Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
10th of September 2023
Exodus 12:1-14
Later this month I am going to be a guest on a podcast that will talk about a book written by comic fantasy author Terry Pratchett. If you enjoy fantasy and have never read Pratchett’s Discworld series, you are seriously missing out. They are brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny. However, the book I have been asked to read is the fourth in a ‘Science of Discworld’ series, which has alternate non-fiction chapters written by two scientists, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, and it is driving me mad. The theme is set by a quote at the beginning: ‘Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.’ Stewart and Cohen argue that religion argues for something called ‘belief’ which is based on faith, as opposed to scientific truth which is based on evidence, and say that science and religion will never be reconcilable until religions discard the supernatural.[1] They compare the scientific method with what they believe religions do: scientists accumulate knowledge by trying to prove themselves wrong, while, ‘few faith-based systems advocate self-doubt as a desirable instrument of change.’[2]
It surprises me that a book, one of whose three authors had been brought up an Orthodox Jew with a grandfather who was a Rabbi,[3] makes this argument. Jews invented self-doubt, and the Hebrew Scriptures are testament to the constant debate between those who believed that Israel should behave like other nations and those who argued that it should be distinctly different, between those who demanded a king to rule over them and those who claimed that Israel’s polity should prioritize the needs of the widows and the orphans. The Hebrew Scriptures have God demanding that Israel commit genocide to occupy the Promised Land, (Deuteronomy 20:17) and yet in the very same book God commands that during the harvest some wheat, olives, and grapes should be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow. (Deuteronomy 24:17-22)
So we come to today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures. It may not surprise you that in my sixteen years of ministry I have never previously preached on God’s murder of the first-born of Egypt, from ‘the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock’. (Exodus 12:29) The lectionary itself seems embarrassed by this story; in today’s reading we are told that God ‘will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals,’ but we are not shown it, and the lectionary never gives us a reading in which we hear that ‘there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead’. (Exodus 12:30) In the next reading the lectionary offers us the Israelites are well on their way to their forty years of wandering in the desert, having first plundered the Egyptians of their silver and gold and clothing. (Exodus 12:35-37)
Today’s story is a story of God committing murder. There are nine plagues before this tenth ‘plague’ of death, but in most of those previous plagues Moses and Aaron act on God’s command: Aaron lifts his staff over the Nile and it becomes blood (Exodus 7:14-25); Aaron stretches his hand over the waters of Egypt and frogs appear (Exodus 8:1-15); Aaron strikes the dust with his staff and it becomes gnats (Exodus 8:16-19); Moses throws soot in the air and wherever it touches boils fester (Exodus 9:8-12); Moses stretches out his staff toward heaven and thunder and hail and fire rain down (Exodus 9:22-35); Moses stretches out his hand and locusts appear (Exodus 10:12-20); Moses stretches out his hand toward heaven and there is dense darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days (Exodus 10:21-29). The only times plagues appear without an instigating act by Aaron or Moses are the fourth plague of flies (Exodus 8:20-32) and the fifth plague of the death of all the livestock of the Egyptians (Exodus 9:1-7). But neither Moses nor Aaron does anything to bring about the death of the firstborn; while all the plagues are in some sense ‘acts of God’ we are specifically told that it is the Lord who strikes down all the firstborn at midnight. God is killing children.
Before the plagues even begin, the Lord tells Moses, ‘I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and I will multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt’. (Exodus 7:3) Again and again, as plague follows plague, we are told of Pharaoh’s hard heart. Sometimes he hardens his own heart: ‘he sinned once more and hardened his heart, he and his officials’ (Exodus 9:34), but at least five times we are told that ‘the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh’ (Exodus 9:14, 10:1, 10:20, 10:27, 11:10). Pharoah must take responsibility for the times he hardens his own heart, but what about the times the Lord does it? Had the Lord not hardened Pharoah’s heart after the plague of festering boils, there would have been no need for the Lord to go on to kill livestock, strike down all the plants of the field, shatter every tree in the field, and murder children.
