Exodus 3:1–3

Exodus 3:1 — The shepherd at the edge of the world

The verse establishes Moses in a posture of hiddenness and humility. Forty years have passed since his flight from Egypt (Acts 7:30). He is no longer the prince of Pharaoh's court but a shepherd in the employ of his father-in-law, Jethro — called here "priest of Midian," a detail that signals Jethro's role as a mediator of the sacred in his own tradition, though the true priesthood of Israel has yet to be instituted. Moses leads the flock "to the back of the wilderness" (Hebrew: 'achar hamidbar), a phrase meaning "the far side" or "the remotest part" — the edge of inhabited space. This geographical movement is spiritually charged: Moses goes where no one else ventures, and it is precisely there, at the extreme margin of the ordinary world, that he encounters the extraordinary. "God's mountain" (Horeb) is identified with Sinai, where the covenant and the Law will later be given (Exodus 19–20). The mountain appears here before the Law, before the covenant — as the site of pure encounter, of meeting God for God's own sake.

Exodus 3:2 — The angel in the flame

"The angel of Yahweh" (mal'ak YHWH) is a theologically pregnant phrase throughout the Old Testament. In many appearances (cf. Genesis 16:7–13; Judges 13:21–22), the Angel of the Lord speaks and acts in the first person as God himself, and is identified with God by the narrator and the human recipients of the vision. The Church Fathers — most prominently Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 60) and later Origen and Augustine — identified the Angel of the Lord in these theophanies with the pre-incarnate Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity. This reading is not a later imposition: the New Testament itself points in this direction, for Stephen in Acts 7:35 speaks of the angel who appeared "in the bush," and yet verses 37–38 make clear this is the Lord God himself. The fire ('esh) is classically the element of divine presence in Scripture: God leads Israel as a pillar of fire, descends on Sinai in fire, and is called "a consuming fire" in Deuteronomy 4:24. Yet here the fire does not consume. The bush (seneh) burns without being burned up ('aynennu 'ukal) — a grammatical construction that emphasizes ongoing duration: the bush keeps not being consumed. This is not a momentary flash but a sustained, impossible burning. The miracle is not in the ignition but in the persistence: fire that gives light and heat without destroying what it inhabits.

Exodus 3:3 — Moses turns aside

"I will go now and see" — the Hebrew 'asur-na' literally means "let me turn aside." Moses must make a choice to deviate from his path, to interrupt his ordinary labor, to pay attention. This small act of turning is the hinge on which everything else in the narrative turns. God waits for Moses to notice, and when Moses turns (v. 4), then God calls his name. The Fathers observed that the spiritual life begins with this turning — the conversio — away from distraction and toward the divine. Moses names the sight "a great vision" (hammar'eh hagadol hazzeh): he recognizes immediately that something qualitatively beyond the ordinary is before him, even before he understands what it is.

Typological and spiritual senses

The burning bush is one of the richest typological images in the Old Testament. The Catholic tradition, drawing from both patristic sources and the liturgy itself, reads the bush as a figure of the Virgin Mary: she who bore the divine fire — the very Word made flesh — without being consumed, whose human nature was not overwhelmed by the fullness of divinity dwelling within her. This interpretation is attested from at least the fourth century; Gregory of Nyssa (Life of Moses II.20–21) writes: "The thornbush...prefigured the mystery of the Virgin." The Eastern liturgies sing explicitly of Mary as "the bush that burns with fire yet is not consumed." The fire itself prefigures the Holy Spirit at Pentecost — tongues of flame that rest upon the disciples without burning them (Acts 2:3). Horeb/Sinai as the mountain of encounter anticipates the New Covenant made on another mountain, and the Transfiguration on Tabor (Matthew 17:1–8), where Jesus is revealed as blazing light to his closest disciples.

Catholic tradition brings a distinctive depth to this passage on at least three levels.

The identity of the Angel as the pre-incarnate Christ. The identification of the mal'ak YHWH with the Logos is not merely a patristic curiosity but reflects a coherent Catholic hermeneutic: the Old Testament is read in the light of Christ. The Catechism teaches that "the economy of the Old Testament was deliberately so oriented that it should prepare for and declare in prophecy the coming of Christ" (CCC §122). The Angel who appears in fire is the same One who will say "Before Abraham was, I AM" (John 8:58), alluding directly to the divine name revealed just a few verses later (Exodus 3:14).

The theology of divine presence. The fire that burns without consuming expresses an essential paradox of the Christian God: he is infinite, transcendent, and "consuming" in holiness (Hebrews 12:29), yet he does not annihilate what he enters; he divinizes it. This is the logic of the Incarnation itself — divinity indwelling humanity without destroying it — and the logic of grace more broadly. The Catechism's teaching on divinization (theosis), drawn from St. Athanasius and St. Thomas Aquinas, resonates here: "The Word of God...became what we are so that he might make us what he himself is" (CCC §460).

Mary and the Church as burning bush. The Marian typology of the bush has deep liturgical roots in the Eastern Catholic traditions and is affirmed across centuries of Western devotion. Mary's fiat made her the locus of the divine indwelling; like the bush, she was not consumed but hallowed. The same logic extends to the Church: the Body of Christ, shot through with divine life, yet composed of frail and sinful human beings who are not destroyed but transformed.

The burning bush speaks with startling directness to the contemporary Catholic. Moses did not encounter God while performing a religious rite or in a moment of spiritual preparation — he was at work, managing sheep at the edge of nowhere. The encounter broke into the mundane without warning, and it required only one thing of Moses: that he stop and look.

Modern Catholic life is relentlessly distracted. We carry devices that fracture attention into fragments; our prayer is often rushed, perfunctory, squeezed between obligations. The burning bush invites a very specific examination of conscience: When did I last "turn aside" — truly deviate from my routine to pay sustained attention to something holy? The bush was burning all along. Moses had to notice it.

For Catholics who feel spiritually dry — who wonder if God is absent from ordinary life — this passage insists that the divine presence does not always announce itself with drama. It burns quietly, steadily, at the edge of the ordinary. The invitation is to cultivate a habit of holy attention: lectio divina, a moment of silence before the tabernacle, a deliberate pause before a crucifix. The fire is there. The question is whether we, like Moses, will turn aside to see.