Exodus 12.1-14, Matthew 18.15-20
The Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, 10 September 2023, Austwick, Keasden
There are some stories which change our world. Stories which impress themselves so strongly on us that they will alter the way we view things, forever. Think of those stories which we cherish from childhood which have helped us form our view of life; think of those stories which have become embedded in the culture of whole societies, shaping their character.
The Exodus story is one of these. A tale set thirteen centuries before Christ, which has impacted history so completely that we cannot imagine our world without it. The story of how a previously unknown God rescued a previously insignificant people from a life of slavery and set them on a journey to a land of promise: Exodus has inspired countless movements for liberation.
In recent modern times the leaders of slave revolts hoped to re-enact the Exodus. Escape from America’s Southern states to the North was imagined as a flight from Egypt. Harriet Tubman, a ‘conductor’ on the Underground Railroad, was celebrated as a black Moses. Spirituals such as ‘Go Down Moses’ described America as ‘Egyptland’ and told old Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!’ [1]
In our own day theologian James Cone describes how Yahweh heard the groaning of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt and ‘took heed of it’, and how this Exodus story was taken up by the Black churches because ‘the central image and dynamic of the biblical story “met their historical need”. And Phyllis Trible refers to the Exodus as a “compelling… theme of liberation from oppression” which “speaks forcefully to Women’s Liberation.”’ [2]
The Exodus story has inspired countless books, films, and other works of art over the centuries, and still does. As recently as 2006 the seaside town of Margate, Kent, hosted The Margate Exodus, the story of Exodus told for the present day as a feature film for theatrical release, which brought together international and local artists and the town’s general population to create what the filmmaker Penny Woolcock called ‘a timeless story of identity, migration and the great movement of peoples in search of a promised land.’ 30 September 2006 was dubbed ‘Exodus Day’ in Margate. A fictional politician gave an incendiary speech to a real crowd; in the evening ten ‘plague songs’ were performed – one for each of the ten deadly plagues – while above it all Antony Gormley’s giant combustible thrift sculpture, Waste Man, a Wicker Man made of Margate’s rubbish, representing a Pharaoh of our broken consumer society, was burned to the ground in front of an audience of thousands. [3]
It seems that whenever people have cried out for liberation from their sufferings, wherever people have pleaded for freedom from bondage to oppressive masters of whatever kind, the Exodus story has inspired them to believe that their voices will be heard… by a divine heart who will let those people go.
It is such a powerful story that it finds its way into the very centrepiece of our acts of Christian worship week by week, the eucharist. For the Exodus begins with a meal around a common table, as outside the Hebrews’ homes the angel of the Lord goes about his liberating work; and surely Jesus knew exactly the symbolic power of what he was doing when he chose the Passover as the time for his last supper, and told his followers to aways remember him in that way.
And so today,
“Through him you have freed us from the slavery of sin,” say our eucharistic prayers,
“Through him you have sent upon us your holy and life-giving Spirit, and made us a people for your own possession.”
Like the Hebrews in their homes at the very first Passover, here, around our communion table, we wait on God to deliver us from all that harms us. Like everyone who has ever cried in hope for liberation from oppression, as we set out from our Sunday gathering, God walks with us to guide our feet on a path to freedom.
Now, there is much about the Exodus story which might trouble us, not least the suffering of the ordinary Egyptian people in the plagues visited upon them by Yahweh. The story was forged in a brutal world where people believed that their gods were jealous and violent in the same way as their rulers were. But there is, breaking through the Exodus story, something quite new about this particular God and his ways with his people. To understand it in all its power we have to try to do something difficult; we have to try to imagine a world before The Exodus, a world which had not yet heard that story or soaked in its meaning.
We have to try to imagine how strange and new is this God who observed the misery of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt; a God who heard their cry on account of their taskmasters, a God who told them that he knew their sufferings. [4]
This is remarkable because no god before had ever sided with the powerless, rather than with those in power. No god before had ever expressed solidarity with human suffering in that way.
And it is remarkable because it is personal. This God is using a new, transformational language previously unheard; a personal, relational language. ‘I am the God of your father,’ he told Moses, ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ [5] This is uniquely a God who wants to be known, and wants to be close, to his beloved people.
The other remarkable thing about the liberation of the Hebrew slaves is that God did not want them to fight for it. God did the work - while they ate the Passover feast. God does not require them to take up the sword against their oppressors; all that God asks them to do in response to his liberation is to always remember that he is the LORD their God, who brought them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. [6]
In a relationship built on grace and gratitude, the enslaved people go free.
How this story has changed our world over the years….. How can we let this story change our world today?
John Davies
Notes
[1] John Coffey, 'Let My People Go!' History Today,15 Dec 2014
[2] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible's Evolution of Divine Nonviolence. p.7,8.
[3] Penny Woolcock, Exodus. Artangel, 2006.
[4] Exodus 3.7.
[5] Anthony Bartlett, Seven Stories: How to Study and Teach the Nonviolent Bible. p.56-58; Exodus 3.6.
[6] Exodus 20.2.
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