From “Rag-Tag” to “Holy”
Photo by Savvas Kalimeris on Unsplash
The crowd that eagerly departed Pharaoh’s Egypt at the behest of YHWH was a mixed lot:
A mixed crowd also went up with them, and livestock in great numbers, both flocks and herds (Exodus 12:38).
A. That crowd is termed “Israel” in the text, but the label is an anachronism, because that community still had to be formed. Before it was formed into a community with a God-given identity, the crowd had different markings:
The crowd lacked any cohesion or identity.
Its participants had no pedigree or qualification.
What they had in common was the recognition that their lingering status as exploited slaves in Egypt was not right, was not bearable any longer, and had to be altered.
For good reason they had found their voice to cry out in their long-running suffering and misery:
The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out (Exodus 2:23).
They broke the silence imposed by Pharaoh and declared their readiness to participate in history, to be agents in the construction of their own future. The cry is generic; it sounds the pain of every human voice that has the courage to announce itself in its misery. The cry was addressed to no one in particular. That their cry arrived in the ears of YHWH, the emancipatory God, was not because of their address, but because of YHWH’s capacity to attract such cries of desperate need. YHWH’s ears are the sure destination of such cries across the generations.
They left as quickly as they could. They had made no preparation for departure, but simply left in a hurry. Nor had they “prepared any provisions for themselves (Exodus 12:39).
But they did not leave empty-handed:
They plundered the Egyptians (v. 36).
The verb in verse 36 is “snatch.” They took what they could get their hands on from the economy of Egypt. That appropriation was “a great number of flocks and herds,” real monetary value!
They trusted themselves to the wilderness beyond the reach of Pharaoh. They survived, we are told, because they received the inexplicable gift of bread from the generosity of heaven (manna) that was given by the emancipatory God. The picture we get of this harried, eager company is a snapshot of humanity in its most elemental urgency for freedom, dignity, and security. While we date the narrative, perhaps to the thirteenth century BCE, it could be in any century. It could be any moment in human history when the exploited discover that they can act with effective agency for their own future. It could be in our own time. It could be some nameless migrants seeking a safe place. It could be the Me Too Movement seeking proper constitutional rights for themselves. It could be LGTBQIA+ people waiting impatiently for a proper place in civic discourse. It could be Native Americans seeking recovery of their own lost land. All of these populations, in every time and through history, shared an identity that is grounded in deep suffering and in bodily awareness of themselves as having a claim on the future. The Exodus narrative, with its rag-tag company departing, is the most elemental human story. That story, willy-nilly, features the certifying agency of the emancipatory God without whom there is no imaginable alternative to systemic suffering. This is indeed a mixed crowd,
without identity beyond shared departure,
without claim beyond pain,
without authority beyond hope, and
without resources beyond what has been snatched from others.
This is the primal narrative of human history that we continue to recite, even those of us who live in relative comfort, dignity and security. This is the most elemental narrative of the emancipatory God, the God who chooses as natural habitat, not the wondrous company of the other gods, but the anguished company of the left behind. This primal story is of a mixed crowd propelled by bold urgency, authorized by hopefulness that vetoes the governance of Pharaoh and all his predatory ilk.
B. This mixed company trusted the wilderness, sustained as they were by bread, water, and quail that were wondrously given in the desert, always at the last minute. And then, abruptly, this company is addressed by the emancipatory God via the office and mouth of Moses. This company is addressed by God’s utterance and is thereby called into being and formed for the future. First, YHWH reminds this company that it was only YHWH who has made a future possible for them:
You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself (Exodus 19:4).
The aim of their emancipation, it is asserted, is not the land of promise or Sinai. The destination has been “to myself”! The erstwhile slaves have been headed, from the outset, to a defining rendezvous with God. They did not know this; it was “eagles’ wings” that had transported them, from Pharaoh and on to YHWH.
But then, second, the divine address continues in future-defining authority:
Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation (Exodus 19:5-6).
This rag-tag company without pedigree or credential invited, by the utterance of God, into a peculiar new identity:
treasured possession…kingdom of priests!
Designated and distinguished from “all the peoples.” This identity is the inverse of Hosea 1:8: This “no people” has become “my people.” This staggering invite, however, is conditional: “if.” The condition is specified as the emancipatory God enunciates the Ten Commandments as the norm for the new identity of this community now formed and chosen (Exodus 20:1-17). These ten conditions bear no marking of class, nations, ethnicity, or cult. They are the most elemental requirements of historical wellbeing, grounded in a holiness that precludes every absolutism. That is all:
Do not impinge upon God’s holiness (vv. 2-7).
Do two neighbor-restoring activities:
Keep Sabbath (v. 8-11).
Honor parents (v. 12).
Refuse any infringement upon the neighbor: “Thou shalt not” (vv. 13-17).
The commandments are a wholesale contradiction of the predatory system of Pharaoh that knew about neither neighborliness that refuses subservience nor about holiness that precludes absolutism. Pharaoh knew only about surplus at the cost of subservience. Now this new community is to eschew both surplus (“Do not covet”) and subservience by treating all others as neighbors. In the tenth commandment, YHWH reiterates the term “neighbor” three times (v. 17)!
C. It did not take long, however, before this “no people” now become “my people” took deliberate steps to guard its new identity, to protect its privileged status, and to preclude others from participation. It would have been impossible to imagine that this “mixed crowd” in the Exodus narrative would intend to exclude anyone. All could join their march toward the wilderness. But as soon as a “holy” identity is granted, it became a ground for exclusion. Thus in the “holiness” rules of the Book of Leviticus we get all kinds of exclusions of those who are judged to be unqualified. Eventually Solomon’s temple, the great citadel of chosenness, would build exclusiveness into its structure as holiness is “graded” and compartmentalized into “holy of holies, holy place, and outer court (I Kings 6:1-6 on “vestibule, nave, and inner sanctuary.”) Belatedly Israel’s holy status is confirmed and to be zealously maintained:
Thus the holy seed has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands, and in this faithlessness the officials and leaders have led the way (Ezra 9:2).
