A God who Liberates

Exodus 3:1-15
3:1 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

3:2 There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.

3:3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.”

3:4 When the LORD saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.”

3:5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”

3:6 He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

3:7 Then the LORD said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings,

3:8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

3:9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them.

3:10 So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

3:11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

3:12 He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”

3:13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

3:14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.'”

3:15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.

A God who Liberates

I find that Christians, more often than not, struggle to really understand the Old Testament as a part of their own canon. 

Supercessionist theologies stubbornly persist even today. These theologies cast the God of the Old Testament as one of wrath and anger, while the God of the New Testament is kinder, more loving (and therefore more authentic) than the Old. Even the Christian names for these parts of their scripture – Old and New Testaments – can often implicitly convey the idea that New Testament texts somehow replace or fix problems in the scriptures that came before.

To be sure, reading the Hebrew Scriptures is not an easy task, regardless of your religious background. The texts encompass a wide range of genres and their authorship spans thousands of years and many, many different communities in the history of Israel. The formation of what Christians now call the Old Testament was itself a profoundly formative part of how early Christians came to understand their own community after the death of their founding rabbi, Jesus.

And yet, for today’s Christian readers the form in which the canon is passed down can sometimes obscure rather than clarify how Hebrew scriptures help in understanding the God Christians worship. The story of the Exodus event is an example of this: when the average Christian opens a Bible today, page one starts with Genesis and the creation stories. Christians take this to be the start of the story of Israel and the Jewish people.

But, in fact, it is the story which shapes the first five books in what is traditionally known as the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) which is the earliest founding story of Israel.  The Exodus event is the original story, and Genesis is the prequel.  It is the central story by which Israel comes to understand who God is.

In fact, although most biblical scholars today believe that the Torah was written while the Israelites were in exile because of the Persian empire (so, several hundred years after the Exodus is said to have occurred), references to the event appear throughout Hebrew Scriptures, including texts believed to have been written before the Torah itself (such as prophetic texts like the book of Amos).

I want to stress this point: the story of Israel fundamentally begins with the revelation of a God who is known and revealed through liberation.

It is I who Sent You

The particular story told from Exodus today is Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. While tending sheep, Moses is struck by a great sight: “angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed (Ex 3:2).”

This is one of the – if not the most famous – theophanies in the Hebrew scriptures. The image is striking: the flames, the bush that did not burn, the voice of God speaking to Moses. But also significant is the revelation of the name of God:

He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”

But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”

He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.'” God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations. (Exodus 3:12-15)

The use of the name of God here gives us some clues to the potential sources behind the text. It is generally assumed by scholars that the Torah was compiled over a long period of time, drawing from multiple sources (four is the number most often given, but there are a range of combinations and amalgamations in the documentary hypothesis).

The text is the moment that God supposedly revealed God’s true name, referred to as the “tetragrammaton” (sometimes written as YHWH – the lectionary version uses all-capitalized LORD to depict the places where this name, appears). Yet the story as a whole alternates between the tetragrammaton and the more generic “God,” or elohim, which may indicate that this story comes from a combination of two sources: the Yahwist and the Elohist – each named for their preferred way to refer to God.

Bracketing for the moment debates about whether they are distinct sources, or one source weaving together multiple traditions, the blending of the Yahwist and the Elohist also means blending two often different views of God. God in the Yahwist account is immanent, anthropomorphic, and closely connected to the lives of humans. God in the Elohist account is more distant, and rarely speaks directly.

And yet these two seemingly disparate views of God come together in the moment on Mount Horeb. Both transcendent and immanent, God has witnessed the suffering of the Israelites. And God will take action. “I AM WHO I AM” – this can also be translated as “I Will Be What I Will Be.”

And this God will be a God who liberates slaves. That is the sign, that is how this God will be known by the people God has chosen.

Liberation in Hebrew Scriptures

Asserting that God is revealed through the liberation of slaves is not to ignore the real and complicated status of slavery in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures (as well as the times and communities which generated those texts). The wholesale condemnation of slavery as a practice came millenia after these texts were written. The contestation around slavery may actually shed light on what Hebrew Scriptures mean when they speak of liberation.

