It is a common belief that the people of Israel suffered greatly at the hands of their slave masters in Egypt. Indeed the mission of Moses is said to have begun when he witnessed a fellow Israelite being beaten to death by an Egyptian. It is a common belief that the very existence of Israel was endangered by such treatment. But this is a very distorted picture indeed.
In fact the Israelites did well for themselves in Egypt. They were, and still are, a smart, industrious people. The Pharaoh's huge civil service was staffed chiefly by Israeli exiles. His massive building programmes would not have been possible without the presence in Egypt of so many Jewish exiles. Israelites were active and influencial at every level of Egyptian society.: the civil service, the army, the labour force, even at the palace.
And the Pharaoh paid them well for their work. They were in fact materially well off in Egypt, as the Jewish author of the book of Exodus concedes in todays excerpt: "We sat by the fleshpots of Egypt and ate our fill of bread." The Jewish people began to settle down to a comfortable middle class existence in Egypt. Their dilemma remains the dilemma of every exile: How do you contribute fruitfully to your new foreign environment and at the same time retain your old native identity?
The London Irish had the same problem. The dilemma of the exile was and still is daunting: do you withdraw to the ghetto, sustained by a diet of nostalgic folksongs and a fictional mythology? It was comfort, not cruelty, that threatened their existence as a separate unique people. Forgetful of their roots and identify, they were melting easily into the Egyptian background. If they continued on in this fashion, the next generation of Israelis would in fact be Egyptian. This obviously threatened the very existence not just the Jewish nation but the Jewish people.
The greatness of Moses lay not in his courage but in his prophetic vision. He had the insight to see what was happening to his people. He had the eloquence and the passion to alert them to their plight. For the sake of their identity they would have to abandon their comforts. There is more to life than pans of meat and eating bread to our heart's content! That abandonment, that rediscovery of their original identity would be painful. They would protest at the effort and the pain.
This experience is not unique to the Israelites. It is the experience of every human being on the journey to adulthood. We do not walk in a straight line from the Egypt of infancy to the Promised Land of adulthood. We so often stop on the road and hanker after what we have left behind. We protest to Moses or whoever the parent figure of the moment happens to be. "At least we were never hungry in Egypt." At least we were never hungry as infants. We protest on the march to independence and maturity. Adulthood is not just handed to us. It requires a demanding walk through a sometimes difficult desert.
But the lesson ranges beyond the personal. That same lesson must be learned today by what is known as the First World, western Europe and the United States, in other words. Crass materialism could well destroy us. As St Paul warns the Ephesians in today's first reading: "I want to urge you not to go on living the aimless kind of life that the pagans live." While the human heart may settle for bread and circuses, the human spirit will not be satisfied. The human spirit craves the infinite. And that infinite is provided in the Bread of Life that Jesus speaks of in today's gospel. The Eucharist challenges us weekly to look up from our pans of meat and recognise the deeper hungry in our hearts.
And we are not talking merely of those who are physically hungry. Jesus was equally concerned about those who are starved of a vision, who are living the aimless life of the pagans. We could well take to heart the advice that Paul gave to the Ephesians in today's second reading: "Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God's way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth." We must broaden our lens to include the spiritual and well as the material in our daily vision of things. Otherwise we sell ourselves and we sell humanity short.
There is more to each of us than meets the eye. We should go out from this place this morning with the uplifting promise of the gospel in our hearts: "I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be hungry; he who believes in me will never thirst." Let us join the Jews in asking him to give us this bread always.
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