The Exodus from the Hotel California

     I was baptized by someone in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I don’t know much about his life at all other than he got out of Hollywood, and that he started a new life in Christ with his family as a pastor at a little church in Boulder Colorado which I attended.  I loved the heart for Christ that he showed when he led us on Sunday mornings singing even those bad, early 1980 worship songs—I’ve never listened to his pre-Christian music. But he escaped from Hollywood. In the Theology of the Body context, I suppose Egypt reminds me of the song Hotel California, where  “prisoners” “can check-out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” You can never leave, that is, until God or His chosen deliverer comes and helps to extricate you.

     John Stott focuses on the oppression of the Egyptians saying,

The Egyptians “made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields” (1:14). Their oppression lasted 430 years. But they cried to God for deliverance, and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Indeed, he was already preparing their deliverer (p. 54).

As much as you want people to leave Egypt and see how much more fulfilled their lives will be in Christ, you can’t make them leave until they want to leave. Sometimes you can only give them the present of your presence, and sometimes words.

     In Jerusalem at Christ Church I first learned from the Rev. David Pileggi the Jewish concept of remembrance. When Jewish people celebrate the Passover Seder they enter back into that Exodus—they relive it. I really like this idea, but even more so, I think we also find our deliverance as we in Christ deliver others. Some theologians say, “Every disciple disciples.” But I think there is more than this. We draw closer to Jesus and his heaven as we allow Him to work through us. So as we disciple others like He did, we are discipled ourselves. As we heal others as He healed, we ourselves are healed. As we love as He Himself loved unto death, we experience His love. And as we work to deliver as He delivered those who wanted to be, we are delivered.

     But beyond the idea of offering deliverance to those who want it and finding our own deliverance in those situations in which God had honored us by giving to us, I think we have to remember that God allows us to have thorns. The deliverance He promises to us is not always physical, as Paul says to the Corinthians in 2 Cor. 12: 1-10. Like Jesus, three times Paul pleaded with the Lord to remove the thorn in his life but in the end he understands that “for the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”  The deliverance that Christ promises us is nothing less than resurrection after death for others. It is to experience His type of love-life.

     So we can consider the 10 plagues both as God’s anger towards the Egyptian life that kept the Jews from worshiping their God and as a 10 step program to extricate Egypt from the Jews. Exodus 13: 14-16 states:

And when in time to come your son asks you, ‘What does this mean? You shall say to him, ‘By a strong hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt, from the house of slavery. For when Pharoah stubbornly refused to let us go, the LORD killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals. Therefore I sacrifice to the LORD all the males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.’ It shall be as a mark on your hand or frontlets between your eyes, for by a strong hand the LORD brought us out of Egypt (italics mine).

Death is sometimes necessary to bring deliverance to others. Word Biblical Commentary says this about these verses (J.I. Durham, Vol. 3):

 All that is set forth here is to the single end that those who are to come may know the exodus, by taste and by feel, by cost and by result, as an experience of their own as equally as an experience of their fathers. And so they await the time, then taste the bread and give Yahweh his due, explain it all to the ones who must remember to those after them, and thus experience the freedom to glorify Yahweh in service that is their heritage.

As Christians we also remember. We wear this mark of Christ as ones who have been delivered from the house of slavery by proclaiming and living this possibility for the world.