Exodus 14.19-31, Matthew 18.21-35
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, 17 September 2023, Austwick, Eldroth
If we want to get a sense of how it might have been for the Israelites waiting in the wilderness before they crossed the Red Sea, from modern times, we might recall the Kabul Airlift of August 2021, following the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. You might remember those reports from Kabul Airport, showing people massing on the concourse in 40˚C heat awaiting a flight to safety: interviews with some unsure of whether they would be granted passage; the panic and the crushing as the deadline to the end of the evacuation approached and people faced the prospect of being left behind; the occasional interviewee saying that they’d decided to stay, prepared to risk a hazardous life under the Taliban they knew, over the uncertainty of crossing over into an unknown situation. [1]
The picture which Exodus paints looks very similar, of the Israelites escaping Egyptian slavery crowding together near the sea coast, with the added tension of the Pharaoh’s army closing in on them, intent on bringing them back to Egypt by force. If the outcome is quite different that’s because it didn’t rely on the logistics of NATO forces; it depended on the miraculous power of God.
Now, whilst the evacuation of Kabul was a compelling moment in modern history, every historian and archeologist who has searched for evidence of the parting of the Red Sea has had to conclude that it is a fiction. [2] But what a fiction; what a very powerful myth; as you may have heard me say last week, the Exodus is a rare story which has changed the world forever. It may be Israel’s folklore, fashioned through centuries of retelling, but the Exodus has impacted all human history so completely that we cannot imagine our world without it. [3]
For all those peoples who have resisted their enslavement, for all those peoples who have struggled for freedom, in so many different circumstances, and who still do today, this story of a God - unique among all the gods - who sets captives free, has awoken hope in them, and empowered them in their movement towards liberty. It might be hard for us to imagine, but without this story having been told, there may never have been any movements to end slavery and liberate subjugated people around the world.
The Exodus is a story of a God who - unique among all gods - is on the side of the victim. ‘Though I am poor and needy, the Lord cares for me’, says the writer of Psalm 40. [4] This is an insight which turned the world upside down when it was first revealed through Yahweh’s dealings with the Hebrew slaves. ‘You are my helper and my deliverer, O my God,’ the Psalmist continues. The helper of the poor - unlike any of the other gods, who only ever privilege the rich; the deliverer of the enslaved - unique among the principalities and powers whose work in this world is to sustain the wealth and dominion of the few by exploiting the many. This God of the Exodus, this is our God, whose love liberates us to live in the light of his freedom in our place and time.
And yet there is something in this story which does not sit well with us. For even as we celebrate the Israelites’ freedom, we may find ourselves asking, ‘What about the Egyptians? Why did they have to suffer so cruelly?’ Those ten plagues, from the rivers of blood to the deaths of their first born: why would God be so callous? The closing of the waters of the Red Sea; could God not have done that before the soldiers entered them, to block their passage, but to spare their lives?
We are faced, here as in many other places in the Old Testament, with a God who may be loving and faithful to the previously suffering people of Israel, but who treats other peoples vengefully, who is excessively violent in his acts of retribution. Many of us struggle with this God, because this is meant to be our God, and yet we fear to associate with him.
Now it is possible to not think about the violent God of the Old Testament, to ignore or skip over him, to treat him as irrelevant. But isn’t that a luxury which the Egyptians couldn’t afford? Which today’s evacuees from religious violence can’t afford? Which, most strikingly, the Jews caught up in the Holocaust couldn’t afford?
In the play God on Trial, a fictional dramatisation of what Elie Wiesel witnessed at Auschwitz, a group of prisoners awaiting their deaths later that day debate why God is allowing his children to be massacred. One of their number, Rabbi Akiba, speaks of the Exodus and all the Egyptians who are supposedly slaughtered by God, them and others in scripture who were murdered at God’s command, and he asks, ‘Did the Amalekites think that Adonai was just? Did the mothers of Egypt think that Adonai was just?’ Another prisoner, Idek, answers, 'But Adonai is our God.'
Akiba replies: 'Did God not make the Egyptians? Did he not make their rivers and their crops grow? If not Adonai, then who? Some other god? And what did he make them for? To punish them? To starve, to frighten, and to slaughter them? The people of Amalek, the people of Egypt, what was it like when Adonai turned against them? It was like this. . .’
In the Holocaust, Rabbi Akiba says, the Jews learned how it was for all those who were slaughtered by Israel’s God. ‘And what did they learn?’ he asks. ‘They learned that Adonai, the Lord our God, our God, is not good. He is not good. He was not ever good. He was only on our side.’ [5]
What I hope we might learn from this difficult discussion is that scripture tells us more than one story about God. It tells us about the tribal god who is on the side of one people and whose power is expressed through violence exacted against the enemies of his chosen tribe. But it also tells us about ‘the God of all creation whose power breaks into the world in acts of compassion and love, which break down the walls of hostility that structure all ordinary human culture and religion’. [6]
Exodus is a rare story which has changed the world forever. It has changed our world. We know this whenever we find ourselves asking the question, ‘What about the suffering Egyptians?’
Why should we care about the fate of the Egyptians, for they are not our tribe? Why should we care about the slaves, for they are not our people? Or for the Jews, for they are not of us? [7]
Something in Exodus permits us to think that way. To think tribally. And sadly, sometimes we do. But something else in Exodus arouses in us, empathy for the struggling ones, compassion for the victims. Whoever they are. And that something else is an aspect of God who, I would argue, we see more and more of, as the Old Testament merges into the New, and is revealed most fully in Jesus. [8]
We have to live, I’m afraid, with the violent God of the Old Testament. We live questioning whether ‘God’s perplexing ways’ may ‘be understood’. But - because we have already embraced this part of his story - we live in faith that helps us ‘say that love is real, and God is love.’ [9]
Notes
[1] Larissa Kennelly, Hours without food or water in Kabul airport 'hell'. BBC News, 23 August 2021; Wikipedia: 2021 Kabul Airlift.
[2] Wikipedia: Crossing the Red Sea.
[3] In a relationship built on grace and gratitude, the enslaved people go free. My talk from 10 September 2023.
[4] Psalm 40.18-19.
[5] Wikipedia: God on Trial; extract from Akiba’s speech quoted in Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year A, Proper 19A.
[6] Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary, Reflections, Year A, Proper 19A.
[7] Why did we sing when the Egyptians drowned? Jewish Chronicle, 18 April 2014.
[8] Anthony W. Bartlett, Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible. p.8-9, p.56-61; Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible's Evolution of Divine Nonviolence. pp.1-23.
[9] Brian Wren, Will God Be Judge? [PDF]. Quote from v.2 below:
1
Will God be judge, and will there be a time,
timeless, yet final, in a world new-born,
when all is weighed, accounted for, made good?
Faith says, Amen, we know not how or when,
but pray and hope for justice seen and done.
2
Will God be judged, and satisfy the slain,
destroyed by torture, genocide and greed?
Will God’s perplexing ways be understood?
Faith says, Amen, we know not how or when,
but say that love is real, and God is love.
3
Will Jew and Christian walk at last in love?
Will clashing faiths be honoured and fulfilled
as pilgrims dance in galaxies of truth?
Faith says, Amen, we know not how or when,
but being found, are seeking yet to find.
4
Christ is our sign, our window into God:
this freeing life, unfinished by a cross,
awakens hope, and points a way ahead.
Let Faith’s Amen be changing us for good,
to live as friends of God, and practice love.
Brian Wren © 1993 Hope Publishing Company
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