Wednesday April 9

Exodus 7:8-24

1. When Israel was in Egypt’s land,
   Let My people go!
   Oppressed so hard they could not stand,
   Let My people go!
   • Refrain:
     Go down, Moses,
     Way down in Egypt’s land;
     Tell old Pharaoh
     To let My people go!
   • 
     

Well, Moses and his brother Aaron went to old Pharaoh, and told him that the God of Israel says, 'Let my people go', but old Pharaoh wasn't about to let his slaves stop work let alone go out in the wilderness to "celebrate a festival".   That brings us to today's reading and the first of ten plagues inflicted on the land of Egypt that eventually led to the Egyptians urging the Hebrew people to leave.  They are the same ten plagues remembered each year in the Jewish Passover Haggadah:

"These are the Ten Plagues which the Holy One, blessed be He, brought upon the Egyptians:  Blood. Frogs. Lice. Wild Beasts. Pestilence. Boils. Hail. Locust. Darkness. Slaying of the First-born.

The Ten Plagues by Chassidic artist, Shoshannah Brombacher.  Note:  Start with the fish in red blood and move counter clockwise around the painting.

As many Jewish scholars point out, the ten plagues can be understood as an "undoing" of the ten utterances of God in the story of creation.  The creation story moves chaos to order; the story of the plagues moves order to chaos.  

In today's bit of the story, the Nile River is the target.  Each summer the Egyptians could count on the Nile flooding and leaving behind rich, black soil that created a fertile green valley across the desert.  But the river that sustained life is now a source of death.  When it turned to blood, all of the fish died; this further contaminated the water and the Egyptians had to "dig along the Nile for water to drink".   Order to chaos.

In our time God's good and life-giving gift of water is threatened by plagues of our own making. For example, ground water is exploited by the bottled water industry. Lakes, rivers, and oceans continue to be used as dumping grounds; the month-long search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been hampered greatly by the sheer volume of garbage in our oceans.  In the midst of this chaos, there are international calls for the healing of our waterways.  Perhaps today we can pray with Brother Cathal Duddy, a Franciscan monk: We praise and thank You, Lord, for the gift of living water.  Guide us to use it wisely, learn from its humility, consume it sparingly, and protect its purity, so that with St. Francis, we may truly enjoy water.  Amen.