Year of Prayer with Benedict XVI: Talk to God as to a friend

In the fourth of a series of articles on catecheses by the German pope, we look at Moses’ faith in God’s fidelity and the way he spoke to God as to a friend.

Moses is most famous as the liberator of the Hebrew people, whom he led out of Egypt to the Promised Land. But he is also known as a lawgiver: He received the tablets of the Law from God.

But it was not these two identities of liberator and lawgiver that Benedict XVI reflected on in his June 1, 2011, audience dedicated to Moses. Instead, he focused on Moses as a man of prayer. Indeed, Israel’s liberator was an outstanding example of prayer. There are three essential reasons for this characteristic of his personality — reasons that can inspire us as Christians.

Prayer stems from friendship with God

First, Moses lived a very close relationship with God. At the beginning of his audience, Benedict XVI reminds us of the verse from the book of Exodus: “The Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Ex 33:11).

This familiarity with the Lord gave him the impetus to speak to him, pray to him, and entrust to him the desires of the people under his care. This verse is very instructive for us, because it illustrates an important truth: Praying to God requires cultivating an ongoing and increasingly close relationship with Him.

The love of God, who is faithful

The second reason why Moses was a man of prayer is his love of God. On this subject, Benedict XVI briefly recalls the circumstances of the people’s sin in the episode of the golden calf: the fugitives preferred a visible idol to the invisible God of Sinai. Faced with this inconsistency and this desire to belittle the divine mystery by exchanging glory for the image of a ruminant, God threatens his people.

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It is at this point that Moses intervenes, saying to God, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’” (Ex 32:11-12).

In this interpellation, Moses’ prayer becomes the advocate of God’s faithfulness! Moses reminds him that it was he, in his goodness, who led Israel out of slavery.

“Moses’ supplication focuses entirely on the Lord’s faithfulness and grace,” says Benedict XVI. As if, in his prayer, Moses were reminding God who He is!

Moses is concerned about God’s reputation among other peoples. So this prayer, which appeals to God against his own divine desire to abandon his people, can only derive from a deep love of God on Moses’ part. This love itself is linked to an intimate knowledge of divine mercy as Moses experienced it during the exodus from Egypt. Here again, what a lesson for us! To pray is also to care for the Lord’s affairs. Doesn’t the Our Father begin with the request to sanctify the divine Name?

Moses prays in solidarity with his people

Last but not least, the third characteristic of Moses’ prayer is his love for the people he leads. After the sin of the golden calf, he intercedes with God, begging forgiveness. In the same vein, Moses asks for the healing of Miriam, stricken with leprosy because she had slandered her brother (Num 12:9-13).

Benedict XVI emphasizes the extent to which Moses shows solidarity with his people, to the point of renouncing the prospect of becoming the father of a new people to replace Israel. Here, Benedict XVI emphasizes the Christ-like dimension of Moses, who prefers to identify with the people and suffer the same fate as they do, rather than become the seed of another people. “if you will only forgive their sin—but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written” (Ex 32:32), he says to God.

Christ will have the same attitude at Calvary. Benedict XVI explains that Jesus’ prayer expresses not only his solidarity with mankind, but above all his identification with us, to the point of becoming sin for us (2 Cor 5:21): Christ “bears all of us in his Body,” says the Pope.

Moses’ solidarity with his people is a model to nourish our prayer. In prayer groups, it’s not uncommon for participants to implore God’s mercy on behalf of those they know who are in difficulty. In this way, they repeat what Moses did in the Sinai desert, for example, when he interceded on behalf of the victims of the poisonous serpents (Num 21:4-9). In this general audience, Benedict XVI rightly reminded us that Moses was not only a political liberator and lawgiver, but also a man of prayer from whom we can draw inspiration to address God.