Doing what Love Requires: Exodus 1, Murder, Myths and Morality…

I recently preached at the wonderful Westcity Church of Christ, taking part in their sermon series on Disruptive Stories. My disruptive story was from Exodus 1:15-22, a story of enormous courage and surprising ethical complexity, which we usually gloss over too quickly. Several people asked for a copy of my notes, so I thought I would make them more widely available and post them on the blog. Hope you find yourself drawn into this extraordinary story….

Have you ever had to make an impossible decision?

Perhaps you run a company – and it has some financial problems. You have to lay some people off. But you know the ones you lay off are unlikely to find another job. The alternative is to keep them on, but then you risk the company going under and then no one will have a job. You lay them off – but feel awful about it, and they never speak to you again.

Or perhaps you are offered your ideal job – everything you have ever wanted. It’s especially appealing because your current job bores you to tears and doesn’t pay much – but you are in a field with few openings. But now a wonderful breakthrough has come, except it involves moving interstate. Trouble is, your elderly parents live close to you and you provide them the care they need to be able to stay in their home. With you gone, they will have no choice but to be in some aged care facility they really don’t want to go to.

What do you decide? If you stay, you’ll resent your parents, seething away at the lost opportunity. If you go, you will feel guilty forever at the choice you made.

And how about the situation Tim Costello described when he was CEO of World Vision? He was chatting to a mother in the Philippines. She told him that a few months back her youngest child was desperately ill and needed some expensive medicine. If she had purchased it, she would have had no money for food for her other children. Then they would have become sick and would perhaps have died. It was a real Sophie’s choice. She didn’t buy the medicine and her youngest child died. Did she do the right thing – she now wonders.

Some decisions are painful beyond our imagining.

Exodus 1:15-22 recounts an impossible situation that arose about 3500 years ago. After the death of Joseph, the Hebrew people are forced into slavery in Egypt. Their situation goes from bad to worse when Pharaoh, concerned that the birth rate amongst the Hebrews was too high, orders the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill all male Hebrew babies at birth.

When reading the Bible, try to imagine yourself in the situation. If you were Shiphrah, what would you have done? It was impossible, wasn’t it? If you obey Pharaohs command, and kill all Hebrews male babies at birth, you go against all you have stood for. But if you disobey the command, you will be killed. 

What would you do?

The passage tells us Shiphrah and Puah come up with a risky, but clever plan. They do nothing, and carry on as before. They don’t kill the babies, and perhaps they hoped that Pharaoh would forget his own command. But he doesn’t. He calls them to account. “Why didn’t you kill the male babies like I said?” he demands.

We can’t know if they had planned their answer in advance, or if it came to them on the spot, but they quickly say: “Ah Pharaoh, here’s the thing. Hebrew women are not like the wonderful, cultured, refined women of Egypt. They are like old cows. They just give a quick push, and their babies pop out.” Or to quote Exodus 1:19 precisely: “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women.” 

You know what. Pharaoh believed them. I think I would have found this passage a bit of a stretch (seriously, could fooling Pharaoh really be this easy?) if I hadn’t grown up in Apartheid South Africa. The myths about race in the world I grew up in were truly astonishing and deeply damaging. I discovered that when you live in a prejudiced context, you land up believing many strange things. Pharaoh believes the midwives because he is a prejudiced man.

Incidentally, Pharaoh’s prejudice against the Hebrews is also a more widespread prejudice against women. Why must only the Hebrew male babies be killed? So far as Pharaoh was concerned, only men could ever be a threat to him. Women were inconsequential – except that it is these two women who outwit him, and then it is Moses’ mother who out schemes him, and it is finally Pharaoh’s own daughter who organises that Moses is raised in the palace. You can imagine how the women at the time would have chuckled at Pharaoh’s endless blind spots, all flowing from his fundamental prejudice.

On the surface, the story seems to have a happy ending. Pharaoh lets the midwives off. In time they have children of their own. All good – no problems! Hmmm – really? Dig into the ethical issues surrounding the passage a little more.

