When the brothers of Joseph came to Egypt to buy food, Joseph said to them: ‘Ye are spies; to see the nakedness of the land ye are come’. This is a psychological direct hit. He accuses them with something in which they are not guilty, but they have a real guilt to hide. They wanted to kill Joseph and sold them to be a slave, and they lied to their father about his disappearance. This sentence triggers out a remembrance in them, and the process of admitting their guilt.
What is the sentence that God pronounces over us, in this Lent, to bring about a similar purification of our hearts? The function of the apocalypse in Matthew’s Gospel is a similarly healing message. ‘And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? Verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down… And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places. All these things are the beginning of sorrows.’
Going through the images of the end-times, we are shaken to the very ground of our souls. This inner earthquake brings to surface what is hidden in us, what is unfinished, what is un-mourned and un-corrected.
These are verbal Icons, expressions of how the world is seen from Saint Augustine's..