Left Behind

Now these are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob; they came each one with his household:  Exodus 1:1 NASB

Who came – The exodus began with Abraham.  It won’t end until the kingdom of God is established on earth.  You and I are in that traveling community, the ones who are waiting for the end.  But that doesn’t mean we are standing still.  It means that each one of us is also “exodusing,” leaving behind what interferes with the intended destination.  We should have known this as soon as we read the verse.  When this verse translates the Hebrew verb bôʾ as “came,” it uses the idiomatic meaning.  The verb really means “to go in, to enter.”  These people didn’t come to Egypt.  They went out of Canaan and entered into Egypt.  You and I have a similar journey.  We left one habitat and entered into another, but it wasn’t our home.  It was a pit stop.  Just don’t imagine that this means geographical relocation.  Unfortunately, pit stops like this leave lasting impressions.  A few generations in Egypt left us with Egyptomania infections.  Now we need to exit.

“The exodus I have in mind is, thus, not one from ordinary life into a space beyond it but in a sense just the opposite: a release from the fantasies that keep us in the thrall of some form of exceptional ‘beyond.’”[1]

We imagined it like this:

Just leave all that chaos behind.  Sail away to a better land.  But most of the time we take the chaos with us.  All those fantasies about a brighter future, about heavenly bliss, about escape from the temptations of ordinary life—all those “Egyptomania” ideas—keep us thinking like the past.  What we need is disturbance, crisis, disorientation.

“To put it paradoxically, what matters most in a human life may in some sense be one’s specific form of disorientation, the idiomatic way in which one’s approach to and movement through the world is ‘distorted.’”[3]

The journey to the Kingdom is not a journey of conformity.  It’s a journey of personal shedding what Egypt infused.  It’s getting rid of those addictive ideas that keep us rooted in comfortable thinking.  It’s recognizing that heaven is not an escape.  It’s a confronting event.

“In Judaism, man is always somehow a survivor . . . Something within him is waiting.”[2]

Topical Index:  exodus, Egyptomania, disorientation, journey, Exodus 1:1

[1] Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, p. 39.

[2] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (Notre Dame University Press, 1983, pp. 404-405, cited in Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, pp. 113-114.

[3] Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, pp. 30-31.