Leaving the Narrow PLaces Behind

One of the most important events in the history of the Jewish people is their deliverance from Egypt. What makes it so momentous is that, as a collective, the cries of a group of people of no specific significance (they were, in fact, enslaved in Egypt) reaches God’s ears, and God responds. This story has given hope to so many people and groups through the years that it is one reason why the bible has been banned at certain times throughout history. It offers a hope of liberation.

Our reading today from Deuteronomy 26 says it very succinctly, “When the Egyptians maltreated and oppressed us, imposing hard labor upon us, we cried to the LORD…and God heard our cry and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. [And] God brought us out of Egypt.”

Many authors use the word “empire” these days as a short-hand way to name the oppressive and exploitative practices of a group that uses military, economic and political power to dominate others (and nature) and create significant power differentials among various groups in that society. 

So we could say that God heard the cries of the people who living in the belly of empire.

The Hebrew word for Egypt is “mizraim” which means “narrow places.” And what a summary of oppression that word is – it creates such narrow places for people to exist.

In today’s gospel from Luke 4, we hear the famous “temptation story.” Jesus has just finished what we might think of as a kind of 40 day vision quest – where he has gone to the wilderness to find his own voice and mission. And after his time in the desert, the “devil” visits him and offers him power, glory and notoriety. 

While we may be tempted to read Jesus’ temptation as an individual process, former Spiritus vision board member and theologian, Ched Myers, offers a very different take. He says that there is an intimate link between what we hear in our first reading and Jesus’ temptation in the desert. Ched says that 

“For forty days” (1:13) is clearly meant to invoke Israel’s 40 years of “testing” in the wilderness… [And so] Jesus re-traces the footsteps of his people to their “place of origins,” the Exodus wilderness, in the hope of discovering where they went wrong. He faces again the forces that lured his people into idolatry and injustice, because to forge a different future he must confront the past.

He goes on to say that

Jesus believes that his people have lost their bearings, and that course-correction can only come through a kind of “re-visioning” of the fateful choices that led liberated Israel back into captivity. This vision quest seeks a radical diagnosis that moves beyond symptoms to the root-causes of the historical crisis of Israel.

That ought to resonate powerfully in our moment, as the experiment of American democracy continues to lose its way under Trump’s autocratic plutocracy.

Jesus’ vision quest is no mere contemplative retreat. He must face the central issues with which the people of God always struggle in their journey of faith and liberation. The three temptations name the archetypal characteristics of the Domination System: the economics of exploitation, the politics of empire, and the symbolism of omnipotence. These issues have not changed for the church in our time.

This memory is meant to function as a warning to the people not to practice the former lifeways of imperial captivity (Lev 18:2-3), or what Walter Wink calls the “Domination System.” Israel must “never return that way again” (Dt 17:16).

Jesus emerges from his time in the desert clear that he must not replicate the dynamics of empire. He will seek another way. And we hear this clearly articulated in a passage (just after what we hear in today’s gospel) where Jesus goes into the temple and “announces” his mission: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because God has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. God has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the God’s favor.”

Jesus will not align with the demands of empire. He will, instead, place himself directly opposite to it

So where does this leave us?

What always strikes me as ironic and tragic is that, like the Jewish people who were liberated from Egypt, we end up re-creating the domination systems of empire. The Catholic church has done it. The United States has done it. And I am prone to doing it.

Yet our gospel tradition calls us to reject this temptation and move in another direction. So part of the first step is to name that we are in and participating in empire. This is not much different from the first steps of AA – naming that we have lost our way and seek to be restored to health.

This will be part of our ongoing exploration during Lent – to begin to more clearly name the ways we participate in and benefit from “empire,” work to withdraw our support from it, resist its spread and collectively develop an alternative that more closely aligns with our gospel tradition.