KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 13 January
Out of Egypt have I called my Son
Fuga in Aegyptum. The flight into Egypt of the Holy Family belongs to one of the most disturbing stories in the Scriptures, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. That it should be part of the Christmas mystery and of the Epiphany, too, indicates the deeper meaning of God’s engagement with our humanity. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son”. It is a most challenging story.
The flight into Egypt belongs to the exodus, a going forth, the idea of a journey. It is part of the break-out from Bethlehem, not the journey to but the journey from Bethlehem. Like the Magi, it, too, is a journey of the understanding and as such needs to be pondered and weighed. It speaks to some of our current confusions and contradictions.
The flight into Egypt is emphatically not a flight from the world either in the manner of the technocratic adventures of the rich elite such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, or in the manner of a flight from the body, what Mary Harrington calls bio-libertarianism, an aspect of identity politics in our times.
Some argue that such elite space ventures pave the way for space travel for us all just as the airplane has transformed our sense of the world and ourselves; perhaps, but we can hardly overlook how modern travel comes with enormous costs environmentally, socially, and economically. Not all can afford to travel. It is impossible to think about the current COVID-19 pandemic apart from the increased forms of mobility in our global world, for instance. In terms of the flight from the body, it is enough to say that while we are biological and embodied beings, constrained to some extent or another by place and culture, we are not just that. We are more though not less than our embodied being. As such there are social constructs that belong to the varieties of expression about ourselves as persons. But it doesn’t mean that we are simply what we claim to be or think we are in our minds. The danger in all of these instances is that we reduce the world and our bodies to objects to be manipulated. It is a flight from reality.
The flight into Egypt is not a flight from the world but from the evil of the world in terms of the abuse and misuse of power itself. Herod seeks to annihilate a child-king whom he thinks is a potential rival to his throne. He embarks upon a policy of infanticide – such are the cruelties and the savagery of the overreach of authority – killing all the little ones “at Bethlem in his fury” as the carol, Puer Nobis Nascitur, puts it. The story is a retelling of the story in the Book of Exodus of Pharaoh, at once god and king in the Egyptian view, who initiated a policy of infanticide to control the Hebrews. Out of that comes the birth of Moses and the Exodus, the deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt. “Out of Egypt have I called my Son”. The Exodus is a journey of the understanding which locates human freedom in the Law of God. Israel is in this view not just freed from oppression but freed to a principle which articulates and embodies human dignity and freedom.