First, the midwives told a lie. Now you might well say – please, it was a little white lie, it was of no consequence. And that is a common 21st century response, where lying and deceit is so much part of our culture that we barely notice it. I recently heard someone say that anyone who doesn’t lie regularly will constantly violate all social etiquette. You know as well as I do that if a friend proudly shows you an expensive new outfit and asks, “What do you think?”, you can’t honestly answer: “What were you thinking? It makes you look even uglier than usual!” Now that might well be what you were thinking, but we know we’d be social outcasts if we said it, so we are more likely to say, “Looks lovely. Really suits you.” It’s not true, but it is polite. We’d probably try to hint at the insincerity of our answer by quickly changing the topic, though then again, we might overcompensate for our awkwardness and go on and on about how lovely the outfit is.

Trouble with this is that we so routinely massage the truth that we no longer know if people are being honest. Ethicist Immanuel Kant used to speak of the categorical imperative in ethics. He said, if you think that lying is ok – you have to imagine a world where it’s not just your one special circumstances lie, but a world where you can never be sure if something is a lie or not, for you have already conceded that lying doesn’t really matter. If you don’t like that world, think again about saying lying is ok.

The second concern is much more serious. This is not just any lie. It is a lie that “others” a nation. Listen to it: “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women.” In other words, the Hebrews are a different race – probably not fully human. Their birth patterns are not the same as ours.

The history of the Hebrew people is a history of their othering – and that is why they have been persecuted so often. It isn’t really an overstretch to say that the seeds of the Nazi holocaust (and the endless earlier onslaughts against the Jews) were laid in that little lie: Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women. The Jews are “other”… So it is OK to do anything to them. And the lie is told to Pharaoh, a King – someone with great power and influence, someone who sets policy.

Third, the lie achieved nothing. Pharaoh shrugs his shoulders and says: Really, the Hebrews are such a strange race. But never mind, if their children are born so quickly, let’s just drown their male babies after birth in future. And if you remember the story of Moses, that was the practice at the time of his birth.

In short, the Hebrew midwives were lying, othering, failures.

Do you see the problem? So what should they have done? Imagine for a moment that you sat on a Hebrew Ethics Council – and the midwives came to you with their dilemma, asking what they should do. I have sat on enough ethics committees to know the likely answer. They’d come back and say: You can’t kill the babies. That’s murder. You can’t lie. That will have unacceptable unintended consequences. So what must you do? Disobey the command and if asked why say that you cannot obey illegitimate instructions – and that a command to murder is illegitimate. We realise that might well mean that you lose your own life, but as Christian apologist Tertullian (c.155-220) famously asked when Christians argued they had to serve in the Roman military as they had no other way to make a living`: “Do you have to live?”

It’s an “ouch” answer, but if you want to claim the highest ethical ground, it’s probably the right one. So what if you lose your life? You will have done the right thing.

Harsh – but right… But is it really the right answer?

There are two clues in the passage that you mustn’t miss. 

When did these women live? In the ancient world, approx 3500 years ago. What did the ancients consider the two greatest blessings a person could receive from God or their gods?

Answer: That their name would be remembered. So what are these women’s names? Shiphrah and Puah. We remember them 3500 years later. Wow – the ancients would have been ecstatic. That is some remembering!

Oh, and incidentally, what was Pharaoh’s name? Pass! The passage deliberately leaves it out. He is “Pharaoh who?” His name is forgotten, not worth remembering. The ancients knew no more damning verdict.

Second, that you had children of your own. What does the passage say? V21: “Because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own.”

So these lying, othering, failures are doubly blessed by God.  They are Shiprah and Puah – their names remembered, and they had children of their own.

Why so blessed?

Because they got their ethical priorities right, and in an impossible situation they had the courage not to take the easy path, which would have been to kill the babies (who were probably later killed anyway), but they told a risky lie, realising that trying to save life (including their own) was more important than everything being squeaky clean.

Interesting, but so what, you might ask.

Well back to the impossible decisions you and I sometimes face. Think about the portrait of God shown in this passage. This is a God who doesn’t expect every i to be dotted and every t to be crossed. This is a God who understands the messiness of life – the God who understands the messiness of your life, and of mine. The God who knows your name, and blesses you.

And when you face impossible decisions in life, this God simply asks – did you get the really important priorities right. Like saving life? Or put differently, did you do what love required from you? Sometimes it might not be what the ethics committee advises, and sometimes we can’t reconcile everything. In 1 Cor 13:13 Paul writes: Now there are three things that remain forever: Faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these, is love.

In impossible situations, do things that are birthed by faith, hope and love. And courageously follow the model of Jesus – who always did what love required Him to do.

As always, nice chatting…