“So Pharaoh said to his people, ‘Look, these sons of Israel are many and mightier than us. Come now, let’s plan carefully how to deal with them; otherwise, when war comes they’ll join up with those we hate and escape from us'” (Exodus 1:9-10).
Over the years, we’re told, a new ruler arose in Egypt who didn’t know of Joseph, perhaps willfully ignorant of all he’d done for the nation during the great famine that had fallen upon the region. Or maybe those bad times had been forgotten, history rewritten so that this nation had ever been great and powerful, never suffering from such a calamity.
I find it unlikely that Pharaoh himself noticed this growing population in his midst. He’s got other concerns on his mind, like the surrounding nations and potential challengers to his empire. This sounds like the sort of thing an advisor, perhaps someone looking to gain power in the court, brought to his attention. A brief mention when he had Pharaoh’s ear.
Now, are they really such a threat? Is group of people who, we see after this, are easily enslaved and set to hard labor. Not exactly a force that should make an empire like this one nervous. And, not a group that’s going to turn the tide in battle.
But it’s not about if the threat is real. It’s about what people perceive. It’s having a group you can blame when the economy’s on a downturn and the populace is looking for someone to blame. And it’s cheap labor, which is what every empire needs to keep everyone satisfied.
So, in the interest of protecting the country, Pharaoh sends in the troops. He might have even called up a special division of his forces, recruited those who truly loved their nation and didn’t want to see it usurped by these foreigners. Folks who understood the threat these people were to their mothers and wives and daughters.
I’m taking a lot of liberties in painting this particular picture. Scripture gives us only a few verses that transform the Children of Israel from a community within Egypt to a people whose freedoms have been stripped away, and who were rendered less human than the rest of the population. So, it may not have come from some advisor who had a particular agenda of his own. The army that helped enslave the people were, possibly, well-trained and used a minimal amount of force.
But what isn’t liberty is that an empire, concerned with maintaining its grip on power found a group, a separate ethnic identity, or just some folks who looked a little different from the majority—or different from those who wanted to remain the majority—to be the enemy within. To be a scapegoat or a distraction related to all the problems that Pharaoh didn’t know how to solve.
It’s a story that’s been repeated again and again. Because, some rulers and leaders are insecure. Some governments feel, in some way, that they know what’s best even though the people don’t agree with them. And sometimes, it’s a way to create a distraction while they enrich themselves.
For those in the populace, it’s difficult to stop these policies from being enacted. There is protest and there are attempts to block the roads the government is using to take people into captivity. But those may not have a lot of impact if the rulers don’t care about their polls or those within the ruling class don’t speak up and act.
We can, of course, refuse to participate in the narrative those in power are telling. There is, I believe, a greater story that is true and real that renders all such myths into lies. It’s that story of the unremarkable child of a couple that made no splash in the royal courts, and especially not in the empire at large. In that same story, that child, grown into a man, said that there was a reality all around us where the first are last and there’s enough for everyone.
That story, when we hold to it in the face of the narratives of the state and nation, tells us that everyone is made in the Divine Image. It resists casting a nationality, an ethnicity, or an affiliation as an enemy, as someone, somehow less than. It calls a lie every time Pharaohs or Chancellors or Presidents name someone as other.
But in so doing, that story at the core of our faith calls us to a rather uncomfortable truth. A reality that, even though their actions are horrible, the Pharaohs and Chancellors and Presidents are also made in that Image. And the story of such good news calls a lie when we want to make them the other. It says that they remain human and not monsters, even when they perform monstrous acts.
It’s uncomfortable, and difficult. It’s the kind of narrative that can put father against son and daughter against mother. It’s one that can breed strife when in our homes and our communities we are looking for concord. It might even leave us without a place we feel we can lay our head.
Yet, if what that child who became a man who was killed for what he said was true, then what other path is there? Can we take only part of the story of this reality all around us where lions and lambs lie down together?
Can we really hope that love is stronger?
Jesus, when the voices around us begin to mold people into monsters and demons, help us follow you in loving them even while we abhor what they do. By your grace, may we love those we are told to hate so they may be convicted and transformed.