It can be a bit intimidating to open the Book of Exodus, at least it is to me, and today is the first Sunday of a series of many lessons that will takes us to the end of October, almost to the season of Advent. But Exodus is such a big book isn’t? It’s a long book and there is so much going on: The burning bush, the plagues, the parting of the waters, the Ten commandments, the golden calf, a lot of those episodes we know well, or believe we know well because we have seen the movies. But indeed, and of course it’s difficult to say, but I guess that if we had just one book to keep from all the Hebrew Bible, that would have to be the Book of Exodus. Not just because of all the epic stuff we may rightly delight in, but mostly because it says so much about who our God is, and what God expects from us. A commentator says something that I think is really important. He says that the Book of Exodus introduces us to a moral God. So far indeed, even if we have learned through Genesis that God hates evil, we have mostly dealt with the Creator God and the God of the promise, the God who raises a people. This God already contrasted very much with the God of Ancient mythologies who aren’t very preoccupied with the dealing and well being of the human race. But in Exodus, there is something even newer: This God of the Hebrews is holy, and expects holiness from God’s people. We may think that the most important passage of Exodus is the liberation of the people from slavery, but we miss the whole point if we don’t understand that there is a purpose to this liberation. The people are taken out of Egypt to worship God and to receive God’s commandments. The heart of the action is what happens in the wilderness, at Mount Sinai, not along the banks of the Nile, and not even at the Red Sea.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
For now again, it may be a bit intimidating to start this study of Exodus indeed, and yet at hearing today’s lesson we may realize that we have humble beginnings. The passage tells us about the birth of Moses and how he was rescued from Pharaoh’s persecution by not less that five women: His mother and sister, two midwives, and a princess. It sounds almost like a fairy tale and yet, if we are familiar with ancient myths, we may quickly realize that it is anything but. The story actually emphasizes that Moses was a regular, “fine” child, born from a human mother and a human father counted among the slave people, people of no power or influence. Moses wasn’t a god and therefore should not be worshiped as a god. Moses’s family is ordinary, the midwives have a humble job, and the princess, even if she is Pharaoh’s daughter, was expected to submit completely to her father’s authority, and by herself is of little power and influence. And yet what stands out is that all of these women together are going to defeat the murderous plans of the Great King, and save the one the reader already knows to become the liberator of the Hebrew people, as God had promised from the beginnings.
Now you may know that it has been said, again and again, that God can use all sorts of people, unexpected people, to God’s service and to carry God’s will. I think this is very true and we find that again and again in the Bible: Abraham, who was 75 years old when he left everything to head towards the land of Canaan, David, a young shepherd with his sling who defeated Goliath and became a king, Judith, Esther, Mary of Nazareth, and so on and so. All kind of people indeed. And yet. And yet I think we’re still quite wrong if we start claiming that God can use anybody in any circumstances because all those characters, and I believe all the people God ever use, they have one thing in common. And what is the one thing they have in common? They have courage.
Indeed it is quite clear from the story we’ve just heard that all the women in the story are willing to risk their lives to save the life of baby Moses. The mother, obviously disobeying Pharaoh’s orders hiding her child, the sister, following the basket and daring to suggest a nurse to the princess, the princess who could have been punished very sternly for something that could be assimilated to treason, protecting the enemy, and then of course the two midwives whose bravery have made their names Shiphrah and Puah remembered over the centuries. Now one thing we may miss, and our translation isn’t helping, is that these women were probably not “Hebrew midwives” but “Midwives to the Hebrews”, the original text could mean both, and another clue is that they talk about the Hebrew women using the third person. Also, Pharaoh was probably not stupid to the point of asking Hebrew women to kill their own babies. Which makes the courage of these women even more outstanding. One would be willing to risk their lives for their own people, but who would be willing to risk their lives to save the foreigner, the immigrant, the slave and the unborn? It has been say that our passage is the first record in history of civil disobedience, and I believe so. The women disobey and lie to the king for the sake of their own conscience, because, the story tells us, they fear God and have compassion on vulnerable people.
