Take a stand and stay still (Exod 14:13-14)

Israel’s complaints at the end of our last reading (Exod 14:11-12) are the wild accusations of a slave people who were not in control of their lives and so had learnt a mentality of not taking responsibility for what was happening to them. They were not, of course, responsible for the Egyptian reaction, but they made their own choice when they left Egypt. It is instructive, however, that Moses does not answer the substance of their complaints, but instead responds to their fear. Like a child I babysat once, who went hysterical at the sound of fireworks and needed a cuddle, so Moses reassures the people (Exod 14:13-14).

As so often in the Bible when things look difficult, the message starts with ‘do not fear’. Fear is an emotion and hence it cannot simply be banished on command, but what Moses tells them is not to react to the fear they feel. Typically, when we are faced with a terrifying prospect we respond with ‘fight or flight’. Either we forcefully go into head-on collision with what makes us afraid in order to overcome it or we try to avoid it at all cost. Sometimes, the fear manifests itself as an overwhelming ‘chatter’ in our head, that tells us that we are no good at coping, berates us for being so irrational or blames us or others for getting into such a situation in the first place.

Moses follows up his initial negative command (‘do not fear’) with a positive ‘stand by’ or, to be more accurate, ‘take your stand’ and observe God saving you while you keep still (the word in Hebrew is onomatopoeic like the English ‘shush’). In other words, he tells them not to react to their terrifying situation with fight or flight, nor feed the inward dialogue in their head with confused panic or finger-pointing, but stay with the situation, stay still and God will come to their rescue.

Not only does Moses reassure them that God will deliver them and fight on their behalf, but he also emphasises that the Egyptians they fear now they will never see again. This is a curious statement that is worth exploring further. Egyptians evoked such terror in Israel because God’s people were still slaves in their hearts and saw in Pharaoh their master. This reminds me of a friend whose controlling mother made her feel she was still a little girl every time she went home to visit. Although she was an adult, she still carried that child identity in her heart and fought for control when faced with her mother’s tyranny. Moses is saying to Israel, ‘The ones who oppressed you, who had power over you and treated you like slaves, you’ll never see again’. It is not that Israel will never see Egyptians; in their history they will encounter them from time to time but never again with that old identity, as slaves, and never the very ones who witnessed their humiliation and who kept them oppressed.

From a spiritual perspective, our enslavement to sin creates an identity that makes sin master over us. It might be old habits we cannot break, attitudes that are too powerful for us to change. Like Israel quaking in their sandals, we too might identify ourselves as slaves to those things that master us. Yet the answer is that as we identify with Christ in His death and resurrection, so beautifully illustrated in baptism, we die to that old slave identity and receive a new identity as God’s people so that we no longer need to conform and act according to the old programming (Rom 6:3-11).