If Jesus is Lord

(Written for Called Out: Conversations with the Ekklesia Project)
Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost | Proper 16 | Year A

I have always been struck by the fact that the midwives have names.

Shiphrah and Puah.

Pharaoh does not get a name.

He is, by almost every measure available in the story, more important than they are. Pharaoh commands an empire. His word becomes policy. Shiphrah and Puah deliver babies. Yet Exodus remembers them by name and leaves him simply as “Pharaoh.” I wonder if that should tell us something about where the real power in this story lies.

Pharaoh is afraid. The Hebrew people have become numerous, and Pharaoh has decided their presence is a threat. So he teaches Egypt to see them that way too. “They are dangerous.” “Something must be done about them.” Their labor becomes harder. Their lives become bitter. Eventually Pharaoh tells the Hebrew midwives to kill the boys born to Hebrew women.

It is an order backed by all the power of Egypt.

Shiphrah and Puah say, “No.”

Exodus gives a simple explanation. “They feared God.” It is easy to move past that statement without much thought. But the midwives are not simply being kind, or uncomfortable with a command. They understand that Pharaoh’s authority has a limit. Their allegiance to God runs deeper than their obligation to Pharaoh.

That does not mean they are unafraid. Pharaoh can punish them. Pharaoh can make murder legal and obedience respectable. Pharaoh can tell an entire nation that what is happening is necessary for its safety.

But Pharaoh cannot make it good.

The midwives know the difference.

There are moments when evil is not especially difficult to recognize. There are forms of violence and dehumanization in our own world that should horrify us. There are people treated as threats before they are treated as neighbors, and lives discussed as problems to be managed rather than people to be loved. Sometimes the question is not whether we can see what is happening, but what we will do once we see it. Will fear convince us to accept it? Will loyalty to a party, nation, or institution cause us to defend in our own people what we would condemn in someone else? Might we decide that because we cannot stop Pharaoh, there is nothing meaningful for us to do?

Shiphrah and Puah cannot overthrow Pharaoh. They can refuse him.

Paul helps us name part of what makes that refusal possible. He tells the church in Rome, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2, NRSVUE). I have often heard those words reduced to individual morality: avoid the wrong things, make better choices. But conformity runs much deeper than behavior. We are formed by stories about who matters and who does not, whom to fear, what power looks like, and how we are supposed to respond when power speaks.

Pharaoh does not rule only by giving commands. Pharaoh creates a world in which those commands begin to make sense. Once enough people accept that story, throwing children into the Nile can begin to look less like horror and more like policy. A so-called necessary evil.

Shiphrah and Puah refuse that story. They have been formed by another allegiance.

Which makes the question Jesus asks his disciples in Matthew feel especially important to me.

“Who do you say that I am?”

For many of us, the answer came long before the question. I cannot remember the first time someone told me who Jesus was. Jesus is the Christ. Jesus is Lord. I am grateful for that inheritance. Faith is received from other people. We are given language and stories and practices by communities that came before us. But I wonder if having the answer can sometimes keep us from hearing the question. There is a difference between knowing the answer and having answered the question.

Peter’s confession is not simply correct theological information. If Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God, then Peter is making a claim about where ultimate authority belongs.

If Jesus is Lord, Pharaoh is not.

It is easy to say. It is much harder to live. We can answer Jesus’ question correctly and still organize our lives around Pharaoh’s assumptions. We can still be captivated by power, still let fear determine how we see our neighbors, still believe that winning matters more than faithfulness. We can know the right answer without ever allowing the answer to transform us.

This is part of what I hope the church can be. Not a people who gather enough power to force everyone else to behave. Not a baptized version of Pharaoh. A community capable of forming people who can say “no” to Pharaoh. People who know that legality does not make something righteous, power does not make someone Lord, something being called normal can still be death, and those we are taught to see as a threat can still be a vulnerable human being.

Pharaoh eventually commands that every Hebrew boy be thrown into the Nile. What follows is a chain of women refusing to cooperate with death: a mother who hides her child, then sets him in a basket among the reeds; a sister who watches from a distance; and Pharaoh’s own daughter, who knows exactly who this child is supposed to be and has compassion anyway.

Before Moses ever stands in front of Pharaoh, Pharaoh is already losing. He is losing not to an army, but to a collection of women who keep refusing to cooperate with death. None of them knows this child will become their liberator. We do. But that does not make what they are doing insignificant. They only know what faithfulness requires of them in that moment, and they do it.

Psalm 124 comes from the other side of deliverance. Israel can look back on what it was like to be trapped, the flood that could have swept over them, the snare that could have closed. From where the midwives stand, none of that is visible yet. They do not get to look back and sing. They only get to refuse, in the moment, without knowing whether the snare will ever break.

I think that is closer to the challenge for us. The question is not whether we would rescue a baby from a river. Most of us would. The harder question is whether we will choose what is right when fear makes cruelty sound prudent, and loyalty makes silence feel faithful.

We may not know what our faithfulness will accomplish. Neither did they.

“Who do you say that I am?” Not only, “What answer have you inherited?” But: who do you say that I am? Because eventually our answer becomes visible in what we fear, in the powers we obey, in the lives we are willing to protect.

The church does not need to become Pharaoh in order to defeat Pharaoh. The church needs to become a people so deeply formed by Jesus that when Pharaoh asks us to participate in death, we know how to choose life instead.

Shiphrah and Puah did.

Pharaoh may have had the throne, but we still know their names.

Christopher JacksonComment