A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [29]
Here again, just as in Genesis, God does not abandon humanity in its tragic story of injustice and oppression. Instead, God gets involved, siding with the oppressed, the vulnerable, the downtrodden, working as their ally for their liberation. First, God calls Moses—that little baby who once floated on the Nile, now grown into a man in the prime of life—to be God’s mouthpiece. Moses tells the tyrant Pharaoh to let God’s people go, but Pharaoh refuses. God responds with a firm but gentle consequence: a plague on the Nile River, which is the lifeblood of the civilization. Ironically, perhaps through a red tide, the Nile turns red like blood. The despot still doesn’t relent, but hardens his heart. Then the Nile produces a plague of frogs, which are followed by gnats, flies, diseases, and other unpleasantries. Each time, Pharaoh is invited to repent and liberate the captives, but each time Pharaoh hardens his heart. It’s as if the land itself—or the universe itself—is turning against an unjust regime. Finally, when a plague takes the firstborn sons of the Egyptians so they experience exactly the grief they had been inflicting on their slaves, Pharaoh says, “Okay. You can go.”
But predictably, the tyrant has liberator’s remorse and then leads his army in pursuit of the refugees to reenslave them. His plan fails, and his whole army is destroyed in the Red Sea. The people are liberated at last. We’re skipping over a hundred fascinating—and at times troubling—details in this telling of the Exodus, but the basic shape of the story is clear: God sides with the oppressed, and God confronts oppressors with intensifying negative consequences until they change their ways, and in the end the oppressors are humbled and the oppressed are liberated.
The story is striking in many ways. God is amazingly patient with Pharaoh (just as God had been with Cain, for example, in Genesis). God refuses to force compliance, but also refuses to passively tolerate injustice, persistently bringing the oppressor to repentance, temporary as that repentance proves to be. Through it all, God never works directly, only indirectly—through Moses, through Aaron, through frogs, gnats, weather, diseases, and other natural phenomena. The so-called supernatural, in this way, seems remarkably natural.1
But the liberation from Pharaoh only takes up the first half of Exodus. And in spite of the fact that Pharaoh is clearly the bad guy in the first half, the newly liberated people are hardly the good guys in the second half. Their grumbling and ingratitude in the second half seem to try God’s patience almost as much as Pharaoh’s hard-heartedness in the first half. If the first half of Exodus celebrates liberation from the external oppression of social sin, the second half (including the wilderness episodes recounted in the book of Numbers) celebrates liberation from the internal spiritual oppression of personal sin, freeing human beings from the dominating powers of fear, greed, impatience, ingratitude, and so on.
Another word for internal liberation is formation: through law and ritual and trial, God forms character and faith and dignity in a people who have been debased by generations of slavery. If Pharaoh’s heart can only be softened by ten demands (“Let my people go!”) followed by ten intensifying consequences of disobedience, the newly liberated slaves’ hearts can only be strengthened by ten commands and many episodes of trial and testing. Exodus thus exposes evil in both