YHVH is almost by definition a liberating God. His name, revealed in the context of the Hebrew slaves’ impending exit from the ‘house of their servitude’, can reasonably be paraphrased to mean ‘the one who is powerfully present’. Where YHVH is, one might say at the danger of lurching towards bumper-sticker ideology, things happen. Freedom things. Escape-from-slavery things. Bonds break, slaves march, songs belt forth the turning of tables that moments ago seemed too heavy for budging.
Yet we resist our freedom, for it is nearly always both free and immensely costly. YHVH is an initiative-taking deity and therefore tends not to ask for payment up front. He is in the business of re-covenanting: he frees those upon whom his favor falls from their odious obligations and sets them in what at least one of his prophets called a ‘wide place’. Yet those fortunate enough to fall under his liberating intentions nearly always find that it costs them dearly. Oddly, we develop a pronounced taste for our disparate slaveries. We relish them as the safe thing that we know. We grow to snuffle around the dankness of it all as though there were life-giving properties in its mold. We get to arrange the furniture in our own cell.
Faced with the impossible fear of their Egyptian masters bearing down on them, the Hebrew slaves revert to that form at which captives eventually become experts: complaint.
As Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites looked back, and there were the Egyptians advancing on them. In great fear the Israelites cried out to the LORD. They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”
The exodus story will end with a most boisterous liberation song. But its earliest articulation takes shape in the resentful syllables of murmuring that it was better where we came from. Freedom sucks.
It would be a fine thing if YHVH were to perform his work without this costly, intermediate stage of participation. Would that he would strike down the Egyptians in the first chapter, allow us to quietly step over their corpses to plunder their silver, and then stroll out of town at a peaceable pace.
It would be the efficient thing.
Yet time and again, before we can belt out that YHWH has ‘thrown horse and rider into the sea’, we must weigh freedom vs. convenient servitude in the balance and take serious account of how much harder freedom can be.
The desert on the way to a promised land is an exceedingly scary place, particularly when the hoofbeats of our punishers begin to rattle in our ears. Waters do not customarily part. Fear is an intimate acquaintance with whom we can strike a reasonable deal. Liberation is YHVH’s project but right now simply our task.
Those Egyptians made such nice hosts.
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