Jochebed: Exodus 2 v 1-10; 6 v 20: ‘When she could hide him no longer…’
In the film ‘The Prince of Egypt’ there is a scene where Moses, grown up and a member of Pharaoh’s family circle, has discovered hieroglyphs on a wall in the royal palace that depict the slaughter of the Hebrew children from which, as today’s passage relates, he himself was spared. Pharaoh Seti, with comforting arms wrapped around the adoptive son of his daughter, tries to reassure him: “The Hebrews grew too numerous. They might have risen against us. Moses, sometimes for the greater good, sacrifices must be made. Oh, my son...they were only slaves..."
This justification ‘for the greater good’ has inspired an enormous amount of cruelty and barbarity over millennia, including the Crusades and the Holocaust. Those who planned the murder of 6 million Jews in the death camps told themselves that their victims were subhuman (‘untermenschen’), a designation first used by Klu Klux Klan member Luther Stoddard to describe what he referred to as ‘colored’ (sic) peoples who he believed to be a threat to white civilisation.
The thread that connects Pharaoh Seti I, Hitler and the Klu Klux Klan is actually an irrational and obsessive fear of people who are ‘different’. The contemporary ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) campaign is an attempt to educate people that every single human life, regardless of ethnicity, is of equal significance. That means that, in the words of theologian and activist Jim Wallis, writing in the context of the BLM movement, ‘Appeals to racial fear, grievance, and hate are assaults on the image of God in others. Therefore, every act of racialised police violence, every family separated at the border, every wink or appeasement to white supremacists, and every attempted suppression of even one vote because of skin colour, is denying the image of God…’
The experience of Jochebad, the mother of Moses (we know her name because of the reference in Exodus 6 v 20 to the irregular nature of her marriage to her nephew), reminds us that victims of the so called ‘greater good’ are often faced with terrible decisions. Her bitter experience in the teeth of an unfeeling and absolute supremacy echoes into more recent history in the context of the millions killed by the regimes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao Zedong (not forgetting the Klu Klux Klan bearing in mind that one African American a week was a victim of premeditated murder by lynching, between 1877 and 1950). The sheer weight of the numbers make it hard for us to get a handle on the fact that all of those millions were people like us. They were people like Jochebad, in fact, a mother whose anguish was ignored and whose son was a statistic whose death would serve the greater good.
The act of placing Moses in a basket and entrusting him to the River Nile may well, in the mind of his desperate mother, have represented a 1% rather than a 0% chance of survival. It is certainly a story of beating overwhelming odds. There is actually no mention of God in the text of this story but it is clear nonetheless, even as the slaughter of the Hebrew children went ahead, that Moses was being preserved as the future liberator of his people. There is an echo here of the story of Joseph, Jesus’ earthly Father, being warned of Herod’s plan to kill all male children in Bethlehem under the age of two (leading him, somewhat ironically, to find refuge in Egypt). We see this providence not just in Jochebad’s desperate plan but in Moses’ sister’s amazing persistence and courage. We also see it in the genuine concern of Pharaoh’s daughter and her willingness to adopt a baby who was supposed to be a victim of her father’s infanticide. In the Bible God’s purposes are often advanced by the unlikeliest people, something we would do well to remember as we consider how he works in the world today.
Whilst this is a troubling story, it is important for us to understand that those families who weren’t given what seems to have been special protection still mattered to God. Jesus may have been preserved in the early years of his life but his mother had to endure the sight of him being executed when in his thirties reminding us that God identifies with all victims of hatred and violence, which so often lie just under the surface of what Pharaoh labelled the ‘greater good’. Modern day Pharaohs tend not to care much about anything other than retaining and exercising power over others, whatever the cost of that might be to ordinary people. But by sending Jesus to give his life for us and by allowing him to be the victim of those who were playing power games, God has shown that he empathises and identifies with the poor, the powerless, the victimised, the overlooked and the bereaved. Indeed Moses himself came to understand as an adult that his place was not with the privileged and powerful people he grew up with but alongside his fellow Hebrew slaves in whose liberation he would play such a pivotal role.
There are many mothers like Jochebed in today’s world whose lives have been blighted by war, disease and malnutrition which together continue to cost the lives of many adults and children worldwide. How might we reflect in our lives, especially in our giving and campaigning, this divine bias to the poor and persecuted that marked the life and ministry of Jesus? After all, we do claim to be his followers…
Questions: Why are we often afraid of people ‘not like us’? Have we ever been helped by an ‘unlikely person’? What did it make us think and feel?
Prayer: Lord, every member of the human family is made in your image. Help us to live our lives in the light of that truth. Amen.