It is of compelling interest that the term rendered “mixed” in this verse is the hithpa’el of ‘arav, not unlike ‘arav in Exodus 12:38. (The BDB lexicon assigns the two words to different roots, p. 786.) However that may be, the “mixed multitude” (Exodus 12:38) is now taken to be distorted by “mixing” with the peoples of the land. That is, the belated essentialism of “holy seed” now regards as a threat and distortion the very “crowd” that had at first constituted the “no people” who had become this “holy people.” Thus over long centuries, the narrative of God with God’s people has gone
from a mixed crowd,
to an odd community given a peculiar identity and vocation,
to a “holy seed” that must be protected through attentive exclusions.
The sequence is breathtaking. It is as though it was necessary for “the holy people” to forget its origin, to fail to remember that its life with YHWH began with a surge of unidentified nobodies seeking an alternative life. In such amnesia, the belated community can refuse and resist the various companies of nobodies from which it was, by the generosity of YHWH, initially constituted.
Of course the same dramatic sequence is readily re-performed. It is re-performed in the life of the church as the rag-tag company gathered around Jesus became a community (see Luke 7:22, 19:48). That company that was “not a people” became “God’s people” (I Peter 2:10). That community was given a defining purpose in the world to refuse conformity to the world, and to be about the work of transformation by acts of generosity, hospitality, and returning good for evil (Romans 12:1-21). It did not take very long, however, before this missional community formed from rag-tag folk drawn to Jesus became self-aware of its “Holy, Catholic” status that it took steps to protect and guard. It was not long before the church took on the onerous work of exclusivity in order to maintain its “holiness.”
The same sequence can be readily traced concerning the immigrants who came to America. We know that those who came included the land-hungry fortune seekers, many of whom came who were rejects and losers in the Old World. But very soon that white Euro-identity was formed into a freedom-loving community, a privilege-guarding enterprise. And not long after that the white power establishment began to worry about the arrival of all the immigrants who posed a threat to “holy whiteness,” so that barriers and quotas came to be enacted in order to protect the homogeneity of race and ethnicity that was easily converted into a particular kind of nationalism. That worry of distortion by “mixing” did not for the moment extend to the masses of Black Africans who were forcibly brought to our land for the sake of cheap labor.
From this oft-repeated dramatic sequence, two extrapolations occur to me. First, concerns our US denominationalism. Long ago Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (1922), traced the way in which socioeconomic and historical factors produced US denominations and a general shared readiness to excommunicate all who embodied otherwise. Thus the church has been formed among us through the pressures of linguistic, ethnic, and economic realities that could then claim grounding in tradition. One might indeed pray and hope for a fresh Pentecost in which the Spirit of God may break through our varied barriers into a redress that “all may be one”:
At this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power (Acts 2:6-11).
The facts on the ground, however, suggest that we have a mighty capacity to refuse such a Spirit-propelled possibility. Indeed, it is rather diminishment of institutional power and resources that requires our several tribes-sects to find each other, and to come together in common confession and mission. Such necessity, perhaps Spirit-compelled, leads us, always belatedly, to discern that what unites our several sects is more than what divides us. Sometimes we come to the awareness that what binds us together is enough to join together as an alternative to the demonic forces of the predatory economy all around us. Through this process we can observe that the church is yet again like ancient Israel, constituted by a rag-tag company of those who have been summoned to an alternative identity and mission. In ancient Israel there were not many among that rag-tag company who were “wise, or powerful, or of noble birth” (I Corinthians 1:26). So also in the early church God chose “the weak and the foolish” to be God’s own people. The current missional crisis (lack of people and money) in the church is perhaps the way of the Spirit to lead us again to our rootage and our proper calling, without the leverage of power and wealth. We may pause over the wonder that God has a readiness to form a “people” out of “no people.”
Second, it occurs to me that the same may be said of our national identity as “Americans” or as the principle carriers of the culture of “the West.” Naoise MacSweeny, The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives (2023) writes of “the grand narrative of the West”:
It was deeply embedded in the political rhetoric of the new United States, providing an ideological basis on which the revolutionaries could argue for liberty and an end to imperialism on the one hand, whilst simultaneously preserving internal structures of oppression and colonialism on the other (p. 245).
We are, we may anticipate, in the last throes of the struggle against white supremacy, but the work is clearly not yet completed. Naoise presents fourteen sketches of particular persons that run all the way from Herodotus (the ancient historian) to Francis Bacon (the seventeenth century English “scientist”), to Edward Said (a contemporary Palestinian). This author shows that for all the exclusively “Western” claims of being heir to Greek and Roman culture, in fact “The West,” and so America, have been a strong mix of many peoples who are not only from Europe, but also from Asia and Africa. Thus the imagined claims of purity and supremacy are destructive fictions. In truth American nationalism is constituted by many peoples from many places of origin with all kinds of ethnic and national rootage. We are indeed, historically and practically, a mixed company clustered as a unity by a summons to “a more perfect union” that overrides and transcends all of our cherished particularities.
I submit that this drama of “no people—my people—holy people” is a drama worth our attention, as we continue to re-perform it in present time. We may well remember that we have been formed as a nation out beyond our cherished origins. We may indeed remember—and be grateful and have fresh courage for the work yet to be done. The great missional mandate to the church stems from this wondrous reality that God desires to choose “the weak and the foolish” to do the transformative work in the world that is never done by the wise and the powerful.
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles.
