Commemorating—and Choosing Again—the Freedom of Redemption

Both Passover and the Triduum commemorate deliverance: from slavery in Egypt, from the Angel of Death, from death itself, and from the accusations of Satan. While humans are free, and these days emphasize our freedom, it is God who spares the firstborn son, God who parts the sea, God who plunges horse and rider beneath the waves, and God who undoes death and opens the way to heaven. However expansive, human agency is incapable of such actions. We celebrate the acts of God while beseeching him to continue to act. 

These are the days we proclaim to the very earth itself, “Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her,” but still our constant, daily prayer remains unchanged and necessary: “O God, make speed to save us; O God, make haste to help us.” During this Passover, hostages from October 7, 2023 remain in captivity. On this Easter, this Pascha, Ukraine is still besieged. Priests are killed in Nigeria, Christians persecuted in China, Sudan, and throughout the Middle East, and Jews are threatened in the United Kingdom. Things are not yet as they should be, as they will one day be, and we wait on God’s deliverance.

We recall great deeds of the past, but they present choices for every generation and place. As Leon Kass explains, the Book of Genesis presents God’s new way, given to Israel, against three major alternatives—Babylon, Canaan, and Egypt—each with “different ruling ideas, each looking up to different gods.” While those “ancient civilizations are long gone, their animating principles survive. Indeed, they find expression in cultural alternatives competing today for our attention and allegiance.” According to Kass, “biblical Egypt should be of special interest for modern Americans,” since it was the “peak of ancient civilization,” and yet, “in the end, [its] people’s preoccupation with survival and material well-being led to their enslavement” to Pharaoh.

We do not simply commemorate, we choose again; we accept the ancient covenants and their promises once more. We must do so, for the permanent possibility remains that we choose the other ways and depart from those given by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and promised to the line of David.

War, oppression, and injustice persist, but, in the West at least, our people and nations, while wealthy, free, and at peace, are choosing the ways of biblical Egypt: we are preoccupied with survival and material well-being, and are beset by a “spiritual poverty.” The philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests that many have “no concern for the good life—only for bare life.” He quotes Aristotle from the Politics: “some people believe that . . . they should maintain their store of money or increase it without limit. The reason they are so disposed, however, is that they are preoccupied with living, not with living well.” Such a life not only ignores but does away “with the teleology of the good life,” loses “all sense of direction,” of purpose, and “becomes obscene.” 

Part of that obscenity, according to Han, is our self-enslavement. Ours is an “achievement society wholly dominated by the modal verb—can,” as opposed to a moral and lawful society “which issues prohibitions and deploys should.” When we are governed by what we should or should not do, there are limits to action, of course, but there is also a resting point—an end, and a completion to should. If one should celebrate Passover, and one has done so, the duty is accepted and accomplished; one has acted well. Moreover, since what we ought to or should do is meaningful if and only if we can do the action, the society governed by a moral and lawful sense assumes we are free and self-governed. The world governed by can has no limits and no resting place, no terminus. In principle, one can always do more, attain more, achieve more, and the world of having and doing knows no end except exhaustion and collapse. In Han’s words, “You can produces massive compulsion, on which the achievement-subject dashes him- or herself to pieces. . . . You can exercises even greater constraint than You should.” In the world of achievement, the governing idea is not “ought implies can”—since any obligation supposes freedom—but rather “can implies ought.” If you can do more, you ought to do more; if you can produce more, you ought to produce more, resulting in a frenzied world, appearing free but in reality self-enslaved. We were promised, by Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Alfred Kinsey, and the architects of the sexual revolution, for instance, that once we dethroned thou shalt and thou shalt not we would be free; instead, we are free for “burnout, depression,” and “an unredeemable failure of ability,” resulting in a “psychic insolvency” that bears the indefinite debt of You can without hopes of atonement, deliverance, or paying off that debt.

The days of Passover and exodus, the days of crucifixion and resurrection, invite us—and, in a sense, command us—to “remember the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Each person deals with the drama of his own soul and redemption, but we are also caught up into the drama of our people, our history, our nation, our culture. As it turns out, our people are returning to paganism with its bare existence. In so doing they jettison their freedom in exchange for a tyranny preoccupied with longevity and wealth, and they are driven to despair by the trap of thinking about what could be done if unburdened by the limits of reality and what should be.

We people of the Bible, Jews and Christians alike, are a blessing for the world, even for those who do not believe as we do. Paganism is false, of course, but it is also degrading; it thinks too little of the human, too little of the world. In our own time, it degrades with its tendency to cause malaise—the so-called crisis of meaning—erasing our longing for immortality, for eternity, and handing us over to the dull routines of bare existence. 

In these next days we celebrate our deliverance; in so doing we remind ourselves of our meaning, purpose, and dignity. But more: we offer hope for the “multitude” who would return to Egypt, return to slavery, simply because of its luxury and comfort, which seems to them better than the bread of life. So, we celebrate, with great joy—and not only for ourselves, but for all. 

Image by Renáta Sedmáková and licensed via Adobe Stock.