"Out of [Sharm el-Sheik] Egypt I Called My Son."
Climate Bible Study: December 2022
Flight into Egypt, Fra Angelica, (circa 1395-1455)
Last month, my itinerary to Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, the site of the COP27 climate summit, gave me two nights in Cairo. (One mustn’t come that far without seeing the pyramids, after all.) I was graciously hosted by the Anglican cathedral’s guest house. Conspicuous in the center of their courtyard is a large stone engraved with a phrase from Matthew 2:15: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” I was left wondering what this verse even means, what it means to Christians in Egypt, and what it might mean to all of us hoping to see progress on climate action coming “out of Egypt” in the waning days of 2022.
Yesterday, we commemorated the Second Sunday of Advent. Messianic prophecies, quoted from the Old Testament, are in ample supply. Of all of them, Matthew 2:15 has proven to be more troublesome than most. The original reference is in Hosea 11:1-4:
When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more they were called, the more they went away; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bend down to them and fed them.
This Old Testament reference is about God’s liberating the tribes of Israel, not only out of slavery in Egypt but also out of bondage to idolatry. The nativity narrative in the gospel is about how the toddler Jesus was hidden in Egypt until his parents could return with him after Herod’s death. It’s hard to fathom how the writer Matthew could claim: “And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet [Hosea]: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’” Did Matthew simply latch onto a single word—Egypt—and think he had discovered another fulfillment of messianic prophecy in Jesus’ story, further apologetic evidence that Jesus is the newborn King? Did Matthew think that Hosea had successfully predicted the holy family’s return trip from Egypt, some 760 years earlier?
Like the advent season itself, Matthew’s gospel is replete with messianic references, and usually as a writer, Matthew handles them a bit more deftly. Our best clue in how to handle this particular case is in the word “fulfill” itself, pleroō. It simply means “to fill up,” and is in keeping with the Synoptic writers’ sense that Jesus “fills up the Old Testament.” His life, death, and resurrection recapitulates and illuminates so much of what we read in the story of Israel. Their journey is his journey, which becomes our journey in turn, having been baptised in Christ, having become children of Abraham ourselves in him.
In the end, I never got to chance to ask an Egyptian Anglican what the phrase “Out of Egypt I called my son” might mean to them. It was pretty cool to think, as I am sure they do, that our Saviour was once on this soil, alongside the banks of this same river, the Nile. That’s a more particularized and immediate blessing that all of us can nonetheless revel in: Emmanuel, God with us, incarnate here on planet Earth! As for how I packed this verse into my carry-on for my on-going flight to Sharm el-Sheik, it helped me understand what the nations did bring out of COP27 in Egypt.
Christian Figueres is the former head of the UNFCCC and is considered the architect of the Paris Agreement. Nowadays, she shares hosting duties with Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson for the podcast Outrage and Optimism. On November 24, their episode (#179) was entitled “The Best of Times, The Worst of Times” and was intended as a wrap-up of COP27. Rivett-Carnac commented, “I felt it was the first post-negotiation COP and the first COP of implementation, which is what it had to be. Now, I did also feel like it was in a slightly confused area where it had left one form and hadn't yet settled on its new form.”
In other words, the COPs themselves have been on a journey. The Paris Agreement went into full effect last year in Glasgow. What does that look like? How do we now operate? Figueres explains, “I think there is broad consensus that the whole purpose of these yearly meetings. . . is actually to move from negotiation to implementation, and that is what this COP has not substantially delivered. . . It has to include private sector, because the private sector is now actually in the driver's seat and they have the capacity to implement much more than governments do. So, yeah, so it's not that [the COPs as we have known them are] not ‘fit for purpose’, it's that we have to understand the purpose has changed … and then change how we come together for it.”
I have felt for quite some time that climate change is not a problem to be solved; it is a journey to undertake. Maybe it was once a problem-to-be-solved. Maybe it never was; maybe it once was, but isn’t now. Now it is a journey, so that even the traditional problem-solvers among us (climatologists, policy-makers, tech engineers, treaty negotiators) must fold their problem-solving into the larger narrative of the journeys that they themselves make in their careers, but also the journeys they make as human beings, and the journey we all take as a society. “Out of Egypt I have called my son” means to me that Jesus is intimately aware of journeys, of contingencies and delays and detours, of the disruptive designs of murderous tyrants, of how God can be trusted to use even geo-politics to accomplish his will. “Out of Egypt I have called my son” means that we are accompanied on our journeys by a God who pronounces his love over us. From Hosea again: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son…. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bend down to them and fed them.” Finally, “Out of Egypt I have called my son,” particularly in the way Matthew sends us back to Hosea, reminds me that the general direction for our new journey can be productively informed. We need to 1) identify the idols in our lives and in our society—and so many of them seem connected to what fossil fuels have delivered to us; 2) turn our backs to those idols; and 3) walk. Also from Hosea: “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them.”
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
on behalf of the Climate Intercessors Leadership Team