There may be some irony, since Passover began last night, that traffic at the Red Sea is backed up. Most maps that try to show where the Israelites would have made their escape from Pharaoh’s army by crossing the Red Sea, as Moses heeded God’s word and held the waters back, place that event not far from where a mammoth cargo ship is currently blocking all passage through the Suez Canal. You can see satellite images that show the logjam of other cargo ships sitting there at the north end of the Red Sea, waiting for some resolution to this crisis. Moses would have had a hard time finding a path across the Red Sea last night.
As an image for our time, maybe the photos of the Ever Given cargo ship, stuck for days now in the Suez Canal carry a kind of poetic force, in that these images seem to say a lot in a compact space. There the behemoth sits, a prisoner of its own immensity, blocking traffic on both sides of the canal. The ship is a feat of engineering, trapped within another feat of engineering. It will take a feat of engineering to get her out. Deus ex machina. Or, with any luck, a high tide. Deus ex natura. Part of the ironic perfection of the plight of the Ever Given is the way the ship so completely blocks the canal, how total is her obstruction. That she is immense and hulking, making tug boats and bulldozers look puny and ineffective, adds to the poetry of the images. The Rubik’s cube piles of shipping containers, holding all that stuff that we are supposed to be buying has its own ironic poetry. So, too, the huge, white, block letters on her side hopefully spelling out “EVERGREEN.”
The New York Times reports, without a hint of irony, that the possibility that human error contributed to what’s taking place on the Suez Canal right now. And the question remains: how will the ship be freed?
It puts me in mind not only of the story of the exodus, but of another story we don’t much read from the Bible these days: the story of the Tower of Babel, which purports to be a story about language. The Lord says, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language....” (Gen 11:6-7)
But the story is really about much more than language. The story is about power and wisdom. Having made us in his own image, God knew all along what we’d be capable of. Perhaps he also knew that our power would surpass our wisdom. It perplexes us to this day that God could think that it might not be a good idea for us to have god-like power. This, I think, is why the story is seldom told these days. We disagree with its premise.
One way of reading the story of the Tower of Babel is to see God preventing us from gaining access to a place that we are not wise enough to inhabit. Or maybe God just wanted heaven for himself. Having given us paradise, only to see that go badly, maybe God thought setting some limits seemed like a good idea. Maybe God prevented the building of the tower in order to save the builders from themselves. There’s no villain in the story, after all - no devil causing mischief - so what’s the problem here? We can hardly imagine that we might need to be saved from our own selves. The scriptures suggest that this failure of imagination could be a problem for us.
The cargo ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal is a tower of Babel on its side. The grounding of the Ever Given is the perfect disaster of self-deception, because it is a horizontal disaster, not a vertical one. And there appears to be no devil in this story; just a gust of wind; not so much as a drunken sailor to wonder what to do with. Unfolding on a horizontal plane, the failure of this tower to accomplish its purpose can appear comical rather than tragic. Comedy in this case is tragedy on its side: there is nothing to topple, nothing to collapse, nothing to come tumbling down in a heap of ash. We remember what that looks like, and it is painful even to allude to it. After all, almost nothing we propose to do is impossible for us. We build towers high as we like. Our journeys into space would make the Babel-ites jealous. We edit genes. And if we should happen to obstruct the path to our own salvation, well, that might just be the cost of doing business.
Of course, it is unlikely that a band of Israelites led by a man named Moses ever actually fled from Egypt, with the armies of Pharaoh in hot pursuit; or that by the power of the Almighty, Moses held back the waters of the Red Sea with a strong east wind. This story is symbolic. And what is symbolism in the face of the international shipping industry?
Some of those who saw Jesus hanging on the Cross, looked at him there and mocked him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let [him] come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” They could not imagine that they might need to be saved from their own selves. On the one hand they can see no divine purpose in the Cross; on the other hand, they see no folly in their own ways.
There is almost never much traffic at the foot of the Cross. A few gawkers; a few faithful women, an old man, ready to donate his grave. No one expected much to come from the Cross - only grief and sorrow, not hope and love. But we preach Christ crucified, because time and time again we find that we are the greatest threat to our own well-being, our own happiness, our own salvation. And the Cross marks the path to salvation that no one seems able to obstruct: the path of love made perfect in sacrifice.
Unfortunately, Jesus is not the solution to the current crisis in the Suez Canal. At the moment, we are told, the most likely solution is eighteen inches of water that they hope will come with a seasonal tide tomorrow. There’s a lot riding on that high tide.
Most days, my job is to pronounce unambiguously the Good News of God’s saving work in the gift of his Son, Jesus Christ. Palm Sunday invites us to see how easily we deceive ourselves; how quickly we turn from singing Hosanna to calling for blood. And this day presents us with the opportunity to consider how effectively we obstruct the paths that God prepares for our salvation; and to ask, how will we be freed?
It may be that we cannot be ready to see what Christ is doing for us on the Cross if we have not realized how trapped we are, and that in many, many ways, we are the cause of our own predicament. Maybe it’s important, from time to time, to arrive at the shores of the Red Sea, and find the waters obstructed, unavailable for crossing, the east wind having done its work already, to bring about this horizontal disaster. Maybe then, when we realize that we have power that exceeds our wisdom, we will be able to look for the wisdom of the Cross, which looks like foolishness to so many.
Of course, we will continue to build towers, including horizontal ones that float. We will continue to try to prove that nothing that we propose to do will be impossible for us. And we will continue to exercise power that exceeds our wisdom.
The experts who are now working to free the ship from its plight work in a highly specialized industry, and the name for their work is apt. They are called “salvagers,” and their work is to rescue those who have been wrecked at sea.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
Palm Sunday 2021
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia
