Jochebed, groaning

Exodus 2:23

23 During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God.

To be a slave is to have your present controlled. When we go out to the fields, we labor for fruit that we do not and cannot enjoy. We work and rest at the control of others, beneath the sovereignty of other men, of principles that are at or below us in value. A man controlling a man, unearned in his control, arbitrary according to birth and situation, a life controlling a life, though neither in itself has power. Slavery, therefore, is an unnatural thing.

Lord, we are slaves.

Lord, men control us. Lord, beneath the all encompassing sovereignty of your might there is a sovereignty over us. Lord, when we walk, they are around us, controlling us, giving pain or pleasure according to the whims of their own wisdom, mastering us according to these withheld or satisfied desires. Work and receive food, refuse and endure pain. Pain and food are our true masters, but you have given the power of these things to the Egyptians, men of this world, men who worship a pagan host. Lord, this is our slavery, a slavery of satisfaction meted out, a world controlled.

Lord, look on this. Lord, how can you look upon your people so controlled, so enslaved, so mastered? Lord, how can you look upon us and not be moved in your heart? Lord, have mercy! Lord, rescue us! Lord, deliver us! Lord, we are your promised people and we are enslaved in a pagan land!

Teach me, O my heart, of the ways of slavery, so that I may know and see them according to the light of the promises. First, that we come from Abraham, from his flesh, his descendants according to the promise given to him. He was told that from his loins would come a great nation, a people "as numerous as the stars in the sky" (meaning, of course, that as the stars are uncountable, so are those who come from Abraham, God can count the stars, having made them, and so he numbers us too). We are this people, this promised people, I from Levi, all my brothers too from the various sons of Jacob, the tribes of Israel.

Second, that this people, it was said, would inherit the land promised to Abraham.

Third, that according to the promises we would be blessed, and we would be a blessing to all nations.

Lord, you whose word cannot be broken, whose promises are for all time (such is the revealed reality of God, God as he is made known to us, for to see the promises themselves in the light of themselves, is to see them as eternal, their glory unfading, such is the nature of all that comes forth from God, his word stretching forward into eternity, existing as he himself does apart from the changing and dying of our world), you have made us into a people. We tremble, uncountable, amongst the Egyptians. But Lord, we are far from the land promised, and who can say that we either are blessed or bless, existing as most of us do under the shadow of idolatry, slaves to a foreign people? If the word of God is true, then it will produce its effects, and what is said will come to pass. This is the nature of truth, to conform to reality, it is reality, that which exists and comes from God, created by his Word even as in our rebellion we try to shape our own truth from our own words.

Lord, your promises are things to be gripped, things which are hands can grasp, things stood upon like a man feeling hardness under his feet in the midst of a flowing stream, or a sheltered place that stops the wind. This is how I will consider them, and how I will hold to them, me and my husband and our household, who walk in the ways of God as did Jacob and Isaac and Enoch. We hold your Word to be true despite the evidences of our senses, despite the labor allotted for us each day by the atheist rulers with no mind or heart for the reality of your presence. Yes, we can stand here and wait here, and these abstractions are reality through the glory that shines through them, making truth out of what cannot be seen and which seems to be false.

This is true, to be established here and now. But Lord, when I see my people, my people, my brothers and sisters, I must bring before you this complaint, this cry, this groan, almost wordless, that we are slaves, that we are ruled over, and that as far as we can see, your promises have not come true, they have not come to pass. Lord, look upon your people and see them suffering, laboring for that which is not bread and which cannot satisfy, their needs begrudgingly provided for by a people with no regard for you! Lord, this is slavery, to need, to be dependent on some thing, some principle, O Lord, we are slaves and the harshness of our existence is the absence of your compassion, for we cry and cry and you are silent.

Lord, I am not among those who have lost hope, who have melded to some degree with the other slaves, or with the Egyptians themselves. Lord, I have hope. I will not abandon it because you have not changed, and thus your promises stand. But Lord, I suffer too, O Lord, seeing the death of so many, watching in horror as my nephews were thrown into the river, seeing my people beaten and murdered according to the whims of a foreign people. Lord, we work and labor each day to satisfy those who cannot be satisfied! Lord, this is our lives expended in futility! Yet Lord, when you revealed yourself to our fathers you came in kindness, compassion, mercy despite your hatred of the sin that rages here. We remember this, and call to you, for though you were kind to our fathers, we cannot say you are kind to us, we cannot say this for we are slaves.

Lord, act!

When I groan, O Lord, when I groan under the cruelties of this slavery, I remember also my son. Lord, somewhere in the wilds out there is my son, my son, the one I once looked upon and saw deliverance in. Lord, who can tell the motions of my heart that gave me such a conviction when first I looked upon the son Amram and I had made? But thus it was, this child, no ordinary child, a child that we must risk for, that we must venture upon the power of God for, that we must intercede according to our trust in the promises for. We did, unhesitatingly, hiding him in our house (how silent was Moses as an infant!) until we could no longer, then in desperation sending him down the Nile in a basket. O Lord, how you proved yourself to us in those days, watching over our child, prospering him, preparing him.

Then, he fled. Not in fear, but in failure. Lord, he began the first steps of uprising, of rebellion against the slavery of these pagans, and he was met with complacency, hostility even. I remember his disappointment, he who had surrendered all the pleasures of Egypt for his people, who had risked the rage of the king for them. They were dead in their hearts, or dead in their future hopes. O Lord, are they dead still?

Lord, we are a people of weakness, a people of foolishness, a people who know the harshness of slavery, but prefer the small pleasures of our acquiescence to the future joys of painful freedom. Yes, Lord, these men of equality, that is, of no greater power than us, except in the sovereignty given out by the hand of God, Lord, they are owners according to your pleasure, and Lord, your people they are dead. Lord, I am not, I know many who are not, but Lord, you have to work and stir and bring alive this people before they will even cry out to you. Lord, I am alive in my desire, alive in my hunger, but only because you have shone into my heart the glory of your promises and in your shining made alive! Lord, work in this way, bring deliverance in this way, stir in these people so that they will cry out to you, so that they will groan, offer to their hearts the future hope of you promises so that with one voice we will cry to you, in longing, hunger, desire! Lord, we are your people but you must make us your people, you must take our hearts and set them on you so that the slavery can be seen, so that we can move and work into the greater slavery, that is, the slavery to one greater then man, which is the only freedom!

Lord, we are dead in this complacency, joined to the world of pagans in the deadness of our hope, for slavery and worldly freedom are one and alike, the only choice being an internal or external master. But in life, brought alive, made alive we are free, free in our slavery, free in a master that can give freedom in our wholeness, or scope to acting according to our creation! This is freedom, O Lord, bring it to us, we long for it! I long for it, and with a greater longing long that these people also would long for it, awoken by the cruelty of this world to the promises that offer freedom from it, our freedom to be slaves to a world not yet created but promised, a world in which groaning will cease from our flesh for it will be perfectly fitted to it, this freedom according to nature, a great hope, a great future, a great master who can bring it, and a desire fitted for that which is brought! O Lord, act towards your people, first in creating and then in satisfying, the desires of our promised condition!