Daily Reading for March 10

The desert witnesses to the confrontation with God in terrible simplicity, it is the ‘primal scriptural symbol of the absence of all human aid and comfort’. Here, in the experience of waste and emptiness, of liberation through and from oppression, Christians have seen the foreshadowing of the redeeming work of God in Christ. The Exodus thus holds a central place in Christian liturgy and spirituality as we celebrate and experience inwardly our own deliverance from bondage. So St Gregory of Nyssa told his hearers: “Cross the Jordan, hasten towards the new life in Christ, to the land that bears fruit in happiness, flowing with milk and honey, according to the promise. Overthrow Jericho, your former way of life!. . . All these things are figures of the reality which is now made manifest.”

From Experiencing God: Theology as Spirituality by Kenneth Leech (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985).