Why Freedom Takes Longer Than Escape

We become what we learn to behold

“This is my Son, whom I love... Listen to him.” Matthew 17:5

If I were asked to summarise the whole Christian life in one sentence, I think I might choose these words spoken by the Father at the Transfiguration: “This is my Son... Listen to him.”

Everything else follows from that. Jesus does not merely teach freedom; he embodies it. He does not simply point us towards the Promised Land. In his own life we glimpse the humanity to which the Exodus had always been pointing.

One of the Bible stories I struggled with greatly as a young Christian was the Exodus. God rescues Israel from slavery in Egypt through one of the greatest acts of deliverance in Scripture. The Red Sea parts. Pharaoh’s army is defeated. Freedom is finally theirs.

Yet within a remarkably short time the people begin to complain. They grumble about the food. They grumble about the water. They grumble about Moses.

Again and again they say something that, as a young man, I found astonishing: “Let’s go back to Egypt.” Really? Back to the place where they had been beaten, enslaved and treated as less than human?

To make matters worse, what follows seemed painfully unfair. The journey from Egypt to Canaan could have taken only a matter of days. Instead, Israel wandered for forty years in the wilderness. Almost the entire generation that had left Egypt died before entering the Promised Land. Only Joshua and Caleb survived from the generation that had left Egypt to cross over. The generation that finally entered the Promised Land had grown up in the wilderness. They had known hardship, but they had never known slavery. Therefore a new generation, untouched by slavery, was able to embrace the future in a way their parents could not.

For years I found that story deeply troubling. Today I think I may have been asking the wrong question. Perhaps the real mystery is not why God delayed the journey. Perhaps it is why freedom takes so much longer than escape.

The Israelites had left Egypt. The problem was that Egypt had not yet left them. They had escaped physically, but their imagination was still shaped by slavery. Whenever life became uncertain, they instinctively looked backwards. Strangely, they remembered the food but forgot the whips. They remembered security but forgot oppression. Their bodies had crossed the Red Sea, but slavery still shaped the way they understood themselves, God and the world around them. They had been set free, but they had not yet learned how to live as free people.

Why Freedom Feels So Frightening

Perhaps that explains one of the most extraordinary verses in the whole Exodus story. The Israelites did not simply complain in the wilderness. At one point they actually said to one another, “We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt.” (Numbers 14:4)

That sounds astonishing—until we recognise ourselves. Freedom is frightening. Slavery, however painful, is at least familiar. The wilderness is uncertain. It demands trust. When anxiety rises, we begin to edit our memories. We remember the “pots of meat” but forget the whips.

We recall the predictability but overlook the oppression. The familiar, even when harmful, can feel safer than the unknown.

That pattern appears everywhere. People return to abusive relationships. Recovering addicts long for the comfort of their addiction. Survivors of toxic churches sometimes miss the certainty, identity and belonging they once knew, even while recognising the damage those environments caused. Whole societies can become nostalgic for authoritarian leaders during periods of uncertainty. Leaving Egypt is only the beginning. The harder journey is allowing Egypt to leave us.

That, I suspect, is one of the deepest truths in the whole biblical story.

Trauma is not simply something that happens to us. It is often something that begins to tell us who we are. We know this instinctively today. Someone may leave an abusive relationship and still expect rejection wherever they go. A soldier may return safely from war while continuing to live as though danger is everywhere. For some people, the deepest wound of all is the lack of a trustworthy father. A child who grows up without unconditional love may spend a lifetime trying to earn the love that should always have been freely given. Even faith itself can become difficult, because the word “Father” no longer evokes safety, tenderness and welcome, but fear, disappointment or rejection.

This is why Jesus matters so profoundly. He does not simply teach us about God; he heals our vision of God. As he says, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” If the father you fear does not look like Jesus, then he is not the Father Jesus came to reveal—because Jesus reveals a Father who is utterly unlike the distorted images so many of us have inherited.

Trauma does not simply wound us. Sometimes it cauterises parts of us. It narrows our capacity to trust, to imagine, to hope and even to recognise freedom when it is offered to us. The chains have been broken. Their imprint remains. Perhaps that is why rescue can happen in a moment, but learning to live in freedom is the journey of a lifetime.

A New Way of Seeing

The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl knew this journey personally. As a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, he saw people stripped of almost everything that made life recognisable. One of the things that kept him alive was his determination to reconstruct a manuscript that had been taken from him when he entered the camp. He also noticed that those who could still see a purpose beyond the barbed wire—a loved one to return to, a task still to fulfil, a future worth living for—often found an inner resilience that others lost. Suffering was real, but it did not have to become the final truth about their lives.

If that is true, then healing requires more than comfort. It requires a new way of seeing. Healing begins when something—or rather Someone—gives us a reason to lift up our eyes again.

Perhaps this is why the strange story of the bronze serpent (Numbers 21:4–9) belongs here.

One of the questions the Exodus story leaves us with is this: “How does someone who has spent a lifetime thinking like a slave begin to think like a free person?” Something has to interrupt the old way of seeing.

That may be why Jesus reaches back to one of the strangest stories in the Old Testament. In the wilderness, the people are bitten by poisonous snakes. Instead of simply removing the snakes, God tells Moses to make a bronze serpent and lift it up. Those who look at it are healed. It seems an extraordinary story until we realise that healing begins, not by pretending the poison isn’t there, but by facing it. The people have to look up at the very image of what threatens them. They stop denying, stop running and stop looking away. They look—and they live.

