Series: March 2026
Speaker: Rob McClellan
Today's Sermon
“Liberation Day: Miracles 2"
Liberation Day: Miracles 2
We continue our series on miracles in the Bible, drawing on the work of Luke Timothy Johnson who invites us to draw on imagery in the Bible to imagine a better world. What about when these miracles involve violence? Not every sign of God’s activity in scripture is a pure healing. In our time, any struggle for justice raises the question about if, when, and how violence may be employed for a greater good. I, for one, cannot read the Jesus story in a way that condones violence, and Jesus is my center. Still, other Christians disagree. Does God’s thirst for justice give us permission to thirst for blood?
Last week, we explored an early passage in the Book of Exodus, when God reveals God’s ineffable self to the world in the burning bush that did not burn. Here is a story from a little later in the book, about how the ancient Israelites are liberated from their captivity in Egypt under Pharaoh:
Exodus 12:21-32
21 Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Go, select lambs for your families, and slaughter the Passover lamb. 22 Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood in the basin. None of you shall go outside the door of your house until morning. 23 For the Lord will pass through to strike down the Egyptians; when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over that door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you down. 24 You shall observe this as a perpetual ordinance for you and your children. 25 When you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this observance. 26 And when your children ask you, ‘What does this observance mean to you?’ 27 you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.’ ” And the people bowed down and worshiped.
28 The Israelites went and did just as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron; so they did.
29 At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon and all the firstborn of the livestock. 30 Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians, and there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead. 31 Then he summoned Moses and Aaron in the night and said, “Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, serve the Lord, as you said. 32 Take your flocks and your herds, as you said, and be gone. And ask a blessing for me, too!”
There is no way around it; this is a violent story. God strikes down the firstborn of all the Egyptians. Even if the Egyptian people are complicit, their children? What do we do with that? The first thing is to note is that the story isn’t written about the Egyptians or from their point of view. If it were, it would be a killing story. It’s a story by the about the Israelites by the Israelites and thus it’s a story of liberation. Wait a minute, that doesn’t mean the violence didn’t happen. Well, maybe, in fact, it does. Remember what we said last week, we are not reading scripture for historical accuracy alone, though there are some verifiable historical facts in the Bible. These are myth histories, which are as much about making meaning, making a point, as they are making documentaries.
While there is scholarly variance on the matter, my best reading is that there is little historical evidence to suggest the Exodus, as portrayed in the Bible, ever happened. If you’re wondering if I’ve just committed blasphemy, I not only came to that conclusion of scholarship but also the teaching of rabbis. If they’re correct, then the bloodshed didn’t happen. What did? There may have been, there’s likely to have been, some semitic people who experienced a form of the story we read, a minority people in a foreign land, who brought that tradition with them and their story got woven into the cultural memory of the larger Israelite people. For whatever reason, the Israelites anchored their foundational story in one of liberation. That’s how they chose to frame their beginnings, with a memory of being under someone else’s oppressive rule, maybe so they would rule differently if ever given the chance.
If that interpretation seems too far-fetched, then let us stay within the story we have. Who does the killing? It’s not the Israelites. It’s God. It’s amazing how quickly people make the leap between God supposedly committing violence as permission to commit their own, claiming God’s sanction or even inspiration. Even now you hear people talk about violence in divinely inspired terms. Moreover, notice God does not initiative violence in this story, if you read the full story. Earlier, in Exodus 1:22, Pharaoh who commands his people to throw every firstborn male into the Nile. Pharaoh enlists people in his killing; God does not. God’s claim of the firstborn Egyptians is a prophetic and poetic mirror of the violence Pharaoh initiated. It’s a literary device to expose an injustice.
If God wants to do violence, well I suppose that’s up to God; it’s when we feel inspired to do so that we should pause. I heard someone once asked the great Christian ethicist and noted pacifist Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School what do we do with God telling the chosen people to kill Canaanites. Hauerwas responds, “If God tells you to kill Canaanites, kill Canaanites,” of course knowing there aren’t Canaanites anymore and that God won’t tell anyone to do so. How then does the Christian know what to do? They discern it in prayer and then they give it a twofold test: 1) with a faithful community, 2) with the witness of Jesus, since Jesus is our center.
In Christ, we see the fullness of God, and what does Jesus do when someone tries to defend him by employing violence? He heals his captor and says to his defender, “all who take the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). He wants to keep violence out of his people’s hands. The Apostle Paul concludes similarly. In the 12th chapter of Romans he writes, “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord’” (Romans 12:9), which is a quote from the Old Testament, 32:35. It’s awfully liberating to leave payback or punishment to God. Keep your hands clean. There are ways to seek accountability without dipping your hands in the blood, which might have the effect, among others, of dulling the mind and its potential to find another way. Hauerwas says turning to violence “stills the imaginative search for nonviolent ways of resistance to injustice.”[1]
But perhaps I have led us astray for focusing so much on the violence. The real problem of this passage is not God-ordained human violence, it is human captivity maintained through the threat of violence. Remember what we said last week, the dominant formational narrative of the faith is liberation, freedom from captivity and exploitation. That’s where our attention should lie. As the preeminent black theologian James Cone put it, “Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology.”[2] If your faith doesn’t overlap with the work of liberating then it’s not Christian.
The miracle of this story is not that the Egyptians are killed; it’s that the Israelites are set free. If you’re really bloodthirsty, don’t pick up the sword, come to the table and dip in the cup that reminds us Jesus shed his own blood so we would stop shedding one another’s.
Amen.
[1] Stanley Hauerwas, “The Servant Community” in The Hauerwas Reader ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Duke University Press, 2001), 391.
[2] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books: 2010), ix.