Mothering Sunday, 30 March 2025, Clapham
She named him Moses, ‘because,’ she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.’
It is good to be revisiting the story of Exodus today. For Exodus is vibrant with meanings and metaphors for our times. It is written as a history, but no ordinary history.
Most histories are written about, and for, the ‘victors’. But the beginning of the book of Exodus is more like a hidden history, a people’s history, a secret story told out of a situation of oppression; to encourage the oppressed people that beneath the apparent power of the king who is enslaving them, a greater power is at work – the greater, though subtler and gentler, power of a God who will one day set them free. God demonstrates this power not through military might or political procedure, but through the furtive activities of sympathetic midwives and loving family members, and through a young woman’s adoption of a child she finds concealed in the reeds of a riverbank. Pharaoh’s daughter named the child Moses, ‘because,’ she said, ‘I drew him out of the water.’
This people’s history smiles at the temporary triumphs of temporal power. It is a joyful tale of beauty bubbling up from beneath. Here is the Egyptian king, worried about the growing numbers and influence of the alien Israelites in his land, putting slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labour, and plotting genocide, ordering the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, to kill all newborn Hebrew baby boys.
But here are two midwives who disobey Pharaoh’s instructions, two bold women who would rather save a child’s life than obey the king’s vile bidding, two midwives who draw from the water of the womb babies condemned to die. Shiphrah and Puah tell Pharaoh a lie – ‘Hebrew women give birth before we can get to them’ – as a clever excuse to ensure that the innocents live.
Here also are Moses’ mother and sister, also avoiding Pharaoh’s deadly intentions by hiding their beloved newborn first at home for three months, and then, when that became impossible, getting a papyrus basket for him, plastering it with bitumen and pitch, putting the child in it and hiding it among the reeds on the bank of the river.
And then there is Pharaoh’s daughter, behaving notably unlike every other storybook princess – for their usual role is to passively accept rescue or marriage at the hands of a man. This young woman radically refuses to indulge her father’s abominable strategies, by saving a child by drawing him out of the water and taking him into her home.
Through the agency of his daughter, her attendants, and these Hebrew women united in their care for the child in the bulrushes, Pharaoh unwittingly lets in to his household, Moses. This little one who God had chosen to liberate Israel, entered the palace of Pharaoh by a back door, into the nursery of Pharaoh’s daughter. The scene is set for God’s long, slow, undermining of Pharaoh’s power and the ultimately triumphant release of the Israelites, in which the role played by the hidden river child Moses is key.
The name Moses, in Hebrew, means ‘One who draws out’. The one who was drawn out of reeds beside the River Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter so as to become established in the land of Egypt, then drew out the Israelites from their captivity, through the parting waters of the Red Sea. The child Moses, lifted out of the waters of oppression, became the adult Moses leading his people through the waters of freedom: another act in the unfolding hidden history of God’s liberating kingdom.
I’ve often said it, and I’ll never tire of repeating it, that God chooses as his birthing partners in the making of remarkable things, people whose histories are otherwise overlooked. Our remarkable scriptures privilege and celebrate the outsiders: like the subversive midwives, the defiant mother and sister, the sympathetic princess, united by their surreptitious risk-taking actions to save a baby.
We know that the pharaohs and presidents, the CEOs and chancellors, will go on doing what they have always done, drawing ever-more power and wealth to themselves and their caste at a cost to the people and the planet. But scripture opens our hearts to the stories of those who are drawn from the waters, those at the edges facing abandonment or drowning, those at the brink of disaster. Through learning to listen to their stories we get to know the voice of God, and understand his worldview, for he so often speaks through and for such people. In scripture, and in life today. This people’s history is a story of beauty bubbling up from beneath.
One such story is that of Yifat Susskind, who works with a group called Midwives for Peace, supporting women in places of conflict and helping their voices to be heard in the halls of power – from village councils to the UN Security Council. She gives a talk called “Think Like a Mother”: “When you think like a mother,” she says, “you prioritise the needs of the many, not the whims of the few.” [2]
Scripture encourages us to see life through the lives of the world’s unsung people. Read the newspapers by all means, watch the news, listen to the radio discussions, read the history books, but understand that they’ll always tend to tell you the story the way the Pharaoh wants it told. Run what you hear and see through this test: What are the tales in scripture which relate to the events of our day? And who are the people whose seldom-heard stories we should seek out, because these are the stories that will reveal to us God’s truth?
We can also learn to read ourselves in this way. When we stop to consider our own modest lives and what they mean in the great scheme of things:
- let us acknowledge how God has written us into his story;
- let us give thanks that God saves us just like he did Moses the baby in the reeds, how he loves us just like he did Moses, and how, just like Moses, he has given us gifts to use in his service;
- and let us be thankful for those people who once nurtured us, and those who still do, who, through their acts of love towards us, have drawn us out into lives of faith and freedom.
Notes
[1] A rewrite of Drawn out of the water, preached at Bratton Clovelly, 2011.
[2] Yifat Susskind, In uncertain times, think like a mother. MADRE, 16 January 2025.