Exodus tells us that these two women feared God, which is why they refused to kill the Israelites' baby boys. To be honest, that language makes me nervous. To fear God, i was told as a child, is to "respect" God. Why wouldn't the language just read "respect," then? Did the midwives let the babies live because of their respect for the God of Life, which was greater than their respect for the Pharaoh? Maybe they were resentful of the Pharaoh, thinking "Why should i take these babies out of the world, after i just worked so hard helping them get into it?" Maybe, out of sheer defiance, they said something like, "We are in the birthing department. If you want killing done, that is not our job!"
We don't know why the midwives did what they did. I'd like to think that they saw through wise eyes trained by years of assisting new life into the world the injustice of the Pharaoh's decree. But their role in this story is an important one. They call this baby out from his mother's womb, form him by simply allowing him to live, and send him out into the world as a captive child of an oppressed woman.
Who am i in this story? Who are you? Draw yourself into the story, choosing a character and imagining how you would have felt or what you would have thought. If you follow the Moses story with the lectionary in the next several weeks, i invite you to keep in mind his tenuous beginning. What if his midwives had obeyed the Pharaoh and killed him? What if his mother had been caught hiding him as a baby? What if the Pharaoh's daughter had not found him and safely rescued him? What if his sister Miriam had not been watching, willing to deliver the child safely back to his birth mother?
I am called by Puah and Shiphrah to look for ways to facilitate life among suffocating injustice. What about you?
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