A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, September 6, 2020, Year A, 14 Pentecost, Proper 18

Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 149
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

“The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.  This day shall be a day of remembrance for you.  You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”

This passage from Exodus is one of the major foundational texts of our Christian faith.  It describes the first Passover, the celebration of God’s salvation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and the beginning of their journey toward the Promised Land.  It is likely this same Passover, this “festival to the Lord” that Jesus celebrates with his friends on the eve of his crucifixion, marking himself as the lamb sacrificed for those whom God will save. 

Given all of that, it is good and right that we should read and remember this passage from Exodus.  And yet, every time the lectionary presents it to us, I inwardly cringe, because, along with the salvation of Israel described, I also remember the dead Egyptian children.  I always think of the sorrow and heartbreak of Egyptian mothers and fathers; I always hear, in the back of my mind, the open-mouthed wails of those ancient Egyptian parents.   

In the context of these texts, the death of the Egyptian first-born sons makes for some significant poetic justice.  You may remember some weeks ago when we heard from the first chapter of Exodus about Pharaoh’s enslavement of the Hebrew people and his command that all their male babies should be killed so that the slaves wouldn’t become more numerous and powerful than their masters. 

With that background, it becomes a little bit clearer why the tenth and final plague against Pharaoh’s people should be the death of all of Egypt’s first-born sons. 

But it doesn’t make those deaths sit any easier with me.  After all, in the beginning of Exodus, it was a hard-hearted, sinful man murdering children.  But here, at the Passover, at least the way this story is told, God is the source of such violence against innocents.  How can we stomach such a thing?

Let me be honest: I don’t have a perfect answer to that question.  To some extent, we just have to sit with the real discomfort and pain of it.  But, there are a couple of things that we can see in this text to help lessen the blow a bit. 

First of all, remember that all of Exodus is written from the perspective of a particular tribe of people.  This is part of the Israelite’s sacred ancient texts.  As such, while these scriptures do tell us some important and relevant things about God, they also tell us a lot more about the Israelites and their understanding of God.  And it would have been important to them to record that their God enacted some kind of systemic reckoning, some kind of justice in the face of the grave evils that had been done to them.  Understood in this way, the death of Egypt’s sons becomes a sign for the Israelites that God sees and knows their own suffering and will not let it go unanswered. 

But, even more importantly, Christians believe that the story of salvation that is begun here at the Passover is completed in the death of Jesus on the cross.  And while the crucifixion doesn’t provide an excuse, per se, for the death of Egyptian children, it does serve as a reminder that God’s own Son is sacrificed, too.  Indeed, just as the deaths of the Egyptian sons served as a catalyst for the Israelites’ salvation, so does Christ’s sacrifice and suffering bring about our salvation. 

And not just ours, not just yours and mine, not just the Jewish people or the Christian ones.  On the cross, Jesus enacts the victory of love over all systems of oppression, all forms of human sinfulness and evil.  It is a victory that effects the redemption of both each individual human being and the whole of humanity, all of creation.  And it happens because Jesus just flat-out refuses to do anything except love – love his friends and his enemies, love insiders and outsiders, Gentiles and Jews, men and women, old and young – Jesus acts, in every moment, even and especially on the cross, from a place of love for us all.

And here’s the thing about love, about the love that Jesus shows so fully: you can’t do it alone.  Love requires a goal, an endpoint, an object.  So, if we are to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” and to love others as he did, it means we have to deal with them, with the whole reality of other human beings.

And that’s when things start getting messy.  Because humans come with flaws and failings, with sinfulness and brokenness.  When we love others, then, we must be prepared to deal with the hurt and harm that comes from engaging with the reality of our own and others’ sinfulness….

Which brings us to Jesus’ words in the portion of Matthew’s gospel we read this Sunday.  Jesus knows that when we do the real work of loving one another, sometimes, oftentimes, things are bound to go wrong.  And while, hopefully, they won’t go quite as wrong as they did in ancient Egypt, it is nonetheless true that our sinful systems and sinful selves are capable of doing pretty grievous harm to others; we are capable of doing violence to innocents, to those with less power and less privilege than our own. 

And when that happens, every time it happens, says Jesus, our job as his followers is to address it.  We aren’t to shy away from the confrontation of the truth, to avoid it or to ignore it.  No, we are to deal justly and honestly with those who have hurt us, with those we have hurt, and with those whose hurt we are called upon to witness. 

And that’s hard.  Maybe it’s even harder now than it ever has been, in a world where sarcasm and snark come as easily as a click of a button, where fake news is quicker to find than fact, where rhetoric seems more important than real dialogue and accusations are tweeted before they’re privately addressed.  It is in such a frenetic reality that we Christ-followers are called upon to do something radically different, to slow down, to speak the truth in love to one another and to listen to another’s truth.  We are invited to establish and care for real relationships and honor the whole human beings that take part in them.  We are charged with the work of building God’s kingdom here on earth by prayerfully discerning what to hold fast to and what we need to let go. 

Yes, this loving is hard, slow, painstaking work; but it is God’s work of salvation and redemption for all people.  And we do not do it alone.  For even now, even distanced from one another, it is work we can only do together.  “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,” says Jesus.  So we will continue to hope, and work, and love, trusting that “salvation is nearer to us now” than ever before, that “the night is far gone, the day is near.”  Amen.