Dear Friends,
This week we once again encounter God on the mountain. Moses in our Old Testament lesson meets God in the burning bush. In so doing God reveals something about himself. Moses has to take off his shoes because where God is, there is holiness and his name is mysterious ‘I am, who I am.’ God is also the God of Promise and Moses was to lead his people to the land promised to his ancestors, a land flowing with milk and honey. God is also a loving, merciful God, ‘I have heard my peoples cry and have come to deliver them.”

Jesus continues to fulfil those promises of deliverance, not from foreign powers but from sin and death. He also continues to unfold some of the mysteries of God in the gospel reading today. Do terrible things happen to people because they are cursed as terrible sinners? Are those suffering from the terrible floods in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe worse sinners than us and are being punished by God? Jesus in the gospel tells in emphatically ‘No’.

Jesus however, does go onto to state that there is a sense of urgency to put ourselves right with God – that now is the time to turn around and come back to God as none of us know what tomorrow will bring. Jesus wants us to know that now is the sacred moment to experience to merciful love of the Father as we confess and repent of those things that stand in the way of our relationship with God.
Blessing Fr Neil