Refactoring Relations

Greetings on this the Monday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Readings: Ex 1:8-14, 22; Ps 124:1b-3, 4-6, 7-8; Mt 10:34—11:1
Notes: The Exodus event is a prime formative event in the life of the Jewish people. The Babylonian diaspora is the second such event. These two events form the core of the Jewish theological understanding – Exodus and Exile.

The Following are extracts from the article Exodus and Exile: The Two Faces of Liberation by John H. Yoder.

1. the Exodus was not a programme but a miracle – They only trust, and ventured out.
2. The Exodus was not a takeover but a withdrawal – the way, the presence of the independent counter community (and its withdrawal).
3. The Exodus was not a beginning but a culmination – the willingness to follow Moses out of Goshen.
4. The Exodus Exodus is only the beginning – Sinai is the symbol of the ” communion with God”.
5. The Exodus is an exception – exile and the abandoning of nationhood as the form of peoplehood are prophetically interpreted as the way of YHWH. [Exile] Ezra and Nehemiah re-establish the community precisely without national sovereignty.

The form of liberation in the biblical witness is not the guerilla campaign against an oppressor culminating in his assassination and military defeat, but the creation of a confessing community which is viable without or against the force of the state, and does not glorify that power structure even by the effort to topple it.

Source: https://journals.co.za/toc/mission/2/1

First Reading
The Egyptians, then, dreaded the children of Israel and reduced them to cruel slavery, making life bitter for them with hard work in mortar and brick and all kinds of field work—the whole cruel fate of slaves.

Responsorial
Our help is in the name of the Lord.

We were rescued like a bird from the fowlers’ snare; Broken was the snare, and we were freed. Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

Gospel Acclamation
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.

Gospel
Jesus said to his Apostles: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household.

Jesus did not offer a course of bloodshed but of dividing and refactoring relations with a divine love. Alliance, advantage and acquisition are not the right binding mortar between us, love is, to this Jesus sets the sword.

Peace be with you,
Deacon Gerry