Consider the stubborness of Pharaoh

“Pharaoh sent urgently for Moses and Aaron and said:

I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you.

Now forgive my sin, I implore you, just this once, and entreat

The Lord your God to turn this deadly thing away from me.

When Moses left Pharaoh’s presence he prayed to the Lord,

 and the Lord changed the wind into a west wind, very strong,

which carried the locusts away and swept them into the Sea

of Reeds. There was not one locust left in the whole of Egypt.

But the Lord made Pharaoh stubborn, and he did not

let the Israelites go…”  --Exodus 10: 16-20

Boy this Bible reading is kind of tough stuff. I am working my way through Exodus now and coming to the very familiar story of Moses and Pharaoh, I was quite surprised to bump into this verse –a phrase repeated a few times in this story.  What does it mean?  Why would God make Pharaoh “stubborn?”  If, as we are told, God is love –how does making Pharaoh stubborn reveal God’s love?  It is easy to see how it plays out for the Hebrews who receive their freedom and 40 years of wandering.  But consider the stubborn Pharaoh (and all of Egypt); what does he receive? Boils, frogs, locust and the death of his first-born son.  Why does God make the Pharaoh stubborn?

If we assume that God doesn’t literally make Pharaoh stubborn, then we are still left with the question: Why is it in the story? Repeatedly? Starting with God’s assurance to Moses:

“I myself shall make Pharaoh stubborn…” (cf. 7:3)

Even if we assume this is just a story that is trying to explain how the Hebrew people came out of Egypt, we still have to wonder why the ancient author would have chosen to tell it in this way? What is the author telling us about God? And, what is the spiritual or moral lesson that is being imparted?  If Pharaoh is simply an allegorical figure (a symbol of enslavement to sin –for example), we still are left with the fact that God seems to willfully stop Pharaoh from changing his ways.  What does that mean?

To my 21^st century mind, it seems unfair of God to make Pharaoh stubborn. It seems unloving. And so, we might ask, what did it say to the ancient reader? Was there a lesson in Pharaoh’s stubbornness that transcended narrative logic? Or was it a lesson about God’s authority? Was it an assertion that God can make someone do something against their own best interest? Or was it a lesson about how God’s ways are not man’s ways?

I don’t know. But it is perplexing and seems to hold a paradox of some kind at its core. 

If we assume that Holy Scripture is Holy and truly the Word of God then the issue becomes even more complex.  Why would God say such things about Himself?  What is He trying to teach us about Himself and His ways…? And –of course—we may have to ask ourselves whether questions of fairness are meaningful when it comes to God.   And His ways.

Afflicted by the Word of God --Psalm 119: xiv [Nun]

Sunday 20 November 2016

Psalm 119: xiv [Nun]

“…Lord, I am deeply afflicted:

by Your word give me life…”

Sometimes, it seems to me, that the way God speaks to us is through our mistakes, our seeing first one thing and then realizing it was another.  This happens to me all the time. I will see what I am certain is a dog sleeping next to a fence only to discover as I approach that it is a crumpled piece of cardboard box or a cluster of leaves; a shrub bustling in the breeze, on closer inspection, becomes a small child squatting in the grass, what appears to be some dropped laundry is actually an anaconda curled up and resting in the sun –or was that someone’s dress shirts?  For me, the world is often not what it seems at first glance.

When I first read the psalm this morning, I was certain it said:

           

            “Lord, I am deeply afflicted by Your word, give me life….”

And I was caught off guard by the insinuation that God’s word afflicts us.  The idea that God’s word, His will, “afflicts” us, was wonderfully troubling to me.  And in the next verse, when the psalmist asks that his homage be accepted and that he be taught God’s decrees –I felt a puzzlingly insightful paradox:

You afflict me with Your word God –I praise You; please afflict me more.  It is Your affliction (Your laws, Your decrees) that set me free.  Your will is my heritage—it is the joy of my heart….  It reminded me of Donne’s “Batter my heart three-person’d God…”

Then, I caught sight of that colon. The one I had missed. And instantly the reading changed. it became more accurate, but certainly less my own.  And that distinction seems important.

In this morning’s Divine Office prayer the reading was from Ezekiel 36.  It is one of my favorites.

I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your iniquities, and from all your idols I will cleanse you… taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts… live by my statutes…observe my decrees… You shall live in the land I gave your fathers, you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”  --Ezekiel 36:25-28

Coming upon that reading in light of my own misreading of the psalm, I found myself pondering not the stony hearts and the cleansing (which I am usually drawn to) but the statutes and the decrees and finally that promise of God’s:  “You shall live in the land I gave your fathers…” And I began to wonder about the affliction of God’s word, the affliction of His decrees, His statutes…

By living God’s statutes, by observing His decrees –by being “afflicted” deeply by His Word, we live in the land of our fathers—the land of promise. The Promised Land --our Eden—is there where we live by God’s statutes, where we observe His decrees. 

How often do we hear the voices of the secular world today proclaiming that God’s laws and statutes, His decrees are nothing but afflictions?  They are rules imposed on us to limit our pleasures and our freedoms.  But are they? Does unbounded pursuit of pleasure and sensation, utter self-fulfillment truly lead to an earthly paradise?  Or does it merely lead to what the psalmist refers to elsewhere as “licking the earth?” An uncontrolled obsession with sensation: taste, touch, sight, to encounter and contain everything –if possible?  Is that paradise? Or is that same endless, insatiable appetite –in fact—what we mean by Hell?

Is it possible that God’s statutes and God’s decrees are meant not as limitations on our freedoms, but guidelines for our pursuit of real, meaningful, fulfillment and true joy? Is it possible that the “affliction” of God’s words, His will, is the path to real freedom and complete fulfillment? Is it possible that wherever and whenever we live those words, those statutes, wherever and whenever we observe those decrees with openness and love and compassion… that place, that moment IS the promised land –becomes, for us, a garden of life –a place of Paradise, a moment of Paradise.  We are afflicted, by the constant badgering of the world, the anxieties and fears and conflicts (petty and large) by physical and psychological… and the pressure to seek always some new earthly pleasure or distinction or distraction to escape from those same pressures. But, today… today let us turn away from those cares, those afflictions, and let us today make the Kingdom of God here on earth… let us, today be truly afflicted by the Word of God.