‘I am the Lord your God
who brought you up from Egypt.’

A people that forgets its origins, loses its identity. That is why God’s great commandment to Israel is: Remember Egypt! Only then will you remember the Lord who brought you out of Egypt, and you will be his people and he will be your God.

What makes us a people is our common origin in Christ. Our liberation, our redemption. We too were slaves, though we do not like to remember that. We take for granted our independence and our freedom, our human progress and social welfare, we take all that as normal and natural and due to us, and in the process we lose the common bonds that bind us to each other and to God. We have forgotten Egypt, and we have ceased to be a people.

‘This is a law for Israel,
an ordinance of the God of Jacob,
laid as a solemn charge on Joseph
when he came out of Egypt.’

Remember your past, remember your origins, remember your liberation. Remember Bethlehem and Jerusalem and Mount Calvary. Remember, deep in your personal history, your own bondage under passions and vices and sin. Personal slavery and universal captivity from which we were redeemed by the salvific action that made us one in Christ. That is our common root, our single history, our radical unity. Memory makes us one, while forgetfulness scatters us into separate groups and opposed factions. A person without a memory is no more a person. A people without a history is no more a people.

Give me the grace of memory, Lord, Make me recall, make me remember, make me be mindful. Let me have always before my eyes the poverty of my lowliness and the splendour of your redemption. You broke my chains, you tamed my vices you healed my wounds, you uplifted my spirits. You gave me new life, Lord, and in that new life is expressed my new identity as a member of your chosen people. I too have come out of Egypt, and I have not come out alone, but in the midst of a joyous crowd that felt the same liberation because they all had been under the same yoke.

To be truly myself I want to feel a member of your people. I accept your commandment to remember, and I ask for the grace to fulfil it so as to build the hopes of my future on the firmness of my past. I am one with your people, one in liberation, one in hope, and one in the end in fulfilment for ever.

Yes, you are the Lord my God who has brought me out of Egypt.