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| An icon of the Virgin Mother, the Burning Bush |
You can’t unsee it is a marvelous expression that describes so perfectly the vivid figures by which the invisible God manifests himself. This week, because of the calendar and the lectionary cycle, one of these images shows how powerfully God revealed His intentions long before He enacted them.
Our Old Testament reading from Exodus on this Third Sunday of Lent is the familiar description of Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush. As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush, though on fire, was not consumed. So Moses decided, “I must go over to look at this remarkable sight, and see why the bush is not burned.” (Exodus 3: 2a-3) In the conversation that follows, God calls Moses to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt and reveals His identity in the most mysterious of ways: I am Who Am.
That the bush was fully on fire, with heat and light and roar, and that the bush was not consumed by this fire was as astonishing to Moses as such a thing would be to anyone who fled the recent Los Angeles wildfires. This does not happen; this is not how fire works. But the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was not performing a party trick just to get Moses’ complete attention. He was prefiguring the astonishing way in which he would rescue His people from slavery to sin and death.
This year it so happens that two days after this Sunday of the Unburnt Bush falls the Annunciation, the most significant moment in human history, when the angel of the Lord appeared to the Virgin Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Upon her gracious consent, Be it done unto me according to thy word, The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Since the at least the late fourth century the Church has recognized the connection between the unburnt bush and the Virgin Mother of God. As Saint Gregory of Nyssa states, The light of divinity . . . did not consume the burning bush, even as the flower of her virginity was not withered by giving birth. The unburnt bush is a figure for the ever-Virgin Mary.
Felicitously I found online an article about this written by a former parishioner here, Fr. Alan Piper, O.P. Rejoicing in his connection to us, I will quote him at length: The burning bush signifies also the result of the Annunciation and Mary’s fiat, namely, the Incarnation of the Son of God. Just as the fire did not consume the bush, so the divinity of Jesus did not destroy his humanity. We beneficiaries of the ancient Nicene formulation “true God and true man” may not appreciate how easy it is to be mistaken about the relationship of Christ’s humanity to his divinity. Among the early Christians, some mistakenly thought it beneath the divine dignity to be united to matter, and so they concluded that Jesus could not have been truly human, but only apparently so. Others thought (again, incorrectly) that Jesus did not possess a human mind or will, since the divine ones would seem to render them redundant. Others worried that the human nature of Christ threatened to diminish his divinity, so they divided him into two persons, such that the Blessed Virgin could be said to be the mother of Christ, but not the mother of God. Ever since, when the Church calls Mary the mother of God, she means to imply that full divinity and full humanity are united in the one person of Christ.
Each of these errors tends to suggest that human nature and the divine nature are somehow at odds. It is as if God could defile himself by coming too close to humanity, or that humanity could be crushed by the weight of divine glory. But the burning bush, the Blessed Virgin, and the Incarnation teach us that divinization does not entail dehumanization. The Creator so transcends his creation that between God and creatures there is no comparison, no contest. And humanity itself is open to transcendence, such that in knowing God the human being is brought to human perfection.
God will not destroy our humanity. He doesn’t want to take away our identity. On the contrary, he wants to show us who we truly are and to free us from tiresome self-misconceptions. This is part of the point of penance. Why should we make peace with tendencies to self-destruction? Why should we say, “In the end, the flesh is all I am,” when God is waiting to conform us to his Son? The divine fire may cause us pain, but it also causes joy–a joy that will endure–because it makes us burn with the love of God.
There is a marvelous mosaic that juxtaposes these two events for the altar of the First Joyful Mystery in the rosary chapels of our own Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. I am frustrated to admit that I do not have a photograph of it but am confident that now that this marvelous manifestation of God’s self-revelation is firmly before your mind’s eye, you cannot unsee it.
Monsignor Smith
