Two weeks ago, at the beginning of Lent, we started to look at the events in the Book of Exodus in which the Israelites eventually make their escape from the captivity of the Egyptians. Dan spoke about the preparations for the Lord's Passover. Today we heard about the event which the Passover was intended to protect the Israelites from - the final plague - the death of every Egyptian first-born child. Next week Andy will speak about the start of the Israelites' journey of escape when they travel across water and through desert on the way to the land which God has promised to them.
The broad sweep of the story of the Exodus has the feel about it of an epic legend, full of heroism and perseverance, laced with magic and divine intervention, a battle between the forces of good and evil.
But today and next week we shall hear about a God who kills the enemies of the Israelites. Today specifically we hear of God killing every Egyptian first-born child. Next week we shall hear about a whole army being enticed into an ambush and drowned. And the book of Exodus calmly describes these two acts of killing as simply the means to an end - to obtain freedom from slavery for God's chosen people.
These stories leave me with a real question: is this a God that I recognise? Is this the God whom I worship, the God who came into human existence to die on a cross for a gospel of love and justice?
I can see a broader thread in what the writers of Exodus were trying to convey by their folk tales. I can see a passionate belief in a God who remained faithful to a promise of freedom. I can see a culture in which natural events and opportunities were seen as direct intervention by the hand of God. I can see a charismatic and gifted leader, Moses, being inspired by the spirit of God and becoming a unique interpreter of God's will for the Israelites as they struggle to survive in hostile times and dangerous environments. And I can see how Jewish scribes who eventually put these events down in writing rationalised it all into the kind of causes and effects which reflected their culture at that time. But I still can't see a God who kills innocent people (as most of those first-born children will have been) just to force a tyrant to release Hebrew slaves.
When children are struck down by a plague, of any kind and of whatever cause, the God I recognise is there, alongside the parents, suffering their loss and grief with them. I feel I need to ask the question: where was God for the Egyptian mother who held the lifeless body of her first-born in her arms as the plague decimated her community? I would say that God was weeping alongside her, just as I believe God was weeping alongside the survivors of the tsunami which decimated the population of Asia in recent months. As inheritors of the new covenant, believing in Jesus as our unique experience of God, we surely have to look at these stories through different eyes.
I am quite happy to believe that God's relationship with the Israelite's brought freedom into their lives and was a source of continual support and inspiration for their early history. But I think what we read in the book of Exodus is largely human interpretation of that relationship, presented as the very vivid dramatisation of ancient folk tales into what passes for history.
I would go further. I think people who take from this story a belief in a God who kills, are leaving themselves open to many dangerous interpretations of a God of vengeance, jealousy, rage and retribution.
How often have we, as an lgbt community, been told that God is visiting retribution of some kind upon us? Don't we recall how easy it was for believers in a God who spreads plagues to use that same powerful imagery a few years ago to present AIDS as the 'gay plague' and to claim it as an act of retribution by God directed against a specific community?
And an even more insidious extension of the concept of the God of retribution emerges in the effect on our own self-esteem when we start to believe that God actually strikes us down individually, or brings our lives into chaos, as the working out of divine judgement. Again, this is a God I don't recognise; and I would have great difficulty leading someone from those beliefs towards the God of love on whom my faith is built. And yet I've heard it being said.
The epic story of the journey of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt to the promised land contains many truths about their covenant with God, but it is not history. Most scholars date the escape from Egypt to around 1200 BC, so an oral tradition will have started at that time. It seems that the earliest written sources that became included in the biblical text date from around 200 years after that, in around 1000 BC. We also know that various priestly editors were still re-shaping and adding to this material four hundred years later. So after 600 years of recording and re-working by Hebrew scribes, we have to ask: how much of what we read in Exodus is the word of God and how much is the interpretation of men who were shaping God into their own image?
I appreciate that this can be an uncomfortable question for some people to face. It can be reassuring to believe in the simple truths as found on the printed page, or to believe that somehow God himself tidied up the texts of the Bible and removed all human error from it; but that approach does lead us to a God who kills people; and for me, that is acutely uncomfortable. We have the capacity to ask the question of any piece of writing, 'Where is God in this?' and I think that question needs asking when we are confronted by a God of plagues.
So, what alternative can we put in place of the genocidal God of the Hebrew editors? Well, perhaps the idea of plagues holds the key. In the ancient world - Egypt included - civilisations were constantly at risk of fast-acting epidemics. We still see the same effect today when we hear the warnings that typhoid and other diseases will kill more people after a disaster than the force of the disaster itself.
Suppose, through entirely natural causes, an epidemic caused people to start dying in Egypt. Might not a superstitious Pharaoh come to believe that his own people were being jinxed by the tribe of foreign slaves in their midst and send them away from his cities into the desert until the dying stopped? - always intending to go and recapture this valuable slave labour when the epidemic had subsided!
That would be just one plausible explanation for what may have happened - but now we have a choice. We can follow the Hebrew editors of the story and see the hand of God in the death of the Egyptians, with more slaughter to come when Pharaoh tries to recapture them. Or we can start to see a God who is in amongst the Israelites as they carve out their early existence under a charismatic leader; a God who leads and inspires them in many spiritual ways on their journey, but whose acts are shaped by love and faithfulness, not by vengeance and death.
For now, we shall leave the Israelites where they are, on their way out of Egypt, travelling by faith to an unknown destination, enjoying their first days of freedom, supported and sustained by their God. Next week we shall be with them as they cross the Red Sea - or do they? More revelations to come, I think!
Amen.
(Philip Jones)
This sermon was first preached in the Metropolitan Community Church of Manchester. Click here for further information.