The Promise of Redemption: Moses
1989 (Year C) 19 November /
Pentecost 27
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
Some years ago we spent a camping holiday in Dorset. We got quite friendly with the family next to us and on the last evening we sat talking – eventually the man asked what I did. It had clearly bothered him for some time. I thought of lying but in the end owned up to being a ‘Vicar’, ‘Thank God,’ he said ‘I thought you were a policeman’.
Another year the same thing happened – the fatal question arrived ‘What do you do then?’ The outcome this time was that the man only spoke to me again in polite formal ways, never as he had begun to do, as a friend. The first man saw what I was and was thankful – the second saw only what I did.
We live in a world where we recognise and rank other people for what they do or what they’ve done, hardly ever for what they are. And once we’ve been categorised it is very difficult for us to think of each other in any other way. The criminal is remembered for what he has done and, even when released, still has to endure stigma. He like the rest of us is enslaved.
Some images seem to have a timeless, universal quality, they have the capacity to reach out and touch us whoever we are. The captive and the slave is a recurring theme in the Old Testament for it was an experience known only too well the Jews. Liberation movements, old and new, religious and political, have continually come back to that experience and the exodus theme (freedom from that which enslaves) has run through all the Western reformations and revolutions. It has filled the humiliated and the oppressed with the Spirit of God, which is the Spirit of Liberty. It has caused great geographical movements of people, driven throughout history to seek security and peace. It has spoken gently to individuals and led them to a personal liberty in the face appalling and oppressive difficulties.
The image of the slave conjures up in our minds people working in homes but having no value of their own. Of being kept only for the work that they can perform. They have no rights and no reason to hope for any long term security. Of people who do not belong. Indeed their well-being depends completely on their good performance.
The slave theme is at the root of biblical imagery for in the Exodus, the point at which Moses led the captives out of Egypt; the Lord liberated the slaves because he adopted them as his treasured children.
In that powerful act of giving freedom, their status in life is redefined and they are given a new identity. Even Pharaoh cannot resist it. God has power to make people into his precious children. Now their life consists, not in the supplying pleasures to others, but being heirs of the divine. Perhaps it seems silly for us to be thinking about this image today, for some of the Biblical images feel as though they have little to say to us, but there are areas of our lives where we function as slaves and are held in chains, cigarettes, drink, some members of our families, our work or lack of it, our homes, our poverty, our wealth, our colour, any of those can conspire to hold us fast.
Our society is filled with slaves, people who must daily establish their worth by performing someone’s assigned tasks. These are people who must daily live with anxiety concerning the day when they will be unable to perform. Slaves live by obedient performance, effectively accomplishing what is expected. They are without intrinsic worth.
The Lord would have us live differently for he calls us out of all which binds us into a new relationship with him and those who we live with. It is the Lord’s will that all who are slaves should be transformed into children. The prodigal returned home to prepared to be a servant and a slave, ‘ Father ... I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants,’ and the fathers response is so well known’ let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’
The woman who told me of her son and the bad things he had done, yet finished by saying that she loved him for what he was, her son, rather than what he had done, gives us a glimpse of the divine. It is the same with the prodigal was welcomed to the father’s table of joy, not for the worth of his performance but by the will and love of his father.
And we, we are called to treat all who we meet for what they are, not just what they do – as children of God. AMEN