Iliad & Exodus

The Iliad Art Print, by Canon Press

   

Lenten Vespers, Week One: Exodus

A Reading from the Book of Exodus:

When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the [burning] bush, “Moses, Moses! … I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob … 

“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites … 

“The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” … God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ”

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I first read the Iliad at the age of 17, and through multiple translations, stage and screen adaptations, and a surprisingly fantastic graphic novel, it has held my imagination captive ever since, in ways few stories ever could. I think it no exaggeration to say that the Iliad and the Odyssey were the closest things that the classical world had to Scripture before the Bible.

Traditionally we attribute the Iliad to Homer, a blind yet divinely inspired poet, who sang the song of the Trojan War centuries after it happened. If indeed he proves to be an historical individual, Homer would’ve lived around the eighth century before Christ, while the events of which he spoke took place in the twelfth or thirteenth century.

Homer lived in the wake of the Bronze Age Collapse, essentially a dark age, during which the storied exploits of his forebears sounded godlike and heroic, as indeed the Iliad is rife with Olympians, nymphs, and demigods. So fantastical were these tales that for a time most serious scholars thought them entirely fiction, Troy having no more grounding in fact than the mythical Isle of Avalon. But then, in the nineteenth century, an eccentric millionaire dug it up.

Now the debate isn’t whether the Trojan War was waged, but how much of Homer is history, and how much his mythology. Even so, I find this a secondary or even tertiary concern. What makes the Iliad matter is what it tells us of ourselves: our timeless search for meaning, the endless scourge of war, the necessity to face our inevitable mortality. The Trojan War happened long ago. But we still read it for what it means today.

The Exodus is a lot like the Iliad. It is an ancient story recounting events that occurred long before it was written. Traditionally we attribute it to one man, one author, Moses; but this is poetic at best. Never does the text claim that Moses wrote it. Like Homer, Moses stands in for an entire tradition of narrative. The text as we have it, the Book of Exodus edited into its current form, dates to the Babylonian Exile, when Judeans lived as strangers in a strange land, compiling the Torah, the Five Books of the Law.

So the Exodus was edited in the sixth century BC, stitching together material stretching back to the eighth or ninth century, about events that occurred anywhere from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries—rather like the Iliad. Like the Iliad, the Exodus has been adapted innumerable times. Like the Iliad, the Exodus is hotly debated by scholars: how much is history, how much is myth, and how much was made up from whole cloth.

And just like the Iliad, I’m not sure that any of that matters, because the point of the Exodus is not to recall things that happened long ago and far away. So a small group of foreigners fled servitude in Egypt to settle in the hinterlands of Canaan—so what? Who cares? That’s not why we read it today. That’s not why we make centimillion-dollar films every few years rehashing Moses, Mt Sinai, the Ten Plagues, the Ten Commandments. No, we return to the Exodus not as history but precisely because it is myth.

And by myth I do not mean it didn’t happen; myth doesn’t simply mean false. A myth is a story that transcends history, “a tale that never was and always is.” The purpose of myth is to make sense of our world, to unveil timeless truths: truths about God, about our world, and about our place within it. That’s why we read the Iliad. That’s why we read the Exodus. Did things occur precisely as they play out on the page? Does it matter? I want to know what it teaches for today.

The Exodus remains revolutionary. Imagine the implications even now. Here we have Egypt, cradle of civilization, daughter of the Nile, undisputed master of the Late Bronze Age, superpower of the ancient world, governed by a living god-king. And the Exodus is the story of their slaves! This is the story of the people they oppress. How backward is that? Surely divine favor rests upon the strong, the mighty, the conqueror; the slaver, not the slave. And yet—here comes Yahweh, God of the Hebrews’ fathers.

He executes judgment against the gods of Egypt: against the sun and the grain and the river and the Pharaoh. He overturns the hierarchy of the heavens, and for what? For foreigners? For slaves? For the poor and lost and unlamented? By God, yes! Here we have the High God, who made the earth and heavens, intervening on behalf of those who haven’t got a prayer: the migrant, the alien, the underclass, the worthless. This is the God who turns the world upside-down, the strength of those who have no strength at all.

These Hebrews were not even seen as human, and here Egypt herself, the greatest of humanity’s achievements, lies toppled, broken, and bereft because she would not release those she held within her power; would not relent, would not repent, would not let His people go. This is not the way in which we tend to view our world. What matters to us even now is money, glory, power, fame: the rich, the royal, the renowned. None of that matters to God.

After the Exodus, might does not make right. Now the truly divine are those who care for all in need, who love their neighbors as they love themselves, who give without thought of gain and who shatter every chain. We were slaves once, the Exodus informs us. We were the weak and the needy, the foreign and the friendless. God set us free! And all He asks of us is that we liberate our brethren: from poverty, from prison, from oppression. Love God with all you are and love your neighbor as yourself: this is the whole of the Law.

In friendship and in hunger, Israel came unto Egypt. As generations passed, their children found themselves enslaved. But never had God forgotten them. Never had He looked away. He sent His prophet before Him, and with a mighty arm, He broke the power of Egypt and set all their gods to flight. A new order for the ages thus was born. The world is wrong, and God is right.

This was the story which the Hebrews told themselves, in Egypt as in Exile: always foreigners, always displaced, always counted out before God raised them once again. Exodus is the genesis of the Jewish people—even more so than Genesis is their genesis. God had revealed His true power as His mercy, His love, His commitment to keep every promise: a lesson we must learn most every day. God does love a loser.

If you want to know who God is, read the Exodus. If you want to know who we are as His people, read the Exodus. And if you want to know the meaning of Communion, of our Lord’s Passover from death to Resurrection, it all begins tonight—with the Exodus.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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