The Exodus Beginning
In the CAC’s early years, Richard Rohr often shared his talk “Gospel Call for Compassionate Action—Bias from the Bottom.” Richard emphasized the Hebrew experience of freedom in the Exodus:
Something happened that allowed an enslaved group of Semitic peoples to go through a liberation experience and to be led to the lands we now call Israel and Palestine. The Exodus journey became an externalized and internalized journey, as true spirituality always is. It marked the beginnings of the creation of this people, and the creation of a spirituality that includes both action and contemplation.
We know the man called Moses at the heart of this Exodus journey. The account begins with his early religious experience (Exodus 3:2–6). We know he is a murderer; that he escapes from the law and lives out in the desert, taking care of his father-in-law’s sheep when he has his “burning bush” experience of God. It’s a nature experience, which is very often our own first religious experience. There’s no tabernacle, church, temple, priesthood, or anything to do with formalized religion.
Immediately upon this experience, the voice Moses hears from the bush says: “I have heard the groaning of my people in Egypt and you are to go, confront the Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go” (see Exodus 3:7–10). The contemplative “burning bush” experience comes and immediately has social, economic, and political implications. There is no authentic God experience which does not situate us in the world in a different way and cause us to see things differently and act accordingly. [1]
Theologian Dwight Hopkins writes about what it has meant for Black Americans in poverty to read the Exodus story and discover a God who liberates:
Today’s poor African Americans struggle for freedom and encounter oppressed conditions similar to those in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The Hebrew Scriptures reveal [YHWH] compassionately hearing and seeing the dire difficulties experienced by the least in society, in this case, the Hebrew slaves. When the poor today read the story of Hebrew slaves and their relationship to a liberator God, they can see that they are not alone in their cruel predicament in contemporary America.
The biblical stories of exodus feature an oppressed people (that is, the Hebrews) who suffered at the hands of brutal taskmasters; were accused falsely; were pursued by forces of prejudice; dwelled in the midst of a wilderness experience; went through periods of anxiety, fear, and doubt about the future, at times longing for a return to their former status in an inhuman system; and quarreled with their leaders while doggedly continuing along the way to freedom….
Moreover, the African American poor, reading the Hebrew Scriptures from their position on the bottom of American society, discover a whole new world different from the dominating Christianity and theology of mainstream American believers. The exodus theme does not end with harsh difficulties. On the contrary, the hope of deliverance cancels out the pain and gives today’s poor the strength to “keep on keeping on.” [2]
Stories from the Bottom
Father Richard shows how one of the Bible’s persistent themes is how God chooses the rejected, the outsider, and the unlikely for grace and divine purpose:
One of the few subversive texts in history is the Bible! The Bible is most extraordinary because it repeatedly and invariably legitimizes the people on the bottom, not the people on the top. Rejected sons, barren women, sinners, lepers, or outsiders are always the ones chosen by God. It’s rather obvious when pointed out to us. In every case, we are presented with some form of powerlessness—and from that situation God creates a new kind of power. This is the constant pattern found hidden in plain sight. [1]
We repeatedly see God showing barren women favor in the Hebrew Scriptures. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was barren and past child-bearing years when God blessed her with baby Isaac (Genesis 17:15–19). Rachel, Jacob’s wife, was barren until God “opened her womb” and she bore Joseph (Genesis 30:22–24). Barren Hannah poured out her soul before the Lord, and God gave her Samuel (1 Samuel 1). [2]
Even before Moses, God chose a “nobody,” Abraham, and made him a somebody. God chose Jacob over Esau, even though Esau was the elder, more earnest son and Jacob was a shifty, deceitful character. Election has nothing to do with worthiness but only divine usability, and in the Bible, usability normally comes from having walked through one’s own wrongness or “littleness.” God chose Israel’s first king Saul out of the tribe of Benjamin, the smallest and weakest tribe. The pattern always seems to be that “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). We see this especially in Mary, a “humble servant” (Luke 1:48). This is so consistently the pattern that we no longer recognize its subversive character.
One of the more dramatic biblical stories in this regard is the story of David. God chose him, the youngest and least experienced son of Jesse, to be king over the nation. His father, who had many sons, did not even mention David as a possibility, but left him out in the fields (1 Samuel 16). David was thus the forgotten son who then became the beloved son of YHWH, the archetypal whole man of Israel, laying the foundation for the son of David, Jesus. [3]
In case after case, the victim becomes the real victor, leading philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) to speak of the “privileged position of the most victimized victim” as the absolutely unique and revolutionary perspective of the Gospels. [4] Without it, we are hardly prepared to understand the “folly of the cross” of Jesus. Without this bias from the bottom, religion ends up defending propriety instead of human pain, the status quo instead of the suffering masses, triumphalism instead of truth, clerical privilege instead of charity and compassion. And this from the Christianity that was once “turning the whole world upside down” (Acts 17:6).
[56] The Moral Law
The immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do that which yet must be done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them, they should be driven to the source of life and law—of their life and His law—to seek from Him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfillment of the law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary.
Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 30-31). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
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