March 11th, Third Sunday of Lent. Okay, here I am in Iceland about to go to work yet desirous of checking out the readings. I went to well-know site for them and came up with two options: Year C and Year A! I took a gamble and went for the former, so here goes; figure the Gospel message transcends gambling. The first reading is Ex 3.1-8, 13-15 and the Gospel is Lk 13.1-9.

I like the Exodus text, for that book in many ways symbolizes the spirit of Lent, our living in the wilderness for the extended period of 40 years. I’ve picked up that sense of exile just from talking with a wide variety of people. Culture makes no difference in this matter; seems a widespread phenomenon yet hard to pin down. It seems to derive from a human desire for something better than what we have, even if we’re well off. Iceland is a good place to observe this. Here there’s no poverty, almost unheard of, and everyone has enough of everything to make life work.

The Exodus reading touches upon a fundamental revelation of God’s nature in his name, “I am who am” (‘ehyeh ‘asher’ ehyeh). The Hebrew language lacks both present and future tenses, everything being expressed in varying degrees of pastness. Sounds strange but true. The basic idea seems to be that as soon as a sound or word is uttered, it has passed, regardless of how close the source to the receiver. So we could translate the divine name given as a sentence into “I was who was.” That keeps in step with divine revelation in general. No matter what we know, it is secondary and imperfect. To me, the most interesting part of this is the relative pronoun ‘asher (who). In other places I’ve discussed this, but it can be summed up through the verbal root (important in any Hebrew word), namely, straightness. By its very nature a preposition is transitional in that it points to something else as opposed to focusing upon itself. With this in mind, we could say that the first “I am” (or I was) moves to the second “I am” (I was) which points not so much to God’s being but to his activity. A bit later (vs. 14) when Moses addresses the Israelites’ request to know his name, he doesn’t mention the rest of this name (‘asher ‘ehyeh).

Last evening we had some snow which later gave way to whipping rain. Around dawn (that’s now after 8 o’clock) the wind really picked up sounding like a jet engine , but with patches of blue here and there. No untypical for Iceland’s oceanic climate, to be sure.