Out of the Frying Pan…

What happens when things don’t work out the way we had hoped? Where do we turn when the worst case scenario becomes the very thing we must live through? When there’s no explanation for our suffering, how can we go on? And what if - and this may be the most difficult question of all - there’s no answer to the question, ‘why?’

The 5th chapter of Exodus presents just such a scenario. Moses follows God’s instructions and things start going very, very wrong. The Pharaoh gets angry and increases the workload of the Jewish slaves. In short order the Pharaoh is angry, the Jewish Foreman are angry and the people suffer, terribly - all because Moses did as he was told. There’s a couple of things we have to keep in mind when reading this story. The first is that it plays out over a time-line that was a lot longer than a ‘made for tv movie’. The Jewish people endured real hardship and suffering while this story played out over weeks - if not months. The second is that we read this knowing how the story ends. This is not the case with Moses, the Pharaoh, the Jewish people or anyone else at the time, and their actions look very different when seen from this perspective. They can’t answer the ‘why’ question. They don’t know what happens next. A God they’ve only just been introduced to - “I Am That I Am” - appears impotent and they must pay the price for the foolishness of Moses.

We’re going to try and walk through some of this on Sunday morning. Frankly, the passage raises a lot more questions than it does answers and not all of them are questions we want to ask. It’s easy for us to discuss those questions in a coolly detached way in church but it’s quite another to find ourselves trying to live through them. Sometimes, an answer to the question ‘why’ simply isn’t possible. How can we live without the answers that matter most?

Image: Moses in front of Pharaoh by Haydar Hatemi, Persian Artist. Public Domai