Tuesday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
A lot is going wrong as we enter the Exodus text for today. To start, Pharaoh has issued a decree demanding that all male babies born of the Hebrews be drowned in the Nile. To live amidst the darkness of such a decree, especially if you are of that ethnicity or religious identity, must be hell on earth. Not only that, Pharaoh chose to use the Nile—perhaps the most powerful source and sign of life for all the people of that region—as the instrument of death. Hell, indeed.
And in this very context, a Hebrew woman gives birth to a son. Can you imagine what she must have felt? Pharaoh had decreed death. What could a young Hebrew woman possibly do to stop it?
And then the most amazing thing happens. Three women do something incredible. Now, it is important to note that two of these women are—as women, as Hebrews, as slaves—invisible and powerless. The third is a princess—the very daughter of Pharaoh.
First, the very brave mother of the baby boy creates a little boat for him and places him at the edge of the Nile. What a risk to take! She knows she can no longer keep him hidden. She must take this chance.
Then, the princess arrives with all her power as a member of the royal family. But she does not run the show. Not by a long shot. Her father has decreed that this Hebrew baby (she identifies him as such) must die. Yet, she decides to rescue him. What a daring decision!
Third, the sister of the baby presents herself to the princess and suggests that she could find someone to take care of the baby. And, in her surprising cleverness, offers up the baby’s very mother as nursemaid. The princess not only happily agrees to that idea, she offers to make it all financially and politically possible.
With the daring actions of these three women, a life doomed to death by drowning in the Nile is transformed into a life of infinite possibility—not least because he will become “Moses,” a child with an Egyptian name and one who will become the prince of Egypt and so much more.
Remarkably, all this miraculous doing takes place in a passage that does not feature God in any way. God is never even mentioned.
What can we learn from this story? Four things, I think.
- If you are someone who, like me, finds it surprising that two Hebrew women at the bottom of the Egyptian social/cultural/political ladder were able to pull this off, then we must take away from this story the realization that we should not trust our limited and limiting estimations of others.
- For these two Hebrew women to do this thing took enormous guts. They didn’t know in advance how the princess would react. They took their chances. It was a huge risk.
- More than this, they put their money down on a woman who had to have seemed to them to be their enemy. She was the very daughter of the man who issued the decree! Yet, they put their son/brother at her mercy. We do not know the enemy. We think we do. And we don’t.
- When hell itself seems to have arrived on earth, God appears absent. Still, God is there. With that knowledge, and as children of God, we can do good. Let us then, as Father Satish asked us in his July 2 homily, to be “disciples of goodness.”
- Sue Trollinger