Today’s first reading is very affirming as we see how the Lord our God can turn all curses into blessings.
Moses’ mother, desperate to save her child, places him in a basket on the river Nile and surrenders him into the hands of the Lord our God. He leads the basket into the hands of his foster mother, who then asks for someone to nurse him. Moses’ own mother is chosen to be his nursemaid.
Moses is a pre-figurement of what Jesus himself would have to endure as a child. He too would have been put to death as a first-born child by Herod. Ironically, he escapes into Egypt and is spared again through the hands of our loving Father in Heaven.
How then can we be so disobedient and not be steadfast to the commands and laws of our loving Father in Heaven? The consequence of our disobedience is not only separation from the Lord our God but eternal death.
In this Gospel reading, Jesus weeps for us, all is us who blatantly disregard the will of God our Father, His laws and commands. It is a loving call to conversion, a call to repentance, a call back into His loving embrace.
So let us turn away from all sin and be faithful to the Gospel.
Amen.
Saint Bonaventure, pray for us…
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First reading
Exodus 2:1-15
Pharaoh’s daughter finds Moses among the bulrushes
There was a man of the tribe of Levi who had taken a woman of Levi as his wife. She conceived and gave birth to a son and, seeing what a fine child he was, she kept him hidden for three months. When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him; coating it with bitumen and pitch, she put the child inside and laid it among the reeds at the river’s edge. His sister stood some distance away to see what would happen to him.
Now Pharaoh’s daughter went down to bathe in the river, and the girls attending her were walking along by the riverside. Among the reeds she noticed the basket, and she sent her maid to fetch it. She opened it and looked, and saw a baby boy, crying; and she was sorry for him. ‘This is a child of one of the Hebrews,’ she said. Then the child’s sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, ‘Shall I go and find you a nurse among the Hebrew women to suckle the child for you?’ ‘Yes, go,’ Pharaoh’s daughter said to her; and the girl went off to find the baby’s own mother. To her the daughter of Pharaoh said, ‘Take this child away and suckle it for me. I will see you are paid.’ So the woman took the child and suckled it. When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter who treated him like a son; she named him Moses because, she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.’
Moses, a man by now, set out at this time to visit his countrymen, and he saw what a hard life they were having; and he saw an Egyptian strike a Hebrew, one of his countrymen. Looking round he could see no one in sight, so he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. On the following day he came back, and there were two Hebrews, fighting. He said to the man who was in the wrong, ‘What do you mean by hitting your fellow countryman?’ ‘And who appointed you,’ the man retorted, ‘to be prince over us, and judge? Do you intend to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?’ Moses was frightened. ‘Clearly that business has come to light,’ he thought. When Pharaoh heard of the matter he would have killed Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and made for the land of Midian.
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Gospel
Matthew 11:20-24
It will not go as hard with Sodom on Judgement Day as with you
Jesus began to reproach the towns in which most of his miracles had been worked, because they refused to repent.
‘Alas for you, Chorazin! Alas for you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. And still, I tell you that it will not go as hard on Judgement day with Tyre and Sidon as with you. And as for you, Capernaum, did you want to be exalted as high as heaven? You shall be thrown down to hell. For if the miracles done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have been standing yet. And still, I tell you that it will not go as hard with the land of Sodom on Judgement day as with you.’
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