Exodus 14:19–31 | Matthew 18:21–35
The wind moves.
The waters divide.
The earth is revealed.
And the people walk free.
Did you hear that in our first reading? It sounds like creation happening again. In Genesis, darkness covers the deep. God’s Spirit moves over the waters. The waters divide, dry land appears, and life begins. Now, in Exodus, there is darkness, wind, divided water and dry land once again. But this time, what emerges is not simply the Earth; it is a people. People who had been enslaved, and exploited walk through the sea to freedom. This is a new creation.
God creates a way where there was no way—a framework within which freedom becomes possible. Israel is no longer Pharaoh’s property. They are God’s beloved people. This is why Exodus belongs within the Season of Creation.
Creation is constant; God’s continuing work of making space for life: bringing possibility from chaos, life from death and freedom from captivity. God creates the way into freedom. Then the people must walk through it. And they decide what they will carry with them.
Years ago, I went to live and work in India, with charities seeking to end human trafficking and disrupt modern slavery. There, I met people for whom Exodus was not an ancient story. It was their story. The people who have haunted me most were not only the girls trafficked into brothels, but the women who ran those dark, stinking places. The women, not the pimps; the older brothel madams. Many of those women had once been trafficked girls themselves. Others had been born in brothels to women who were sexually enslaved. Exploitation was the only world they had ever known. When they became too old to be profitable—or when HIV or other illness had ravaged their bodies—some were given another role within the same brutal system. They became the women who managed the brothels and recruited the next generation of girls.
The enslaved child became an adult who helped to enslave others.
The victim became an agent of the system that had first consumed her.
I don’t tell their story to excuse the terrible harm done to the girls they recruited. Nor to blame them for failing to escape (most were never offered any real path to freedom). I tell it because even though they appeared to be in charge, they had merely been moved from one room in Egypt to another. The system offered them survival only by making them serve the power that had destroyed their childhoods.
The thing with oppression is that it doesn’t only wound people; it teaches wounded people to reproduce the wound.
Egypt gets inside us. And even when a path into freedom appears, we carry the habits and chains of captivity with us. And that is where Matthew’s Gospel takes us.
Jesus tells of a servant who owes his king a debt so enormous he could never repay it. The servant pleads for patience, but the king does something extraordinary: he cancels the debt completely. A path opens. The servant walks free. Then he meets another servant who owes him a much smaller amount. He seizes him by the throat and demands payment. Although the second servant pleads for mercy, the first servant refuses, and has him thrown into prison.
He had received mercy but refuses the extend it.
He has received freedom—but immediately creates captivity for somebody else.
He has crossed the sea but had then rebuilt Egypt on the other side.
That is the warning at the heart of Jesus’ parable.
God’s mercy is not simply something we receive. It is an invitation into a new way of living. We are forgiven so we might become forgiving. We are liberated so that we might liberate others. We are shown mercy so that mercy might enter the world through us.
So where have we received mercy but refused to pass it to others?
Who do we keep imprisoned in the worst thing they have done?
Where has our own woundedness begun to wound somebody else?
Forgiveness does not mean pretending harm didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean remaining in abusive or dangerous relationships, abandoning justice or removing necessary boundaries. Of course, we may carry scars across the seabed. Of course we will remember what Egypt did to us. But we do not have to carry Pharaoh’s chains so that we can fasten them around somebody else.
Egypt is not found only in personal relationships. We reproduce it whenever we treat any part of God’s creation as objects to exploit. The same belief that turns a human being into a commodity turns a forest into timber, a river into a drain and the Earth into a resource whose only value is what we can extract from it.
But people do not belong to Pharaoh.
The Earth does not belong to Pharaoh.
Creation belongs to God—and we belong within it, creatures among creatures, called to receive God’s gifts without turning them into instruments of captivity.
So, our response is not to admire Israel’s journey from a safe distance. It is to walk it.
Perhaps that means loosening our grip upon a resentment we treasure. Perhaps it means recognising where our comfort depends upon another person’s exploitation. Perhaps it means consuming less, wasting less and refusing to treat the Earth as disposable.
And I am not saying this is simple! It really isn’t.
Perhaps forgiveness begins with the prayer:
“God, I am not ready to forgive, but I am willing to become willing.”
God creates the way into freedom, but we must decide if and how we will walk through.
As God created in the beginning, so God still creates now…
The wind moves.
The waters divide.
The earth is revealed.
The people walk free.
The invitation is ours. May we cross with open hands. May the freedom we receive become freedom for others. And may the Creator make of us—and through us—a new creation. Amen.
Holy Adventures 