Taking Slavery Out of the People: Beyond Biblical Literalism

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost, September 13, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

In the Jewish tradition, there is a long history of what they call midrash—a creative interpretation of canonical scripture that seeks to make sense of the apparent contradictions of scripture. It’s a thoughtful, prayerful standing under scripture that uses the memory, reason, imagination, and lived experience of God to offer non-literal interpretations of scripture that stand alongside the accepted, canonical reading. One of my favorite midrashes comes from our story from the Hebrew Bible today. Moses and the people of Israel have crossed the Red Sea between two towering walls of water and the shoreline is clustered with the dead corpses of the Egyptian army--soldiers in their armor, horses, chariots, broken spears and shields scattered on the sands in the lapping waves. 

While the Israelites rejoice at their sudden and miraculous deliverance from slavery and Miriam and the women sing their songs to timbrel and harp, Moses sneaks off to a place apart trying to take in the gravity of what has just occurred. He wanders off wearily into the desert where he hears the sound of gentle weeping. By now he’s learned the lesson of the Burning Bush and decides to go towards this strange, keening, cry. Over a dune and past a cluster of rocks he’s drawn to the sound. There, in a clearing, he sees a figure, which he immediately recognizes as Yahweh. Yahweh has his head in his hands and is crying. Shocked, Moses asks the only question one can ask at a moment like this, “Why, Lord of Hosts, are you crying?” Yahweh looks up, tears in his eyes, his face contorted with grief, and replies, “The Egyptians were my children too.”

Sometimes, we get so used to the common telling and re-telling of the story of Moses and the Israelites’ deliverance at the Red Sea and the Passover that we blithely skip over the disturbing fact that the Israelites’ freedom comes at the cost of the firstborns (both human and animal) in the land and thousands of war dead. What kind of God is this who would premise one peoples’ freedom on the wholesale slaughter of another? It’s the age-old theodicy question--who can a good and loving God, a God of peace and mercy, act one-way towards the people of Israel and the exact opposite way towards the people of Egypt? Doesn’t this mean that God is not so unconditionally loving after all? Doesn’t this mean that our trust in God is more akin to the slavish obedience of a child who is afraid of being beaten, or yelled at for the least misstep? 

It’s perhaps comforting to know that this very same question that vexed the rabbi who wrote the midrash about God weeping in the desert has troubled people of good faith and profound experience of God from the earliest days of the church. One such person was Gregory of Nyssa (335-395), one of the Cappadocian fathers and mothers (with Gregory’s sister Macrina, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nazianzus). Gregory of Nyssa wrote and entire treatise called The Life of Moses in which he interpreted, in symbolic, spiritual, and allegorical fashion, the Israelites’ journey from salvery into freedom, from brick-makers under Pharaoh to the good and broad land, the land of milk and honey. Writing of the Passover account and slaughter of the Egyptian firstborns Gregory asks,

How would a concept worthy of God be preserved in the description of what happened if one looked only to the history? The Egyptian acts unjustly, and in his place is punished his newborn child, who in his infancy cannot discern what is good and what is not. His life has no experience of evil, for infancy is not capable of passion. He does not know to distinguish between his right hand and his left. The infant lifts his eyes only to his mother’s nipple, and tears are the sole perceptible sign of his sadness. And if he obtains anything which his nature desires, he signifies his pleasure by smiling. If such a one now pays the penalty of his father’s wickedness, where is justice? Where is piety? Where is holiness? Where is Ezekiel, who cries: The man who has sinned is the man who must die and a son is not to suffer for the sins of his father? How can the history so contradict reason?

Gregory uses his reason, his profound knowledge of scripture (how many of us can cite Ezekiel off the top of our heads?!), and, perhaps most importantly, his knowledge of God born of intimate experience in the place of deep, imageless prayer, to see that a literal (what he calls “historical”) reading of this text presents us a with a God unworthy of the name, a God unworthy of worship, of worthship.

