The Lively Lectionary Old Testament is a blog that reflects on the Old Testament text from the Revised Common Lectionary each week.
Refusing to look at the contexts in which texts are ensconced is to run the risk of completely misrepresenting and misusing material for foolish or even dangerous purposes. Today’s reading presents such a problem.
In the central “resurrection story” wherein the Israelite slaves escape from their Egyptian captors by the power of YHWH and the servant Moses, sea and land are at the center of the story.
Deuteronomy 34 presents to us a kind of coda on the literary life of the great lawgiver, a portrait that Deuteronomy shapes throughout his lengthy book. For Deuteronomy, Moses is most especially a prophet, a role not particularly emphasized in earlier accounts in Exodus, though his calling at the famous bush becomes the very model of later prophetic calls.
In this final episode from Exodus, the question of a human conception of God is raised forcefully, and at the same time with traditional Hebrew delight.
Why is Aaron portrayed here as the enabler of human sin, as the purveyor of evil, as the maker of one of the Bible’s most notorious and memorable objects of sin? In other words, who wrote this story? On the one hand, that is a question we can never answer. On the other, a literary answer may be surmised.
Because all life is in fact God’s life, we humans take life at our peril. No killing, however it is done, and whomever is termed our foe, can never be the cause for rejoicing.
Given all that, I still must say that I have never had a “real” experience of the presence of God. I am hardly alone in my desire for some genuine evidence of God.
As the old spiritual said of Jesus during his final trial and death, “he never said a mumblin’ word.” To the contrary, the newly-freed slaves from Egypt are just full of mumblin’, more traditionally “murmuring” or “grumbling,” words, as they find themselves facing the terrifying and unyielding deserts of the Sinai.
Today’s text forms the very heart of the Israelite belief system; it is their resurrection story. On the west bank of the sea, they were Egyptian slaves, and on the east bank, after the miraculous defeat of pharaoh and his armies, they are the people of YHWH.
Suddenly, we find ourselves immersed in the world of ritual, a place of precise dates correct foods, and cultic practice. Why is it here? Why should we now read about a Passover ritual that certainly was not instituted in the wilderness, but surely was created by a people with the leisure to celebrate their foundational story?
I am most attracted today to the confrontation between the mighty pharaoh, at the time the world’s grandest, most powerful ruler, and the two Hebrew midwives, women designated as guides and helpers for the onerous and too often deadly task of child birth.
The scene of Joseph’s revelation of himself to his brothers has often lead to all manner of claims of Joseph’s wonderful forgiveness of them, despite their dastardly attempts to murder him in the desert, abandoning him in that fearful dry well.
© SMU Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence
