Word to the Wise
Tuesday, July 23, 2013 - Tuesday in the 16th Week in Ordinary Time
[Exod 14:21—15:1 and Matt 12:46-50]Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord swept the sea with a strong east wind throughout the night and so turned it into dry land. When the water was thus divided, the children of Israel marched into the midst of the sea on dry land, with the water like a wall to their right and to their left.
Motion pictures are often judged by their "special effects." Certainly the special effect of dividing the Red Sea, even if nowadays it may seem crude by the industry standard, remains one of the great ones! Cecil B. DeMille's biblical epic, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, forever shaped my imagination of the event! Old Testament scholars may argue about how God REALLY did it, but Cecil B. DeMille managed to put imagination on the screen! It remains one of the great feats of imagination engineering!
The exodus of the Children of Israel is a defining event for Judaism, just as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is for Christianity. Indeed, the early Christian community quickly realized that baptism in water could serve as a symbolic connection as the liberation from slavery to sin just as the exodus was deliverance from slavery to Pharaoh. This is made explicit in our celebration of the Easter Vigil, at which this particular passage from the Book of Exodus is required reading. In Jewish homes at Passover, at the Seder Meal, a child is required to ask why the celebration is taking place? The Passover meal is a memorial feast celebrating deliverance. We, in our turn, celebrate the Eucharist daily as a memorial of our deliverance from sin. I certainly was not present at the original event at the Red Sea. But DeMille's movie helps me to "remember" it just as DaVinci's LAST SUPPER [painted in a Dominican dining room] helps me to remember how we began to memorialize our own deliverance! AMEN