Today we contemplate one of the most powerful images and expressions of God’s presence in all of Sacred Scripture: the Burning Bush.  Moses was busy minding his own business when God reached out to him in this marvelous way: God reached out to Moses and sent him on a mission to free his people from slavery.  That’s dramatic enough already, but there’s a lot more going on here.  What’s happening here: God is forming a relationship with Moses.  A personal relationship.  A relationship that foreshadows the kind of relationship that will come to fruition in the person of Our Savior.  Like the start of almost any relationship, this one, between God and Moses, begins with the exchange of names.  Whenever we meet someone new, it’s customary to extend our hand and introduce ourselves: to reveal our name.  And to receive the name revealed by the other person.  It’s an everyday little social ritual, but it’s an important one.  Telling someone my name, lets them in a little bit to who I am.  It’s the first step in creating a relationship.  And this is what happens between God and Moses. 

God knows Moses’ name already, and addresses him from the bush: “Moses!  Moses!”  And God identifies himself too, sort of indirectly: he tells Moses, I’m the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob: he first introduces himself in terms Moses would be familiar with: I’m the God your family worships.  Moses is fairly stunned by that already, and that’s a reasonable reaction.  But then God does something truly remarkable: he tells Moses his name.  Moses wants to know: What am I supposed to say when they ask who’s calling?  “I AM WHO AM.”  I am, who am.  I exist.  That’s God’s name; that’s his identity.  Everything else that is, owes its existence to something else.  Every person owes his existence to others, parents most directly.  Every other kind of thing was either made by another, or developed, or grew by some natural process that we can probably figure out.  Not God.  He just is.  That’s his identity.  That’s what God is saying to Moses when he tells him his name.  He is infinite and self-sufficient.  He is already complete by himself.  But he still reaches out; he still speaks to Moses.  He still speaks to humanity.  He enters into the network of human relationships; God comes out of himself, so to speak, and becomes present among us and for us.  

The Hebrew people wouldn’t say the name of God out loud, or even write it all the way out; they would use a little shorthand or a euphemism.  For them, the name was just too holy.  But they didn’t just see in the name of God an unutterable mystery; they also saw an affirmation that God is with us.  Because he did speak.  He did reach out.  He did form a relationship.  And Our Lord Jesus Christ, brings this relationship-affirmation by God to its fulfillment.  He is Emmanuel, which means “God is with us.”  The infinite, the perfect, the totally self-sufficient and self-sustaining one, has chosen to reach out to us, to join us, to be one of us.  Our Lord brings to fulfillment what began with the burning bush; in Christ, God, who had made himself known to Moses, now reveals himself fully.  This desire God has to be with his people comes to completion in the Incarnation of the Son, and what began at the burning bush is truly brought to fulfillment: God, as a Man, is close to us.  He is one of us, yet he remains the eternal and infinite God.  “Truly you are a God who is hidden, O God of Israel”, the prophet Isaiah had prayed.  This always remains true.  But we can also say: Truly you are a God who is close, you are a God-with-us.  You have revealed your mystery to us, you have shown your face to us.  You have revealed yourself and given yourself into our hands…You give yourself into our hands once again in the Holy Eucharist, God truly hidden under the appearances of bread and wine, but truly God, God truly with us.  At this hour, may joy and gratitude fill us, because God has reached out.  Because he, infinite and beyond the grasp of our reason, is the God who is close to us, who knows us, who loves us, and who, hanging upon the Holy Cross, saves us.