Free to Worship

The exodus is a story of liberation, but it is a particular figure of liberation that cuts across and challenges many of our modern prejudices about what it means to be free. In words that have echoed down the millennia, seven times Moses commands Pharaoh in the name of God to “let my people go” (Exod 5:1; 7:16; 8:1; 8:20; 9:1, 13; 10:3). Each and every time, this formula is followed by a “so that” clause: “so that they may worship me” (7:16; 8:1; 8:20; 9:1, 13; 10:3) or “so that they may hold a festival to me” (5:1). “Let my people go” is from time to time quoted in the media and in political circles; “so that they may worship me,” hardly ever. But this second part of the command is crucial. It shows that God’s liberation of his people has a particular purpose in view: God frees his people not so that they can serve no lord, but so that they can serve the true Lord. At the same time that we dismiss the “that they may serve me” clause as a retrograde, subservient refusal to be free, we are busy enslaving ourselves to the fickle masters of ambition, or reputation, or fame, or power, or even to the very ideology of our own freedom. The imperative of the exodus was always “Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness” (Exod 7:16), and the giving of the law on Mount Sinai is God’s directions for how his people are to worship him. Indeed, the giving of the law is the second half of the exodus narrative, and “it is easy for us to forget this in an age when to be free is to be free from” (Roberts and WIlson, Echoes of Exodus, 47-48). —Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture, 263, 266, 277