The Lively Lectionary Old Testament is a blog that reflects on the Old Testament text from the Revised Common Lectionary each week.
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.
With Gen.37 we begin the long tale of Joseph, often termed a novella, a kind of mini-novel that concludes the book of Genesis. Like his famous ancestors Abraham and Jacob, he is a deeply flawed character and yet finds himself employed by a near-silent YHWH to effect a mysterious divine will.
I say that the wrestling match at Jabbok cannot be fully comprehended without the succeeding meeting of the two brothers. It is there that God is fully revealed.
What are we to make of this story of trickery, deception, and clever dealings? No character here is to emulated; the Bible does not say ever “be like Jacob” or “take Laban as your model for living.” What the Bible instead implies is: just how is the great God going to make anything out of these rascals? And, it follows, just how is God going to make anything out of us? How indeed.
Context is always crucial when one reads any biblical text, but that is doubly true when examining Gen.28, the tale of Jacob’s mysterious ladder dream. The story is wonderfully spooky, deliciously important, and delightfully funny all at the same time.
© SMU Perkins Center for Preaching Excellence
