Who Were the People Liberated From Egypt? Lent 2024
In today’s Scripture reading from Matins, we read how Moses and the other Israelite leaders led their people out of Egypt. The numbers look staggering: “six hundred thousand on foot, not counting the children.” Now there was no roll call, but we can ask in general who these liberated folks were. You can say, “well, the Jews.” And, no, that’s not exactly right, because the term “Jew” really refers to people from a later date, hundreds of years later, when the only Israelites left in Jerusalem and vicinity were members of the tribe of Judah, and a few other who survived the Assyrian invasions and deportations. Now they had just celebrated the first Passover, so let’s take a look at a family of Egyptian slaves a couple of days earlier.
This family may or may not have been a member of the twelve tribes descended from the patriarch Jacob, otherwise known as Israel. We know this because Exodus records that the escapees from Egypt included “a crowd of mixed ancestry.” We just know this family was in slavery to Pharaoh and looked for redemption. So what did they have to do to get this Mosaic promised release?
Well, they had to celebrate Passover, so they had to believe Moses and Aaron, who had done nothing nice for them yet. The two Israelites had turned their water foul, polluted the air, summoned up a plague of locusts, brought skin troubles and now were trying to scare everyone with a prediction that if Pharaoh didn’t do what they said, some unnamed disaster would come, one that was worse than they knew, and then Pharaoh would drive them away. So believe Moses, ok.
Then they had to get a lamb, butcher it, roast it, and eat it while being ready to flee. Oh yeah, they also had to smear some of its blood over the lintels of their doors. Now slaves live in fear, and they particularly don’t want to attract the attention of their masters. That never brought anything good, just more work or a beating. So they had to smear the front of their dwelling with red, stinky blood. And why? To signal the angel of destruction to pass by. So believe Moses, ok.
The people who followed Moses out of Egypt, then, were folks who did all those things, believing a guy and his brother who was barely known to them. Now they did get a chance to relieve the nearby Egyptians of jewels and other treasures, but then they were supposed to go out into a dry, trackless desert with what they could carry on their backs?
That means that the people who were liberated from Egypt were those willing by faith to follow a man who was a stranger, preaching about the power of a god they probably had never worshiped, and–oh, yes–the men would get to be circumcised quite soon, maybe even before they left. So who were these people? They were a people of faith, not of a particular ancestry. And even many of them, several times in the desert, rebelled against Moses and God, moaning and groaning about the leeks and onions they had left behind when they were captives, and complaining about forty years of free bread called manna. No wonder God complained about them: “forty years I was weary of these people, whose hearts go astray because they do not know my ways. And I took an oath in my anger–never shall they enter my rest.” And they didn’t. Only Joshua and Caleb got to see and live in the land of promise.
So let’s learn an important lesson: it’s not important to our happiness just who our ancestors are, or what racial or ethnic group we belong to. What’s important is that we follow God’s path, the narrow one Jesus showed us, loving God above all and our neighbor–even our enemy–as ourselves. Then by God’s grace we can look forward to our own place of rest–in the loving embrace of God Himself in the kingdom prepared for us.
