a better understanding of how incredible these laws were, and how God was holding the Israelites to the highest standard they would be capable of back then. It’s the same now: Christians are called to higher standards than the rest of the world deems necessary. They make us weird, but the fruits speak for themselves.
Moses continues: if they stay close to God, blessings will abound, but if they stray then exile will come to them. He urges them to choose life but admits he knows they will not after he dies. While this is pessimistic, it is also realistic. He says this because he knows them. Moses promises them that one day, when they’re in exile, struggling with venomous sin, they can always turn back towards God. He will welcome them back with open arms. For even when God rightly brings down justice, He transforms those just acts into life for those who look for healing, as when the Israelites looked upon the serpent.
Eternal truths about the relationship between God and man abound in this set of books. We constantly offend God and reap the consequences. He also constantly forgives us when we come back to Him. We don’t earn that forgiveness, He just gives it, if we want it. When we take that forgiveness and choose to live lives that ignore the mirage of the oasis, and instead keep our eyes fixed upon God, the blessings overflow. Our Lenten walks in the desert keep us keenly aware of the sting of suffering. Looking forward to Easter, what we truly see on the other side is the greatest promise of all: Heaven.
Desirae Sifuentes is a military wife, mom of 5, and theology student at Franciscan University. Growing up largely ignorant to her faith, she ventured off and found her way back home. This led her to passionately pursue her own catechesis. Now she’s sharing that journey, and how to grow, learn, and defend your catholic faith online at @uncatechizedcatholic.
