A type of pre-reflection that occurred to me the other day
as I was making my way through this psalm. As we will see, at the heart of this
psalm is the Exodus. As we will also see it is not something, to the psalmist,
that exists in the past but is, in a very real sense, a present reality. It is
this continuing aspect of the Exodus that first drew my attention. It then
connected up with something else I had though t of regarding Abraham and the
sacrifice of Isaac. These (very) jumbled thoughts orbit around each other in the
following way: When Abraham and Isaac went up Moriah they went at the command
of God. This covenant-child is to be killed but Abraham says they will return.
Abraham raises the knife and the angel stops him. A ram is offered instead. In
this way Moriah (as the place of the temple mount; Chronicles) becomes the
foundation of all the sacrifices offered by Israel. It is what solidifies and
perpetuates their Abrahamic covenant. As a father, though, what I’ve come to
see is that Abraham, after receiving back Isaac, must have had an overwhelming
sense that his son now lives in the power of God—if he went into death and yet
was now given back then God would protect him from death in a way he could have
never dreamed of before. There is, it seems to me, the sense here that the
covenant is truly ‘resurrected’ in the power of God and handed over to Abarham
(and, hence, to Israel).
Exodus: something similar seems to be happening. They are
pushed up against the very waters of chaos with Pharaoh bearing down on them.
They are certainly going to die. And yet, the chaos waters dry up. They walk
through on dry ground. On the other side, they erupt in praise.
It seems to me that in both of these there is a sense of assurance
precisely due to the fact that death is certain. And, in a way, Isaac and
Israel did die. They were simply resurrected by this astonishing in-breaking of
God; they were in a sense ‘born again’. What I’m trying to get at, but can’t
formulate very well, is that something utterly secure is made present, or
‘handed-over’. It is almost as if the foundation of creation itself is revealed
in these moments. And that, for our purposes, just as Moriah became the foundation
of the Temple and of the sacrificial system, so too does the Exodus function in
this perpetuating manner. Both of these events were moments of creation,
moments of new openings. By moving into and through death they inhabit the
sphere of God’s ‘forever’. When one ‘remembers’ these events then (whether
through sacrifice or through liturgy) one is not merely recalling but
participating within them—in other words, just as Abraham would have looked up
on Isaac, so too do they look upon the Exodus. Isaac and the Exodus would have
been like some oath given by God to Israel, a binding promise (…covenant)
matched by its already-fulfillment.
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