BEFORE ABRAHAM WAS, I AM

A REFLECTION FOR PASSION SUNDAY

At Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, one of the required prayers, familiar to all of us, is the Divine Praises.  Beginning with the words “Blessed be God”, we praise, one by one, the sacred attributes of God.  The very first to be mentioned after the praise of God himself, is the Name of God—“Blessed be his holy Name.”  We sometimes think of this holy Name as that of the Son of God, “Jesus”, which we revere by celebrating a feastday in its honor, and bowing our head whenever we pronounce this Name.

The custom of giving profound veneration to the Name of God, however, originates long before the birth of our Lord.  It goes back all the way to the Book of Exodus, to a day that found a fellow called Moses tending to the flock of his father-in-law Jethro.  As they climbed the slopes of Mount Horeb, an angel of the Lord appeared to Moses “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bushwas not consumed.”  

This naturally aroused Moses’ curiosity, and as he approached the burning bush, God himself warned him to take off his shoes before coming near, “for the place whereon thou standestis holy ground.”  It is a common feature of many cultures still today to remove their shoes at certain times. Muslims, for example, leave their shoes at the door when they enter their mosques; the Japanese take off their shoes when entering someone’s home.  Even we Catholics have the custom of removing our shoes every Good Friday—it is prescribed by the rubrics that as we approach the Cross for veneration clergy and people remove their shoes and genuflect three times before kissing the feet of Christ on the Cross.

And for what purpose had God called Moses to this holy place?  If not for this milestone in Jewish history, Moses would presumably have continued his life as a shepherd and we would never have known about him.  But God had seen the plight of the Hebrew people, living in slavery in Egypt.  It was his intention to deliver them from their bondage, as a sign of the Messiah who was to come and deliver them from all their iniquities, redeeming his people and re-opening the gates of heaven, slammed shut since Adam bit the apple.  God had chosen Moses to lead the great exodus out of Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey, prefiguring his only-begotten Son who would lead us away from our sins to the blessed homeland of a new Jerusalem, heaven itself.

Moses anticipated that his people would not accept him unless he could give the name of the One who had given him his mission. And so God declared to Moses that “I AM THAT I AM.”  When these words occur in the liturgy we bow our heads.  The Hebrew phrase is ehyeh ašer ehyeh, from the word hayah(היה). From this derives Yahweh(יהוה), the most holy Name of God in the Hebrew language, the word that, out of reverence for God, Jews still today refuse to pronounce even replacing the written form (in English) with “G-d”. “Thus,” said God to Moses, “shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AMhath sent me unto you.”

When our Lord declared that “Before Abraham was, I AM” he was not only pronouncing the sacred Name of God, he was actually claiming to bethat God.  Little wonder the unbelievers were horrified.  But he who is the Truth itself cannot lie…