The Apostle Paul raises this very question in his Letter to the Romans, and his answer is that since God made us God can do what God likes with us? ‘Who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God? Will what is moulded say to the one who moulds it, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one object for special use and another for ordinary use?’ (Romans 9:20-21) One of the articles I read this week makes the same argument: ‘Christians are obliged to praise and worship God, regardless of whether or not we understand His actions’. That is the sort of ‘religion is answers that may never be questioned’ argument that I found so frustrating in The Science of Discworld. I am never going to accept that there may be a good reason for the slaughter of numerous humans and animals, nor could I ever worship a murderous god. Given that, why did I not choose today to preach a gentle sermon about how when two or three of us are gathered in Jesus’ name, he will be among us?
Context is everything. I read the Bible as an Anglo-Celtic Australian, which means that I am one of the most privileged people to ever have lived in human history. I am the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants who left behind their families and friends and everything they knew and journeyed to a foreign land, but the members of my family were welcomed when they came here as economic migrants. My English grandparents had both British and Australian passports all their lives, and swapped between them depending on where they were. Visiting Scotland? They were Australian, not English. Visiting France while it was doing nuclear testing in the Pacific? They were English, not Australian. I was born only five years after my mother first arrived in this country, but because my skin is white no one ever asks me where I really come from. I have never experienced racism or rejection because of my ethnicity or faith, so I must work hard to imagine being in the situation of the Israelites in Egypt. My immediate response to the story of God attacking the Egyptians is abhorrence, because I am committed to a God who loves all people without impartiality. And, of course, that is true. God does love the torturer as much as the tortured; the military dictator as much as the ‘disappeared’; the slave-owner as much as the slave. But the message of the Exodus is that God is not on the side of the torturer, the military dictator, the slave owner.
The story of the Exodus is the story of God not simply listening to the cries of the oppressed but taking their side and challenging their oppressors. As one theologian writes: ‘A God siding with the tyrants would be a God of malevolence; a God siding with no one would appear to be a God of indifference but would also be a God of malevolence, giving support to the tyrants by not opposing them; only a God siding with the oppressed would be a God of justice, a God worthy of the name.’[4] Do I believe in a God who hardens Pharoah’s heart so as to do signs and wonders, who kills the firstborn of Egypt to prove a point? No. Do I believe in a God who in the conflict between Egypt and Israel is on the side of the Israelites? Absolutely.
What do we do if, through no fault of our own, we find ourselves on the side of the Egyptians? If we are the child of a Hebrew woman who has been raised as an Egyptian by the daughter of Pharoah, or a member of the majority community in the Promised Land, or an Anglo-Celtic Australian? Then we are to join in God’s campaign for liberation and justice, on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressors. God called Moses to join in the struggle for the freedom of his people; indeed, despite Moses’ repeated protests, God called him to lead it. (Exodus 4) Once Israel had entered the Promised Land and become a nation they were reminded again and again, ‘You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.’ (Exodus 23:9) ‘The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.’ (Leviticus 19:34) ‘You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’. (Deuteronomy 10:19) We, like the Israelites, need to remember that the God we worship is the one who sides with the alien, the widow, and the orphan, the vulnerable and the enslaved and the oppressed, and make sure that we act on God’s side.
The Exodus is at the heart of the Jewish faith. The God of the Jewish people is not primarily the Creator of the cosmos, although God is of course that, too, but the Liberator, the one who brought Israel up out of the land of Egypt. This is the liberating God that Jesus spoke about in his Nazareth Manifesto: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ (Luke 4:18-19) Christians believe that in Jesus the God who is on the side of the poor and oppressed became one of the poor and oppressed, and was executed by an occupying power in solidarity with all those tortured and killed by military dictatorships. The God who freed the slaves and led them from Egypt is the God who raised Jesus from the dead in the world’s most pointed act of civil disobedience.
And if anyone ever suggests to you that Christianity demands belief in a god who murders children to prove a point, you can tell them that faith advocates self-doubt as a desirable instrument of change, and long ago decided that the story of God inflicting the ten plagues on Egypt is just that – a story.
[1] Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Judgement Day: The Science of Discworld IV (2014), pp. 38-40.
[2] Judgement Day, p. 36.
[4] Robert McAfee Brown, Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984), p. 41.
Rev Doc Geek 