the two mothers of Moses - 15th week Tuesday

We continue to reflect on our first reading, this time from the book of Exodus.  Today we reflect on the choices of two women which made Moses who he was.

The first woman I am referring to is the mother of Moses, the real mother.  And the second woman is the princess, Pharaoh’s daughter, the adoptive mother of Moses.

First these two women chose life.  In a culture of death they chose life.  Pharaoh decreed that all male born of Hebrew women should be killed at birth.  It must have been agonizing for the mother waiting for the child to be born.  Will it be a girl or a boy?  She had to wait anxiously for nine months to know that.  There was no ultrasound then, there was no way to know the sex of the child.  And yet she allowed her son to live.   She disobeyed Pharaoh, she disobeyed the law and did all she can to hide him for three months.

Then came the princess, Pharaoh’s daughter.  She too was in the same world where the mother was, a world which made it easy to kill a child.  When she saw the boy she immediately knew by his circumcision that this was one Hebrew child and this was done by some mother trying to defy the law of Pharaoh, her father.  It was very easy to kill the child, to finish off what the mother could not do.  She could just tilt the basket and allow the child to drown in the river.  But no, the other woman again allowed the child to live.  She chose to give life to the child instead.

We have a saying, the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand the rules the world.  Many times it is the choices of women that changes human history.  Even in the movies like Terminator, terminating and eliminating the mother, would spell the difference as to who will come out victorious in the future.  And yet extreme and radical feminism would have us believe that motherhood enslaves women.  That what she does with her body is her choice.  Indeed it is her choice but the consequence of that choice to the world and to history cannot be simply dismissed as insignificant.  What if the mother of Moses chose to follow the law of Pharaoh and killed the child when it came out of her womb?  What if the daughter of Pharaoh chose to follow her father rather than the compassion of her heart, what if she tilted the floating basket with a simple and light movement of her finger allowing the baby to drown?  The world would have been different.

And yet this did not stop here.  The two women did not just choose to let the child live.  They also did something more important – they chose to love the child.  In fact they chose to love him more than they loved themselves.  If they loved themselves more than they loved the child, they would not risk such move in keeping the child alive.  They could be killed and put to death for defying the law of the land.  And because they loved him more than they love themselves, Moses became the man he was meant to be.

Some parents expect, and I think they expect wrongly, that they would be loved by their children with the same intensity, with the same passion that they have loved them.  May be; probably.  However this I am sure – your children will love their children the way you have loved them; your children will love their own children in the manner that they have experienced love from their parents.  Love is not given back.  Love is handed down and passed over.  Kon paano mo sila ginhigugma, amo man ina sila maghigugma sa ila mga kabataan pila ka adlaw.

And this is, I believe, what made Moses who he was, the savior of his people, the person who risked everything for the sake of his people, in the same way that his real mother and his adoptive mother risked their lives for love of him.