Apparently this Pharaoh wasn't a firstborn. We are told that the firstborn of all Egypt,
including Pharaoh's household, those who were in prison, even the firstborn of
the livestock, were struck down this night but we have the same Pharaoh. At midnight the plague of death strikes every
household in the land and in the night the Lord awakens Moses and Aaron to lead
the people out. Do the people go into
the land of Egypt from Goshen in order to ask their Egyptian hosts/slavemasters
for their lovely parting gifts? The Egyptians
will do anything to get them to leave, they know that this is the God of the
Hebrews doing. For their part the people
take the booty they are given and put their other possessions on their backs
and leave, about 600,000 men in all not including women and children. In 430 years they have greatly increased in
Egypt.
This ending conflicts with the way the Gospel ends in verse
8. You can see at the top of the reading
that this passage is one of the most disputed passages in the New
Testament. It does not appear in the
earliest manuscripts. The Gospel seems
to end with the women not telling anyone for fear. This begins by saying Mary Magdalene alone
saw Jesus that morning and then told everyone else, exactly what Matthew's
Gospel says. Then we get two verses that
harmonize with the end of Luke's Gospel, the disciples on the road to Emmaus
though here we get only the barest detail.
Then, we get the verses that speak of handling snakes and drinking
poison that some in our region have taken as prescriptive rather than
descriptive. Paul has a snake bite in
Acts that becomes a sign to unbelievers and who knows what torture early
Christians were subjected to whether poison might be something they had to
endure. The other thing we see here is
this, "Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole
creation." That was St Francis'
motivation to preach not only to humans but to the rest of creation. I wonder why the snake handlers don't follow
that example.
If the Gospel is not that Christ is raised from the dead it
is not the Gospel. To strip out the
resurrection from Christianity or to define it in some way other than physical
is to lessen the impact and lose the Gospel.
The body is important in the resurrection, not just the Spirit. If it were simply a spiritual resurrection
Jesus would not have eaten nor would He have invited Thomas to touch His hands
and His side. The body matters because
redemption includes both body and spirit. Our bodies are the means through
which the Gospel is preached and it is a reminder of the incarnation and
indwelling life of Christ. If the
resurrection were only spiritual then we would have a philosophical dilemma
that is ruled out in all the epistles about the body's relationship to the
world. Is the body a temple as Paul says
or is it meaningless and only fleshly so therefore we have freedom to literally
do anything with it because it doesn't matter in the salvation equation? The answer is that we have the life of Christ
now, not simply when we pass from this body of death.
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