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"I, the LORD,
am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house
of bondage." (Ex
20:1-17)
Freedom, Sin, and
Predilection:
the Pedigree of our
Predicament
A
two-fold question comes to us in today's reading and it is simplicity
itself
Why?
The first part of the question pertains to God:
Why did God choose to lead the Jews
and us
out of slavery ... and
subsequently out of sin? What motivated Him to do this?
The second part of the question pertains to man, and
is this: why did the Jews
and why do we
despite the manifest
predilection of God, long to return to slavery, to sin, once
we are delivered from it? Why would we ever
wish to go back?
We are
perplexed on both counts. Implicit in the first question is yet another:
why did God choose the Jews among the many people in Egypt
at the time under the yoke of slavery? Why not the Nubians, the Canaanites?
Why?
Once freed, why did so many of God's chosen people yearn to
return to Egypt during their sojourn in the desert, disdaining even
the Manna from Heaven itself that God gave them each morning to sustain them
when they had nothing else to eat? Why do we so often wistfully
look back and yearn for the sin that subdued us in misery even as
we ourselves receive the Bread of Angels in the Most Holy Eucharist?
Even was
we ponder this terrible incongruity, yet another question arises that
is latent in both: having been delivered from bondage in Egypt, and
knowing the misery and humiliation of slavery, why did Israel perpetuate
the obscenity of slavery itself?... much as we ourselves perpetuate slavery to
sin after our emancipation from it?
Having
been a people delivered by a merciful God from the degradation of slavery
why did they
not abolish from their midst that from which they themselves prayed for deliverance?
Why do we not among ourselves? It is not unlike like the Parable
Jesus gives us where a debtor, freed of his obligation by the mercy
of his master, immediately sets about to throttle one indebted to him
and for far less? (St. Matthew 18.23-34 )
Why do we cherish what we abhor? ... subject ourselves to that from
which we had erstwhile sought deliverance? What is this madness?
We cry out to God for deliverance ... and once delivered, return, as
St. Peter tells us like a dog to its own vomit? (2 St. Peter 2.22
). We cry out to be free, and then clamor again for the yoke of slavery,
and what is more, in our freedom immediately purpose to subjugate
others. We deplore the mercilessness of our former masters
and then exceed them in lack of pity toward those we have taken in bondage
to ourselves.
Let us attempt to answer the first question.
Why did God choose the Jews and not the Canaanites?
Because
He choose to.
It is that simple.
We are
ever seeking to constrain the freedom of God, seeking one way or another
to make it more acceptable, more pleasing, in a word, more amenable
to us, to bend it to our own will
and failing that, indict
God as unjust or unfair because it is our freedom that is constrained,
when we would constrain Gods' ...
We look in vain for reasons, justifications, warrants, that would validate
the choice, disclose its justification to us completely failing to
understand that anything which compels a choice, in some way
diminishes the freedom of that choice. The reason for the choice lies
outside the choice itself.
It is the
way of men. But God's ways are not our ways.
We do not
know unfettered freedom. Ours is a freedom that is always either a freedom
"to" or a freedom "from", and we do not understand it apart from things
extraneous to the unconditioned notion of pure freedom itself. Our most
arbitrary choices are always understood in terms outside of the freedom
by which they are chosen. We are ever lacking in some way, and all our
choices are invariably choices that purpose to supplement what we lack.
The most
deliberately "arbitrary" choice to prove, to validate, our freedom,
is itself a choice intended to authenticate the very freedom we presume
ourselves to possess. It is a choice that is motivated by something
we understand to be necessary to authenticating it which is to say
that it is not a totally free choice at all.
God lacks nothing. He is deficient in no way. He wants for nothing.
To such a Being, every "choice" is radically free, unconditioned, and
stands in need of no explanation for no explanation is possible. There
are no other "ends" that could possibly motivate a choice in God.
"I will have mercy on whom I will, and I will be merciful to whom it
shall please me" ("Miserebor cui voluero, et clemens ero in quem
mihi placuerit.")
(Ex 33:19)
The people who would later become the nation did not merit, warrant,
earn, or deserve their deliverance. A cursory reading of the Book of
Exodus gives us ample evidence of the spiritual turpitude of this people.
They were not chosen for any reason apart from, outside of, God's perfect
free will. He choose them. Why? Because He chose to.
Why Abel and not Cain? Why Jacob and not Esau? Why Joseph and not Reuben?
The list is endless.
We rebel against this free will of God a will that is perfectly, indefeasibly
good and despite what it chooses, which is invariably our own good,
we lay out a path for ourselves, and if it diverges from the path that
God has set before us, well, all the worse for God. "We will choose
what we will choose ..."
It is not
only Caligula in his madness who apotheosized himself into the pantheon
of gods. He was simply less subversive about it than we are, less ...
subtle ...
Our second question was this why, once delivered
from slavery to sin do we return to it? We leave Egypt ... and then
long for it, throw off the yoke of the slave and then yearn for it.
Do you
seek a clever answer? You will find none. St. Paul himself lamented,
"the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that
I do." (Romans 7.13-24). It is the mystery of sin. But take heart. It
is also the mystery of salvation.
We are no less stiff-necked than Israel wandering in the desert. They,
too, made gods for themselves, even as we make gods of
ourselves. But that same freedom by which God chose Israel, and by which
He chooses us and against which both have rebelled brought this
people, despite themselves, to the Promised Land from bondage
in Egypt,
... and
it will bring us, too, to the freedom that only exists in sanctity from
the slavery that only exists in sin.
Why?
Deus vult. God wills it. God chooses it. Despite the countless
reasons we can enumerate why He ought not.
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