Monday of the
Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time
(Exodus 1:8-14.22; Matthew 10:34-11:1)
The word genocide
is bantered about today. People attach
it to every mass murder. It means the
extermination of a nation or kind of people.
The Nazis attempted genocide against the Jews at the end of World War
II. More recently, the Hutu tribe in
Rwanda tried to exterminate its rival Tutsi tribe, and the Serbs of Serbia
attempted to eliminate the Bosnian minority.
In the first reading today the Egyptians have genocide in mind as they
deal with the Israelites.
The conditions for genocide are rife. The Israelites, once no more than a small
clan, have grown both numerous and prosperous.
The ruling Egyptian nation resents the Israelites’ success and views
them as a potential threat to their hegemony.
The overlords multiply the Israelite workload, but the added labor seems
to make the Israelites more ingenious.
As a final solution to the threat, the Egyptian pharaoh orders the death
of all Israelite boys. The girls would
be married to Egyptians and their offspring assimilated in the dominant
culture.
Pharaoh’s plan, of course, fails and the Israelites are
led out of Egypt to the desert where they are formed as God’s chosen
people. The saga clues us on how to deal
with oppression. We are not to give into
evil but to maintain our noblest values.
God will see us past the threat of genocide and mold us into a people
reflecting His own goodness.