Observing that, the same commentator I mention earlier says something that hit me like a tons of brick – no pun intended. He says: “There are far more kind and honest people than there are courageous people. Unfortunately, however, in the battle against evil, all the good traits in the world amount to little when not accompanied by courage.” And I say it hit me like a tons of brick because there are passages of the Bible that seems so distant and odd, it can be really hard to relate to them, and then there are those passages that hit so close to home it’s almost unbearable, it’s like looking in a mirror and we really don’t like what we see. If you remember a few weeks ago, I also quoted this priest who said: When is it that we have decided that being a Christian was all about being nice? And I think here the commentator develops the same idea: What does it mean to be Christian if we are satisfied enough being decent, honest and kind, and we have no courage, and in the case of this passage, no courage against discrimination, oppression and unchecked power? Actually, being nice people may work against us, we become enablers: We just let evil things happen because we don’t want to be rude or negative.
Now to go back to our story, I don’t thing the midwives care much about being nice, they’re actually willing to lie to Pharaoh because in this case lying is the right thing to do to protect human lives. They aren’t being bold and impetuous, they are not “rebelling against the system” or even “getting political”, they are morally courageous, standing for the right against the wrong. And so, as we are now introduced to the “moral God” of the Book of Exodus, it is interesting to realize that the first virtue that is necessary to get the story going, to enable God’s work, is that some courageous people show up. And this makes me sad because as Christians we may indeed be kind and honest, but we may also have become people of little courage. We struggle with sharing our faith and denouncing the wrongs of our society, we don’t stand up when vulnerable people are targeted, violated and even dehumanized, we submit to power and sometimes even use the Bible to justify evil. But it’s so hard of course, when it’s just little us against the powers that be. And yet the story says, that’s the only hope, that’s the only way God is going to act: Through ordinary people like you and me. And so, that could be indeed very disheartening knowing how weak and afraid we can be.
And yet. Yet I find more than a glimmer of hope in our Gospel today. Peter, and we will hear more about him next week, Peter is chosen by Jesus to be, if you will, his prime minister, the one in charge of the house. We may have in our minds those images of Peter, or maybe even jokes about Peter, at the entrance of the pearly gates with his long register seeing who’s in and who’s out, but what the story refers to is actually a passage from Isaiah when Jerusalem is under threat, and there is a man named Eliakim, who is appointed to replace a corrupt official. God says of Eliakim: “I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David; he shall open, and no one shall shut; he shall shut, and no one shall open.” (Isaiah 22:22). Peter, like Eliakim, is given authority over all the kingdom, even though he is not the king. But we know Peter, right? He is the first one to confess Jesus’s divinity, yes and he is generous and loving but he has not courage, does he? Oh sure, he has a temper, he is bold, impetuous but that’s not moral courage. Peter he is very scared of getting caught, and suffering and dying. When Jesus announces his passion, he will deny such things can happen (next week reading), when Jesus is arrested he will run away from the priest’s courtyard. He won’t be standing at the cross with John and the women.
And yet, I say the story gives me hope because we know that Peter will die a martyr in the end, will be ready to offer his life for Christ. Something happened in between and he became courageous, outstandingly courageous. And our story today tells us actually where the midwives’ courage came from. Although they weren’t Hebrews, the women feared God it says, they knew in their hearts that there was a superior moral authority over Pharaoh’s worldly authority, and it gave them the courage to do the right thing. Maybe as Christians we have lost our fear of God somehow. Not that we should believe that God is going to punish us or send us to hell, but maybe we should remember that we are accountable to God, responsible for our brothers and sisters – and that what last week’s lesson, that was the conclusion of the book of Genesis with Joseph saving his family. The fear of God, it has been said, rather than crushing is in fact liberating. It means that there is something bigger than all the things and people we may be afraid of in this life.
If we fear God, then there is nothing else we need to be really afraid of and we discover what it means to be morally courageous: to live according to our conscience, as the midwives, or according to God’s commandments as the Hebrews will be later told to do. I think Peter also learned about being courageous when he came to grasp God’s greatness in Jesus’s resurrection.
And so, this is a good thing we are to study the book of Exodus because it is indeed a book about God’s power, God’s greatness and God’s moral demands. It teaches us how to fear God so there’s nothing else we can be afraid of. We may not have to behave like moral heroes every day and all start by doing the small things we are afraid of: Telling a friend how we really feel, asking a stranger if they need help, defending someone who is being disrespected, having this conversation we have been avoiding, starting something new…Because instead of working so hard to be nicer, maybe we all just need to become a little bit more courageous?