Miracles

Sunday’s lectionary reading was the story of the wedding feast at Cana in John’s gospel.  Jesus turns water into wine: the first of the seven signs John recounts.  All over the world, folks, like me, whose pastors’ follow the Revised Common Lectionary heard mediations on miracles.  Here’s another sort of mediation on miracles, based on a different story.

This week’s parsha for Jews around the world was בְּשַׁלַּח , Beshalach, “when let go”.  The passage tells the story of the Great Escape—the time when God saved His people from slavery.  It is the story we tell at our Passover Seder each year.  It is the story that Jesus retells at His final Seder in Jerusalem on the night before He died.

The details of the story are worth attention. The parsha begins just after the instructions about how to celebrate the events that the instructions interrupt: “And it came to pass, when Pharaoh let the people go, that God led them not by way of the land of the Philistines [the short direct way to Canaan] . . .But God led the people about, by way of the wilderness by the Red Sea,” (Exodus 13: 17-18).  When the text says “God led the people”, the writers are not kidding around, “the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, . . . and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light;” (13:21).  You want to talk your fodder for sermons on miracles—here it is.  You want your “sign from God” to insure this gamble we call faith pays off here it is. Clear as a bell day or night—the visible presence of the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Redeemer from the slave pits of Egypt—right there before your eyes directing your steps.  How’s that for miracle.

Then Chapter 14, the cinematic highlight scene, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are “led” to camp at Pi-hahiroth hard on the sea.  The mighty Pharaoh, heart hardened, welshes on the deal to let the Israelites go and puts 600 chariots worth of hard men in motion to get them back.

“When Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were sore afraid; and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord. And they said unto Moses: ‘Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?’ (14:10-11) Moses shouts, “Fear not”, and assures them that the Lord will fight for them and they have nothing to fear.

And then the miracle.  The movie makers, and the way we tell the story to our children around the Seder table, would have you believe that the parting of the sea is the miracle: ‘and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided [think about the creation story in Genesis]. 

But I think the miracle is somewhere else.  Somewhere a little quieter. Somewhere a little more human.  Note the crucial details: “And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Wherefore criest thou unto Me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.”  But how can they go forward?  Just when they need reassurance and direction most, “the angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud removed from before them, and stood behind them; (v. 19).  Just at the crucial moment, one set of miracles ceased.  The signposts pointing the way disappear. Disaster looms on all sides, and then the real miracle occurs.  Someone, unnamed in the story, a real nobody, follows the command God gives: “go forward”.  One heart answered the call of God to ‘fear not’.  One heart moved one step and 620,000 slaves walked to freedom. One heart, an uncertain and frightening future, and one miracle: dayenu; it is enough.

Buen Camino.