Psalm 114: 1-6
When Israel went out from Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
Judah became God’s sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.
The sea looked and fled;
Jordan turned back.
The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
Why is it, O sea, that you flee?
O Jordan, that you turn back?
O mountains, that you skip like rams?
O hills, like lambs?
When Dante was writing his famous Divine Comedy, his key Bible text was the first two verses of this psalm – he drew a comparison between the Exodus, Israel escaping from Egypt, and souls getting out of Purgatory. We might put things a little differently, but we too ‘join the dots’ between the Old Testament and the New Testament, see Exodus as a model of our salvation and find Easter so exciting that the hills skip up and down, or (we might say) Big Ben bounces in time to the music of the gospel!
Easter Bounce (Psalm 114)
How do you link the Exodus to Easter?
How do you join the dots between the texts?
How do you get your teeth into the story,
where Israel’s exiting,
grace is revisiting,
mountains are bouncing
and God is announcing
the kingdom is open to pilgrim and punter and priest?
How do you grasp a theme like Easter morning?
How do you tie the resurrection down?
How do you get your head around the Master,
who floored his critics,
knocked back the cynics,
woke up the dry and dead,
gave us new life instead,
named us his holy ones, called us to share in his feast?