29th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2022

My Dear People,

Congratulations to all the ones who were confirmed this week! 

Today, the first reading from Exodus deals with the problem with the Amalekites. Amalek was a nation of nomads that controlled the northeast part of the Sinai peninsula and the southern part of Negeb. The Amalekites were not happy to have the Israelites moving through the outskirts of their territory, and they sent bands of scouts to trail them. According to Deuteronomy 25:18, the Amalekite raiders would kill off the weakest of the Israelites who lagged behind the main camp—that would be the ill, the elderly, poor families with many children, and so on. The Amalekites were an ancient expression of the culture of death. 

On their way to Mount Sinai, the Israelites were attacked outright by the bulk of the Amalekite forces, and they were forced to respond despite the fact that they were not military men, but former slaves, and had few if any proper weapons. It was a situation of great peril that could have ended with the complete annihilation of the Israelite people in the middle of a desert wasteland. 

The young man Joshua went out to lead the forces the Israelites could muster while Moses went to the mountain top to beseech God in prayer. The moral sense of this text is a good example of the complementarity of prayer and action, ora et labora. The people fight and pray—both are necessary for the same reason that faith and works operate together. 

How curious that Moses’s prayers are necessary! Why doesn’t God just send victory without them? Surely, he could! Yet this is the mystery of God’s will: that he chooses to incorporate our participation in the fulfillment of his plans. He ordains to grant victory to Israel through Moses’s intercession. Prayer is a cooperation with God’s will for us. 

In the Old Testament, there were no “secular” wars. Every battle was both a physical and spiritual conflict because the opposing armies always called their respective gods. The conflict of nations was the conflict of their divinities, and the stronger divinities won. So here as well there is a spiritual battle going on between the Lord God of Israel and the gods of the Amalekites, just as earlier in Exodus, the Lord took on the gods of Egypt through the ten plagues, defeating the Nile god, the crop god, the livestock gods, the sun god, and so on. In spiritual conflict, prayer is vital. God chooses to use it as his means to victory. This calls to mind later spiritual conflicts in the ministry of Jesus. When the disciples cannot defeat the demon, the Lord tells them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting. (Mark 9:29)

Pope Benedict XVI points out that Moses, with both arms lifted up in prayer, strikes a pose on the mountaintop much like Christ on the Cross. So, we can see Moses here as a type of Christ prefiguring the great prayer to the Father that was the passion and crucifixion, the great prayer which definitively defeated the enemy of God’s people. We participate in that great Prayer of Christ on the cross at every Mass. 

People are surprised sometimes to discover that the Christian life is a battle. They supposed that things would be easier after baptism or after conversion. But you see, slaves don’t have to fight. In Egypt, the Israelites weren’t in the army; they just slaved away in obedience to their Egyptian masters. That’s like the life of sin: it’s not really a struggle. You don’t fight temptation; you just obey it. It’s not slaves but free men who have to fight, who have to serve in the army. So, it is in the spiritual life. When we leave our addiction behind, having experienced conversion, we enter this life of freedom but discover that freedom entails struggle, that freedom cannot be maintained without fighting. 

What gives us power to fight? Prayer. That’s the true source of our victory. But it must be persevering prayer that continues until the final victory is won. 

Yours in Christ, 

Fr. Vincent Clemente