Easter: Leaving Egypt

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 24, 2025

We often think—perhaps especially in Lent—that the key to a sound spiritual life is a combination of penitence and penance, sorrow and suffering for our sins, a conviction that without genuine contrition, reparation and amendment we can neither draw close to God nor be saved. This recognition and commitment can be a first step, but subsequent steps can go in a circle if we think the process is undertaken through our own strength.

Easter sends us a different message, which we also need to accept—the message that Christ has conquered not only sin but its consequence in death. In other words, Christianity does not begin with our repentance; it begins with the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

There is a quotation from St. Augustine in one of the Lenten prayers in the Breviary: “You too left Egypt when, at baptism, you renounced the world that is at enmity with God.” I don’t know exactly where Augustine wrote that, but it captures the spirit of Lent perfectly—the essential turning away from that attachment to sin which interferes with our acceptance of Christ. Yet the key to even this spiritual moment is a preliminary recognition that God is not only more powerful than sin but far better.

The Jews could not attain this through the Law—through a human determination to avoid sinful practices. No amount of personal discipline was able to bring this about. Rather, the key reality that ensures our success is Christ’s public triumph over sin and death, through which He offers each of us a share in His own Divine Life. We call this grace, and it is owing to this and this alone that we can move forward with confidence, that we can risk a profound change of life through an absolute trust in Jesus Christ.

We cannot “renounce the world” out of sheer negativity (though God knows what a lure this can be at times); we must rather trust something else more in order to break that attachment. It is not a mere matter of self-discipline: If successful, self-discipline might trap us again in self-love, and if unsuccessful, in self-loathing. No, this process must proceed primarily through trust in Jesus Christ.

Entanglement

Even so, it is a tricky business. The world is full of those who claim to have seen the light, and it is no wonder that Psalm 19 raises a telling point: “But who can discern his errors?” Therefore the Psalm becomes a prayer that we can all say often, for holiness is actually a gift which demands our own perceptive cooperation:

Clear thou me from hidden faults.
Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins;
let them not have dominion over me!
Then I shall be blameless,
and innocent of great transgression.
Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in thy sight,
O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.
    [Ps 19:12-14]

Even this heartfelt plea to God must be realized through the Risen Christ. No matter how severe our penances in Lent, we cannot conquer sin without an absolute trust in Him. Our penitential practices are meant not to justify us but to enable us to recognize our own weakness more clearly and to repudiate our own failure by uniting ourselves more closely with Him.

Indeed, there is nothing about the Christian life that is not focused primarily on the person of Christ. The whole point is that we have left Egypt (as Augustine put it) because we have desired above all simply to go Home. Or as Francis Thompson expressed it in “The Hound of Heaven”:

‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.’

And so…

We turn to Christ because we are drawn by love. We discipline ourselves because we love in return, and wish to open ourselves ever more to Christ’s love, until each one of us can say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2:20).

It is for this reason that Christian piety is always positive, always seeking to open ourselves more to God’s love and, having accepted it as the greatest of gifts, to offer it back to Him both directly and through others. Through penance we empty ourselves for the sole purpose of making more room for Christ. Through Christ we make more room for love, which is to make infinitely more room for life.

This purpose of Lent is revealed only in Easter. It has nothing to do with our own strength. It is a matter of welcoming Christ in our weakness, so that we too might live by faith in the Son of God, so that we too may hear and understand the words of the prophet Hosea (11:1), “Out of Egypt I have called my son.”