Lent 3C25 "What's in a name?" (Exodus 3:1-8, 13-15; 23 March 2025)

A reflection on the first reading, Exodus 3:1-8, 13-15, written and spoken by Kieran J. O'Mahony OSA.

Gentle piano music to close the meditation

Transcript

John’s Lane
D08 F8NW
23 March 2025
Exodus 3:1-8, 13-15

Welcome
Once I was invited onto a team, which was going to work together for four years. Before starting the actual work, we spent time team-building. One technique was to ask each us about our name. How do you feel about your name? Is there a connection with family? What does your name mean? Do you like your name? It was very interesting. As we each talked about our name, something of our story, something of who we were and are also something of who we could be came out. Something similar may be said about the disclosure of God’s name in our first reading.

Topic
In brief, the name of God is mystery, the name of God is mercy and the name of God is Emmanuel, God-with-us.

Steps
Where we hear the words “I am who I am,” our first reaction could be that the disclosure is a kind of anti-disclosure, revealing and just as much concealing. There is something right about this, because God must always be awesome, beyond and, to us, a mystery. In fact, our word mystery comes from an ancient Greek word muō, meaning to close or shut the mouth or the lips, that is to remain silent. A contemporary monk has written as follows:

“The natural language of God is silence. Everything else is a poor translation. In order to understand this language, we must learn to be silent and to rest in God.”

It is a good warning: anything we say of God must be qualified by our awareness any word we use of God is coming from a very limited human experience, a distortion of some kind. The name of God is indeed mystery. 

In the Western tradition, great writers and saints reflected on the name of God in Exodus 3:14, I am who I am. They went on to say that God is not a being in the universe, discoverable in the way you might discover a plant or a planet or a bug. Instead, God is “being”, the is-ness of things. This is also mysterious, of course, but it has two advantages. It stops us thinking of God a being, somehow part of the furniture of the universe, visible if only we were eagle-eyed. It also means it is kind of hard to be a true atheist because even a convinced atheist will acknowledge that things exist, that they are and that they enjoy “being.” The big difference between believers and atheists is that we as believers hold that God is more, being both creator and personal, who discloses himself to us. In the expression of a writer I greatly admire, God, in whom we live and move and have our being, is in himself “holy being who let’s be.” 

The Jewish tradition goes another way. It is also aware of mystery — so much so that the name of God — YHWH, the one who is — is never pronounced. Even the expression in Exodus 3:14 is left untranslated in my Jewish bible:

And God said to Moses, “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.” He continued, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites, ‘Ehyeh sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:14)

But there is an expansion later in the book of Exodus which is very helpful. In Exodus 33:19, the writer unfolds the name of God using the same parallel structure:

“I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The Lord’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. (Exodus 33:19)

We learn that the mysterious God is also the God of grace and mercy. In the simple expression of Pope Francis, “the name of God is mercy.”

As Christians, we want to go a step further. The name of God is “Emmanuel, God-with-us.” Perhaps you have come across Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor, who was imprisoned and finally executed by the Nazis. He was convinced that the traditional language of God in heaven, God upstairs somewhere, no longer works for our time. Searching for a new expression, Bonhoeffer finally came up with this: God is the beyond-in-the-midst. He meant that whenever we encounter sacrifice, unconditional love, unselfish service, the unlimited commitment to goodness, costly forgiveness and reconciliation, there is God. There is God: perhaps unrecognised but there all the same. I hope most of us, all of us, have seen in our lives people who are simply good and loving, whose great energy is the well-being of others. As we often sing, where there is love, there is God. As St John writes: whoever lives in love lives in God because God is love. God is the beyond in the midst, God with us always, our Emmanuel.

Conclusion
So our mysterious first reading invites us all to stand before the sheer mystery of God, God who name is not just I am who I am but whose name is mercy. This God is present always, the beyond in the midst, recognised or not, just there. 

There is no getting away from this God, as illustrated in an old communist-era joke. Three soldiers are keeping guard. And one says, “Please God, it will be be a quiet night.” A second soldier butts in to say, “but God doesn’t exist, thank God.” The third soldier adds, “but what if, which God forbid, he did?”

As I was saying at the start, a lot can come out in a name!