Week 14 Friday (Year 1)

Readings: Genesis 46:1-7, 28-30; Psalm 36; Matthew 10:16-23

Egypt plays an important role in the story of God's chosen people and again in the story of God's chosen one, his son whom he 'calls out of Egypt'. The first reading today tells of how the people first went to Egypt. It was to find food and refuge in a time of famine. Providentially, Joseph, the son of Jacob/Israel, betrayed by his brothers, ended up in Egypt where, after various adventures, he rose to a position of great power.

So leaving, temporarily, the land which the Lord had given to his ancestors, Jacob/Israel goes with his whole family to  Egypt. There is no indication that this temporary visit would last as long as it did, or that the eventual return of the people would be as dramatic as it turned out to be: Moses and plagues, release and pursuit, the crossing of the Red Sea and the wandering in the wilderness ... What seems like a good idea a the time can, in later circumstances, look very different. Joseph's foreign family is initially welcomed but over time is oppressed and enslaved. In the life of Jesus, Egypt is a place of refuge, until the danger from a particularly cruel wolf, Herod, is past.

Perhaps the reading invites us to reflect on our own relationship with 'Egypt', if we take it to mean 'the world outside', the place where we are strangers, the place of those wolves Jesus speaks about in the gospel reading today. In that place we are obliged to be as cunning as serpents while seeking to remain always as harmless as doves (in imitation of the one we follow).

We might reflect also on the variety of instruments God uses to fulfil his purposes. On the one hand we have Jacob/Israel, whom the Bible presents as the shrewdest and most calculating of the Patriarchs, and on the other we have his son Joseph, like his namesake in the gospels 'a just man', a bit of a dreamer, but innocent in the face of betrayal by his brothers and the seductions of Potiphar's wife. To live effectively among wolves while maintaining innocence, a combination of shrewdness and harmlessness is needed Jesus says. That is if we are to be effective as Jesus himself is effective.

So we too move back and forth between 'Egypt' and the land that is promised, obliged for now to live in the world with its dangers and possibilities while longing for our true homeland, the place of justice, peace and love. Living where we are we seek to temper the world's cunning - flowing from its fears and anxieties - with the gracious light of that homeland - living with those 'Joseph virtues' of faithfulness, integrity, strength of character and tenderness.

We all spend time in 'Egypt', facing its challenges in order to develop those virtues needed to respond to them. Not to worry, Jesus says, because the Spirit of your Father is always with you, and the Son of Man is coming soon to reveal his Kingdom and to lead you home again.