Exodus 1:8-2:10
A favorite pastime among readers is to list the best first lines of novels – sentences that are so good they hook the reader instantly. Think of the opening line from Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Or Moby Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” from A Tale of Two Cities, and my personal favorite: “124 was spiteful,” from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.
And chapter 1, verse 8 from the book of Exodus, is also one of the best: “Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.” Now, you might say it doesn’t count because it’s not the first line – it’s the eighth line of the book. Technically you are right – but I think verses 1-7 are more like a prologue to the story. The real story begins in verse 8.
“A new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” – this sentence says it all. All the fears and dread, all the worst possibilities for Israel are contained in this sentence. A new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph. It didn’t happen right away. It didn’t happen in anyone’s lifespan. But eventually, inevitably, it happened.
A new king arose over Egypt who did not know how much gratitude was owed to Joseph – and to Joseph’s God. A new king who did not know that, had it not been the Lord who was on their side, they would be gone. Egypt would have been no more, they would have died out in the terrible famine that had happened those many years ago. A new king who did not know that because of Joseph, and by the grace of God, Egypt survived the drought.
He did not know because that was so many years ago – and, really, who cared anymore? It was such a long time ago. Why bother to remember something that doesn’t fit the story they would like to tell about themselves. This little detail about some foreigner who had to rescue a great nation from its own shortsightedness – is it really important?
Willful amnesia, perhaps? We all practice it sometimes; Egypt certainly did at this time. The collective conscience of a nation can be dangerously weak when they decide not to remember, when they turn the other into their enemy. When they let their fear get the upper hand, as nations sometimes do, and are willing to sacrifice compassion in the bargain. To read the story of what happened to Israel these many years after Joseph is to take a walk on the darker side of humanity. There is much evil on display in these first two chapters of Exodus.
Yet, there is also hope.
The story of Moses is a miracle story, from beginning to end – and sometimes the miracle is the fact that ordinary human beings resist the forces of evil. This first part of the story, the conditions under which Moses arrived in the world, highlight a few individuals who resisted the evil surrounding them and chose to do something good. To borrow some words from the psalm, let me put it this way:
If it had not been Puah and Shiphrah who midwifed the Hebrew women, every baby boy of Israel would have been stillborn.
If it had not been Moses’ mother who was brave and resourceful and strong, the infant Moses would have been thrown into the Nile.
If it had not been Moses’ sister, Miriam, who loved her brother and watched out for him, he might have died in the papyrus basket.
If it had not been the Pharaoh’s daughter who found Moses in the reeds, he might have been just one more lost boy of Israel.
It’s a story with a lot of “ifs” in it. It’s the kind of story where all the parts are held together by the grace of God.
But I am hesitant to use the phrase, because talking about the grace of God can be a risky thing; it can so easily be misunderstood. It’s a phrase people use when they have avoided some catastrophe, that it was by the grace of God. It’s what people say when they see someone who has been dealt a horrible fate – “There but for the grace of God go I.” It is as if to say the grace of God has chosen us and passed over that other miserable wretch.
It doesn’t make sense to talk this way, because we all know that even we who claim God’s love suffer our share of hardships and heartbreaks. St Theresa of Avila, who worked herself nearly to death for Christ’s church, committing her whole life to it, is said to have heard the voice of God speaking to her at a particularly difficult time. “This is how I treat all my friends,” the Lord said, to which Theresa replied, “Then it is no wonder your Lordship has so few.”
Seriously, I don’t know how far we want to go down the road of crediting God for every good thing and blaming God for every bad thing that happens, keeping a tally of pluses and minuses. The biblical text says God gave the midwives families as reward for their courage and faithfulness, but we might say this is too quaint. We might claim that we have a more complex, more sophisticated view of things now.
But do we? I wonder if I should say we just don’t leave much room for ambiguity anymore.
In our world where everything is crisply outlined in black and white; fact or fiction; where one plus one must always and only ever equal two; we may have lost the ability to say –
The hand of God has saved Moses and
the hand of God has rewarded the midwives and
the hand of God has chosen Israel even while
the hand of God has allowed the suffering of Israel;
to say that the grace of God is present in all things because
the grace of God is not in what actually happens but in how we experience what happens.
And how we experience what happens will certainly affect the choices we make.
As the prophet Micah says, “God has shown you, O Mortal, what is good.” God has equipped us with the ability to discern evil from good. And what we see in this story about a time when a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph – – – – it is very much like what we see in life: when things get hard, some will become the instruments of evil, but others will stand up and say no.
And so, I say to you that it is not by the grace of God that we stroll through a valley of sunshine and lollipops and unicorns and butterflies.
Unicorns aren’t real, anyway.
But it is by the grace of God that we know what is good and have the choice to step forward and say so.
May it be so. Amen.
Photo: I have been making a collection of these hope signs that have been appearing during the pandemic. Hope is a good response to hard times.
