Canter Bridge

Were there not enough graves in Egypt …?

So do harassed and terrified Hebrew slaves interrogate their would-be liberator as the empire’s strength closes in on them like some mobile Berlin Wall.

… that you brought us out into this desert to die?’

Memories of slavery are often quaint.

Retrospect from the anguish of freedom erects tidy picket fences where there were none, red meat where one slurped gruel, tranquility where in fact one knew more than anything else the oppressor’s whip.

The book of Exodus probes not only a people’s history but the landscape of human experience, asking its reader not to look away from the fickleness of heart that prefers the security of the ‘house of slaves’ to wide open places where one must depend upon an unseen God bent on achieving freedom for daughters and sons.

It is in point of fact a reasonable dilemma. There are perks to slavery that are not to be scorned. Confidence about how things are, the egalitarian ignominy of suffering, the freedom to concentrate on the banal rather than to have one’s nose rubbed constantly in the imperative of choosing life or death.

Slavery boasts its luxuries, conveniences that are in fact profoundly attractive when the absence of light on the horizon has worn the soul down to smallness.

Freedom in the hands of a demanding God is what would one day be called ‘the road less traveled’. It is as frightening as making bricks in exchange for watery soup.

We are not wise to sentimentalize this thing that the Hebrew Bible calls ‘salvation’ or ‘liberation’. It is neither autonomy nor rest. Israel’s own name insinuates that it involves a wrestling with God who too often flees before dawn, leaving himself unnamed to the exhausted wrestler and his limp.

One must wonder, or at least one ought to wonder, why the biblical narrative insists that it is resolutely to be preferred. A hidden God, one speculates, has hidden wealth in liberation that is chiefly to be discovered in trackless wastes and—sometimes—in homes that others have built, vineyards that others have planted, rich gardens left tilled by those who have abandoned them to newcomers.