KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 2 March
Exodus: a going forth
“You shall strike the rock and water shall come out of it, that the people may drink,” God tells Moses in a striking passage in Exodus. Exodus is the second book of the Torah, the second book of Moses, as it is sometimes called. Exodus is its Greek title from the Septuagint. Its Hebrew title is Shemot – Names. It is the scriptural classic about the idea of journeying and as such complements The Odyssey of Homer. Both are about the journey of learning through suffering and reflection, we might say, which have to do with the understanding of our humanity in relation to the intellectual structure of reality either in the form of the Greek cosmos or the Hebrew creation.
The idea of the exodus is taken up by Christians and Muslims alike and relates to the larger philosophical and ethical quest for wisdom. As such the concept of exodus speaks directly to us as a School and to all of you as learners, those who have embarked on the quest for understanding. Exodus, as a book, however, confronts us with the disorders of our humanity. We are really a whole lot of complainers! On the one hand, never being satisfied (like Mick Jagger’s ‘Can’t Get No Satisfaction’!) signals a yearning for something more than the material and quotidian realities of our lives. On the other hand, it signals a presumption and a pretension about ourselves, namely our hubris or pride in which we think we are entitled to, well, everything. It extends to the idea that God owes us and thus that God is accountable to us. It is exactly the reverse of the teaching of both The Odyssey and Exodus.
Exodus means going forth in the sense of a departure. The Odyssey is about the homecoming of the Greek heroes after the battle of Troy; the journey back to where they are from and, in that sense, where they belong in the order of things. The exodus in the Hebrew Scriptures is literally the account of the people of Israel being delivered from slavery to the Egyptians. It marks the entire journey in the wilderness that is about learning what that liberation properly means. It is, literally, a going forth from slavery but, morally, the exodus extends to a going forth out of sin, out of ourselves in our preoccupations and obsessions, our selfish pride which is blind to God and to one another. And, intellectually, like The Odyssey, the exodus is the going forth out of ignorance and into the understanding of the will of God expressed concretely in the Law, especially the Ten Commandments. Unlike The Odyssey, it is not so much about a place such as the polis, the Greek city-state, but about the Word of God written which defines the journey. But it means that the exodus as freedom from slavery, from sin, and from ignorance, is fundamentally a freedom to a principle; in short, to God as the ethical, spiritual and intellectual principle of reality.