So what does Gregory do? How does he proceed? Simply put, Gregory concludes that the only way to proceed, the only way to preserve God’s goodness, virtue, and justice, is to read this account allegorically, not literally. Not literally. Gregory argues that the story of the Israelites’ journey to freedom from under the yoke of Pharaoh is, in fact, the journey of each one of us. Gregory reads the entire Exodus narrative as an allegory of the soul’s flight away from wickedness (the land of Egypt) to communion and friendship with our loving God (liberation, the Promised Land). In this framework, the slain Egyptian children don’t literally signify dead kids; rather, they represent how we must relinquish the roots of our wicked actions— “the first birth of evil” —before we can embody liberation. The story is true, just not literal. It illustrates the reality of working with attachment, greed, and ignorance that forms an integral part of our quest to attain fellowship with God. 

Brian McClaren calls this, rather ingenuously, “getting the slavery out of the people.” In McClaren’s reading of the arc of scripture we’re all slaves. He writes,

The truth is that we’re all on a wilderness journey out of some form of slavery. On a personal level, we know what it is to be enslaved to fear, alcohol, food, rage, worry, lust, shame, inferiority, or control. On a social level, in today’s version of Pharaoh’s economy, millions at the bottom of the pyramid work like slaves from before dawn to after dark and still never get ahead. And even those at the top of the pyramid don’t feel free. They wake up each day driven by the need to acquire what others desire, and they fear the lash of their own inner slave drivers: greed, debt, competition, expectation, and a desperate, addictive craving for more, more, more.

So Gregory of Nyssa and Brian McClaren are on the same page. The Christian life is about liberation from all kinds of bondage--personal and societal--that prevent us from recognizing our original freedom given as free, unmerited gift that is trusting in God and God alone. When we see and live from this freedom that is our true nature and release those substitutes for true happiness (power, prestige, possessions) we are restored to ourselves like the Prodigal Son. And we are restoried. We remember who and whose we are and why we are here for the brief span of days that is this fragile, contingent human life. 

One of ways to understand how the parable of the Unforgiving Servant fits in this broader picture is that forgiveness is an essential component of freedom. If we live in unforgiveness, we aren’t free. We might enjoy holding the other in contempt, we might relish the juicy rush we get from thinking our unforgiveness justified or right, but we aren’t free. We’re enslaved. We’re in bondage under Pharaoh even as we move freely about. The Unforgiving servant has experienced forgiveness first-hand to an astonishing degree. His debt is the equivalent of 10,000 workers’ daily wages. It’s wiped clean. Forgotten. And yet, he is unable to forgive a debt of just a fraction of that. We tend to hear those final lines of the typically Matthean “weeping and gnashing of teeth” as indicating some kind of future punishment in a version of hell dreamed up by Dante Alighieri. But we all know that living in unforgiveness is itself a kind of hot, hellish existence. The Unforgiving Servant puts himself in hell by holding onto his grudge. He chooses that hot, burning, tooth-gnashing way of being in the world by not becoming himself the forgiveness he has already received. 

Now we all know that forgiveness itself is a journey. Sometimes it takes forty years like the Israelites’ time in the wilderness. Sometimes we have to pray not to forgive, but to want to forgive. Sometimes we have to pray to want to want to forgive. But even that desire to desire forgiveness is a step towards the good and broad land and a step away from the claustrophobic hell of holding others in our debt. 

All of this gives us three things to put into practice this week. First, to take a cue from the rabbinic midrashes and Gregory of Nyssa and when we are faced with an apparent contradiction in scripture or something that doesn’t sit well with us, to dig deeper. Rather than simply discard the story, we ask ourselves, “How, in what manner, can this story still be true if not in a literal sense?” Second, to remind ourselves that being a Christian is all about liberation: personal liberation from diminishing stories and attachments to what is less that life-giving; societal liberation that works to recognize, name, and dismantle the kinds of oppression that our African American brothers and sisters have languished under since 1609 so that we can create a more just, equitable, and peaceful society that more closely resembles the Kindom of God; and environmental liberation that works to undo our wanton destruction of God’s good creation and embrace our role as stewards, not profiteers, of the environment. And finally, to recognize the role that the practice of forgiveness plays in this process of liberation. The good and broad land, the Exodus from the slavery of unforgiveness, is manifest whenever and wherever we practice loving our neighbor as ourself. The Church doesn’t practice forgiveness, or preach forgiveness. The Church, if it is truly the Church, is forgiveness itself. That is the milk and honey we can offer to the world without end: seven times seventy into eternity.