Tuesday of Week 17 Per Annum (27^th July): Exodus 33.7-11; 34.5-9,28; Ps 102; Matt 13.36-43

Friendship can differ in various cultural contexts, but there are common characteristics of it that cut across these distinctions, including affection, kindness, love, virtue, sympathy, empathy, honesty, altruism, loyalty, generosity, forgiveness, mutual understanding and compassion, enjoyment of each other’s company, trust, and the ability to be oneself and make mistakes without fear of judgement from the friend.

So when the Maker of heaven and earth is described as speaking to Moses ‘as a man speaks with his friend’ something very profound is being proposed. All those characteristics of friendship that we have known with one another are meant to be characteristics of our relationship with God. Over and over the patriarch Abraham is described as the ‘friend of God.’ [II Chronicles 20.7; Isaiah 41.8; James 2.23] Now God extends the promises he made to Abraham to a later generation. He takes Moses as his friend. [cf Numbers 12.7-8] The name of this relationship is faith, not primarily our inevitably faulty trust in God, but God’s immutable intention to call us to himself, to lead us out of slavery into life worthy of the name. That same God promises to speak to us as his friends [cf John 15.15], to hear us when we call to him [cf Luke 11.5-8], to draw us from servile fear into joyful worship.

Wednesday of Week 17 Per Annum (28^th July): Exodus 34.29-35; Psalm 98; Matthew 13.44-46

Moses’s face shone when he returned from the presence of the Lord. The holiness of God himself came to dwell in Moses as both affirmation and also as operative strength. [cf Numbers 6.24-26] St Paul reminds us [II Corinthians 3.18] that our own faces ‘reflect like mirrors the brightness of the Lord’ and ‘grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit.’

The 8^th-century father St John of Damascus pointed out that the Greek word for God, Theos, is derived from a verb that can mean either to run or to burn. God, that is, is active energy, not impassive being. God is better described as always running to meet us rather than as impatiently waiting for us to turn to him. He works to transform us, to burnish his own image that he implanted within us [Genesis 1.27], to make us his sons and daughters. [John 1.12]

St Martha (29^th July): Exodus 40.16-21,34-38; Psalm 83; Luke 10.38-42

Chapters 25-31 of Exodus define the regulations for the worship of God, and Chapters 36-40 describe, in remarkably parallel fashion, the way these regulations were minutely carried out. ‘Moses did exactly as the Lord had directed him’ the text declares.

True worship, though, is more than mere legalism but involves the transformation of our inner selves, our hearts. [cf John 4.23-24] God’s instructions aren’t given to a settled people but to a people on the move. They have been led out of Egypt but have not yet been brought to the land promised to them. [Exodus 3.17] Forty years—more than a generation—the freed slaves would have to wander in the wilderness before their descendants would be able to take possession of that promised land. [Psalm 94.10-11; cf Deuteronomy 8.7-10]

Yet it isn’t the case that we can only worship God when we have reached perfection. The wilderness years were years of formation for Israel, transformation from a motley assortment of enslaved people into a mature nation. The journey is as important as the destination, and even whilst we remain on the road we open our ears to hear the Word of God and we offer in response our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving to the God whose glory fills the places where with earnest and humble hearts we seek him.

Friday of Week 17 Per Annum (30^th July): Leviticus 23.1,4-11,15-16,27,34-37; Ps 80; Mt 13.54-58

Most of Leviticus consists of speeches of God to Moses. Having directed Moses to build the Tabernacle, Leviticus teaches the people and their priests how to make offerings in the Tabernacle and how to conduct themselves in and around that holy Tent.

Central to these instructions is the naming of the three most solemn festivals of each year: Passover, Pentecost (to use its familiar Greek name; in Hebrew Shavuot, the feast of the 50^th day after Passover), and Tabernacles (Sukkoth). Generations later, when Israel had become a settled nation, these three became known as the Pilgrimage Festivals, when all male Israelites were commanded to go to the Jerusalem Temple to sacrifice. [cf Deuteronomy 16.16]

In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, these pilgrimage festivals were a profoundly important social and religious institution, bringing thousands of Jews from all around the Mediterranean to Jerusalem and supporting a vast commercial enterprise including the raising of animals for sacrifices, a complex banking community, and hundreds of inns to lodge the travellers. Since the destruction of the Temple (in AD 70) prayers have replaced the animal sacrifices. These festivals, though, still unite us to God’s ancient people and invite us to see and recognise him at work in the course of our own pilgrimages.

St Ignatius of Loyola (31st July): Leviticus 25.1,8-17; Psalm 66; Matthew 14.1-12 The agricultural feast of Pentecost, observed on the 50th day after Passover, that is to say, after a week of weeks, seven weeks of seven days each, becomes expanded into the Jubilee year (from the Hebrew word yovel, from the ram’s horn trumpet blown in announcement), a celebration of the ‘liberation of all the inhabitants of the land’ once every 50 years. Indeed, this Jubilee celebration is itself an expansion of the ‘sabbatical’ year, occurring every seven years, when lands were to be left fallow and slaves were to be released. [Leviticus 25.2-7] Babylonian kings often issued ‘clean slate’ decrees for the cancellation of debts and the return of people to ancestral lands they had been forced to sell, in an attempt to redress the tendency towards the accumulation of most of the arable land into the hands of a wealthy few. [cf Isaiah 5.8] The Biblical Jubilee expands this concept, making it part of the law of God rather than the changeable whim of the king but also, since it was based on a regular rhythm known both to debtors and creditors, making it fairer to both. [cf 25.15-16; Deuteronomy 15.7-11]