For the next three weeks we’re reading the Book of Exodus in our lectionary recalling the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. We might tend to see the Israelites in Egypt only as poor helpless people captured by the Egyptians and given back-breaking work building their cities and farming their fields as slaves. But that’s not quite the way the Egyptians saw them, the words of today’s reading says. A Pharaoh, with no appreciation of the accomplishments of Joseph, doesn’t see them that way. He sees them as a powerful, growing threat to the Egyptian empire.

They can’t be trusted. They could sell us out. They’re such a threat that Pharaoh decides to eradicate them as a people, killing their males and enslaving their females. 

The Hebrew title for the Book of Exodus is  Shemoth (“Names”), from the book’s opening phrase, “These are the names of the sons of Israel who, accompanied by their households, entered into Egypt with Jacob.” They are the same sons of Israel who tried to kill their brother Joseph. They are offspring of Jacob and his wives, not poor, helpless people at all. They’re a powerful people. Moses recognizes repeatedly their destructive tendencies; they’re a “stiff-necked people. He calls them God’s, “degenerate children, a perverse and crooked race! …  a stupid and foolish people” who pursue their own aims and not God’s will. (Deut 32: 1-12)

Yet God choses them for his own and leads them out of Egypt. The mystery of the Exodus is greater than the rescue of a poor helpless people. It’s God’s rescue of stubborn, foolish, sinful humanity. 

We may also simplify the Exodus to one decisive act of God who opens the Red Sea and takes his people out of Egypt while destroying their enemies. But the 40 chapters of the book remind us the Exodus originally didn’t take place in a day, it was a long, complex process that had its ups and downs. Pharoah wasn’t a pushover; Moses had his doubts, his “stiff-necked” people backed down again and again. It was complex mystery, but God works in complexity. 

The Exodus is an abiding mystery, still at work in us and our world. We especially remember it in the breaking of the bread.