Within the Torah itself, we see that the patriarchs owned slaves and the Deuteronomic code allows slavery. New Testament epistles like Philemon implicitly condone the practice. At the same time, The Deuteronomic code also calls for protection of fugitive slaves (Deut 23:16-17), and the release of slaves after seven years of service (as part of the sabbath year commands that also included things like forgiving of debts).

Given these tensions, it’s hard to categorize the biblical view of slavery in just one way. Although slavery is accepted as a given in the cultural and social life of the ancient near east, Hebrew scriptures also reflect an insistence on treating slaves with a certain amount of respect that was less common at the time. 

With respect to liberation, this ambivalence about slavery draws our attention to the many dimensions of liberation that exist in Hebrew scriptures. The prophetic books, for example – the Nevi’im – are rife with liberation themes. Jeremiah. Amos, Micah and more speak of a God who rejects economic and social oppression, and acts on behalf of those who are poor and vulnerable. 

Some of these books (like Jeremiah) were written in the same experience of Persian exile that also prompted the writing of the Torah. Others, like Amos, were written before that experience, and express a warning to the people of Israel themselves about their neglect of justice and liberation. Consistently, liberation in the Hebrew scriptures has real, material impact on the people who experience it, whether it is the freedom from slavery, release from an oppressive empire, or responding to the needs of people in poverty.

Jesus and the Exodus

I often wonder what it meant for Jesus to be formed by this foundational story of Israel – how that affected his idea of God and his interpretations of the Torah. While we don’t have direct access to that (in the sense that we don’t have any sources written by Jesus), it is clear that for early Christians the Exodus was an important interpretive lens for the person of Jesus and their own formative identity.

Matthew’s gospel in particular shows a lot of engagement with Exodus, largely because it is the gospel most deeply concerned with Jewish tradition as a whole. Scholars have theorized that the Matthean community still primarily identified as Jewish, although they were also in conflict with the larger Jewish community. Matthew’s gospel makes great efforts to connect the person of Jesus to the story of Israel: its genealogy, infancy narrative, and “fulfillment citations” are all designed to draw a direct line between Jesus and Hebrew Scriptures – and in many ways, Moses himself.

In that sense, I find the pairing of Matthew with Exodus in the lectionary to make a lot of sense: Moses, reluctant though he may seem, takes on a great and burdensome mission of liberation.  Jesus, less reluctant, predicts the trouble and consequences of his own prophetic mission.

Yet, this pairing can also point to one of the supersessionist traps that continue to persist in Christianity today – the tendency to spiritualize liberation. The work Moses is called to by the God who spoke through the burning bush will make a concrete, material difference for those he liberates (albeit with further challenges ahead). Yet the death Jesus describes will not change the socio-political situation of first-century Jews (or at least not immediately so).

Rather, many Christians see Jesus’s death and resurrection as an internalized liberation from sin. While as an ethicist I would certainly argue that sin always has material and social repercussions, some Christians are susceptible to centering liberation only for themselves, from their own sins. This is a marked contrast to the liberation of Hebrew scriptures, which is social, political, and material.

That being said, liberation theologians within Christian traditions often resist this problem of spiritualization. In fact, Gustavo Gutierrez places the Exodus event and its unabashedly material and political nature as the event through which we must understand Jesus’s own salvific work (A Theology of Liberation, 88-89).

Although his reading is still very much bound to a typological reading of Hebrew scripture, I admire the way he emphasizes a shared, social liberation. God has been revealed as a God of liberation, and we, like Moses, are called to a difficult task ahead.

Liberation Today

Given this centrality to liberation in Hebrew scriptures and how it ought to form Christian understandings of liberation, we are called all the more strongly to act on it today. As I close this reflection, I want to stress the importance of acting in concrete and material ways while resisting the reduction of liberation to an interior spiritual posture. 

Despite contemporary moral condemnation, slavery persists under many different names: human trafficking, forced labor, penal labor, the abuse of migrant labor, child labor, etc. and etc. It is our duty to understand not only our complicity in its persistence, but also the actions we can take to combat it.

When God gives God’s name to Moses, that revelation is defined by God’s decision to liberate that people. Let that liberation be how the world continues to hear the name of God, today.