Holy Cheek: How God Begins Liberation Through Ordinary People at Work

Humble Workers at the Center

In today's discussion, we see how God begins liberation through ordinary people at work. By paying close attention to the midwives—people like us—we sow with hope. This is week two of four where we focus on one character from the founding myth-history of Exodus, guided each week by Paul Ricoeur's questions: What shaped this story? What does it say? And what does it demand of us now?

Last week we looked at Joseph—not just as the technicolor hero, but as the brilliant administrator who, in Brueggemann's phrase, helps Pharaoh monopolize land, labor, and life under a regime of scarcity. Today we stay in Egypt, but the camera pans down from the first minister's palatial rooms to the workplace floor, to two midwives.

These are not headline heroes. These are people on a shift.

The Exodus story was written down in exile, shaped by scribes living under Babylonian and Persian rule. This week, we notice how those same scribes sharpen the story by shifting our attention away from palaces and towards workplaces. Many scholars argue that the scribes are making a quiet but radical claim: that liberation begins before prophets speak and before miracles occur, by foregrounding women, workers, and supervisors caught in impossible systems. The text insists that God's resistance to empire is already alive in everyday labor.

Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza notes that this is how power is renarrated—from the margins inward. In a world where women and slaves were usually anonymous, Exodus gives us names: Shiphrah and Puah. Phyllis Trible reminds us that naming is intentional, not ornamental. They are the doorway into the whole Exodus liberation drama.

And the word of the week is liberation. We aren't just talking about an individual's freedom or their personal comfort. We're talking about freedom and flourishing from systems that trap and diminish people. Liberation is active and resistant, shaped through the actions and agency of people in the text.

Meet the Midwives and Their Holy Cheek

Exodus tells us that a new Pharaoh arises who does not know Joseph, but the system Joseph built still holds. The economic slavery he engineered has hardened into something more explicit—Egyptians on one side, Hebrews on the other. What began as exploitation has become racialized bondage.

And then comes a new directive from Pharaoh:

The king of Egypt said to Shiphrah and Puah, "When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women and see them on the birth stool, if it is a son, kill him. But if it is a daughter, she shall live." — Exodus 1:15–16

This is not a private prejudice. This is state policy—targeted, racist, gendered violence issued as a workplace instruction.

So what's driving it? Pharaoh is gripped by a fear as old as empire itself. The people his ancestors brought in for cheap labor are multiplying. The "other" is growing. He's already inflicted violence upon them, and now he fears their retaliation. His nightmare is not just disorder, but the replacement of the Egyptians. And so he draws the most brutal conclusion possible: cut the future at its source.

Black feminist theologian Delores S. Williams, in Sisters in the Wilderness, observes that empire often reveals itself first through attempts to control women's bodies and children. When a system feels threatened, it reaches for reproduction—deciding which lives may continue and which must be stopped. This is exactly what we see here.

This fear is not ancient; it is recognizable. Fear of immigrants. Fear of men racialized as dangerous. Fear of communities once exploited for their labor, now being blamed for having large families. As theologian Kelly Brown Douglas writes in Stand Your Ground, racialized power systems repeatedly rely on the myth of the threatening, oversexualized "other" to justify preemptive violence. Violence is framed as defense. Terror is rebranded as security.

The point of Pharaoh's dictate is not just demographic management. The point is fear—to discipline whole families, generation by generation, back into submission. This is how empire stabilizes itself: not just by force, but by making survival feel precarious.

This story is echoed later in Herod's massacre of children—the brutal opening act of the nativity story. Different ruler, same logic, same fear, same willingness to sacrifice children to preserve power.

Fear as Faithfulness

And into that world—into that policy, that fear, that violence—step two midwives on shift, at work, with no army, no platform, no protection.

And what did they do?

The midwives feared God. They did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. — Exodus 1:17

When Exodus says the midwives "feared God," it is not talking about terror of punishment, although that may be part of it. It is naming a deeper fear—fear of crossing a line they could not uncross, fear of becoming agents of death in the place where life should be protected. They recognized that Pharaoh's authority ends where God's begins, and they quietly refused.

This is fear as faithfulness.

There's no burning bush, no angelic choir accompanying this great act of godly resistance. Just two women on shift who decide, baby after baby: not today.

Pharaoh eventually notices the statistics and summons them in verse 18: "Why have you done this and allowed the boys to live?" They reply: "Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife can come to them."

You can hear the deadpan delivery, can't you? The picture of these quickly birthing Hebrew mothers shooting out babies and escaping into the night before Pharaoh's midwife-agents appear. Either Pharaoh is completely insulated from the practicalities of childbirth—which, let's be honest, as a young male ruler in a patriarchal society living in complete luxury, may in fact be the case—or he is so wrapped up in his paranoid fears of the "super-breeding" of his slaves that this explanation puts off the ruler for a while.

Shiphrah and Puah are the patron saints of holy cheek, and the text sides with them:

And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. — Exodus 1:21

This is not a moment of high liturgical drama. This is everyday practice—birth after birth, conversation after conversation, careful stories told to the boss. Their job description says one thing. The policy of the state says one thing. Their covenant with God says another. And they choose the covenant.

Holy Cheek Here and Now

The Bible doesn't tell this story so we can admire the midwives from a distance. It tells it to train our attention—to help us recognize what faithfulness looks like when it shows up quietly at work, without applause.

We've seen this kind of courage in Australia. We know from the Bringing Them Home report how, across the continent, hundreds of unnamed Aboriginal women—some deeply shaped by Christian faith, some in contrast to it, some by law, and some simply shaped by the ethic of care—quietly resisted the removal of children, including removal of children by or supported by church denominations. They hid children, warned families, delayed officials, lied when necessary, and used whatever authority or obscurity they had to protect life.

Like Shiphrah and Puah, they were not making policy. They were not deciding policy. They were refusing to let their work, their homes, or their bodies become instruments of harm. These women were not looking for heroism. They were trying to remain human.

The midwives teach us that liberation does not begin with a burning bush. It begins with ordinary people deciding that obedience to God sets limits on what the state, the boss, or the system can ask of them.

The question Exodus leaves us is not abstract. It is personal: Where in our own workplaces, systems, and daily routines are we being asked to comply with something that crosses the line where Pharaoh's authority ends and God's begins?