Jesus deliberately connects this story with his own crucifixion:

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up...” (John 3:14)

Why compare the crucified Christ with a serpent? Perhaps because, on the cross, Jesus exposes the poison that has infected the human heart. We see fear, violence, scapegoating, the abuse of power and the rejection of innocent love. In other words, we see the Egypt that lives within us all.

Yet the One who is lifted up answers none of it with revenge. He meets hatred with forgiveness, violence with self-giving love and death with resurrection life. Looking at Christ crucified is therefore not simply looking at our sin. It is looking at God’s response to our sin.

Admiration versus Participation

When we look at Jesus lifted up on the cross, refusing hatred, revenge or violence, it is tempting simply to admire him. We place him on a pedestal, honoured but ultimately unreachable. Yet that surely misses the point.

The great spiritual teachers of history do not merely give us ideals to admire; they awaken possibilities within us. As author Jim Palmer observes, we can easily turn wisdom, compassion and love into qualities possessed only by exceptional people. Admiration then replaces participation.

Jesus invites something far more demanding—and far more hopeful. He does not say, “Marvel at my love because you could never live like this.” He says, “Follow me.” His life reveals what it means to be fully human, and his Spirit is given so that, little by little, the same courage, compassion, forgiveness and self-giving love may begin to take shape in us.

The cross is not only the place where we see who God is. It is also the place where we begin to discover who we are becoming. Jesus reveals the true character of God, and at the same time reveals the true vocation of humanity.

Paul expresses this beautifully when he writes, “And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another...” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

We become what we learn to behold

The goal of Christianity is not simply that people should believe in Christ, but that the life of Christ should gradually become visible in people.

I wonder whether every genuine turning point in life has something of this character. It is not merely an emotional experience. It is a moment when we begin to see differently. The New Testament calls this “metanoia”—not simply “conversion” in the sense of changing religion, but a transformation of mind and imagination. We begin to hear a different voice. We begin to believe a different story about God, about ourselves and about what it means to be truly human.

Perhaps that is why, at the Transfiguration, the Father simply says, “This is my Son, whom I love... Listen to him.” Freedom begins when the voice of Jesus becomes the truest voice we know—the voice by which every other voice is tested. The Transfiguration is, in many ways, the answer to the question the wilderness leaves behind.

Recently I was talking with someone who had experienced profound spiritual abuse many years ago. What encouraged me most was not that she was denying what had happened. Quite the opposite. She was recognising it—and naming it—more honestly than ever before. Yet she was doing so because she wanted to become free rather than remain defined by it.

That distinction is enormously important.

Justice matters. Truth matters. Safeguarding matters. But no safeguarding process, however necessary, can by itself heal trauma. Justice may establish what happened, but only the long work of recovery enables a person to live beyond what was done to them.

Justice asks, “What happened?” Recovery begins by asking, “What now?” We need both. One without the other leaves something unfinished.

This long journey from rescue to freedom is not just the story of the Exodus. It is also the story that reaches its fulfilment in Jesus.

The Exodus, it turns out, was never simply a story about escaping Egypt. It was always pointing beyond itself. Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah appeared with Jesus and spoke with him about the “departure” he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. The Greek word Luke uses is ‘exodos’. They are talking about a new Exodus.

The first Exodus brought God’s people out of slavery. The second Exodus would bring humanity out of every power that dehumanises us: sin, fear, domination, violence and, ultimately, death itself.

The mountain of Transfiguration is not simply a moment when Jesus shines with heavenly glory. It is a glimpse of humanity exactly as humanity was always meant to be.

Every generation has something that promises salvation through power—whether Pharaoh’s armies, Babylon’s empire, Rome’s cross, or the powers and ideologies of our own age. The Transfiguration points us in another direction. God’s glory is revealed not in domination but in the face of Jesus.

For the first time we see—in Jesus—a human life completely free. Free from fear. Free from the need to dominate. Free from the need to prove himself. Free from the power that other people’s approval or rejection can hold over us. Free to love completely.

Jesus does not merely reveal what God is like. He reveals what a human being looks like when nothing of Egypt remains inside.

The command at the Transfiguration is not simply to admire Jesus. It is to allow his voice to become the truest voice we know—the voice by which every other voice is tested.

If humanity is ever to become truly free, this is what freedom looks like.

The Church has often spoken as though salvation were mainly about changing where people go when they die. The New Testament seems at least as interested in changing the kind of people they become while they live. Paul calls it “the renewing of your mind.” Jesus calls it being “born from above.” The Exodus calls it learning to live as free people. The journey is long because slavery leaves deep marks upon the soul.

The Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) spent much of her life asking how apparently ordinary people become capable of participating in extraordinary evil. While reporting on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief organisers of the Holocaust, she coined the controversial phrase “the banality of evil.” Her point was not that evil is trivial, but that it often flourishes when people stop thinking deeply for themselves. Instead, they inherit assumptions from their culture, their families, their politics and their religion until those assumptions feel like simple common sense. We rarely notice the invisible chains because we have worn them for so long.

Perhaps Israel’s deepest bondage was not simply that they had been enslaved by Egypt, but that they had learned to see the world through Egypt’s eyes.

Israel inherited the mindset of slaves. We inherit ways of seeing the world that feel so normal we scarcely realise they are imprisoning us. Some inherit fear. Some inherit prejudice. Some inherit shame. Some inherit the image of a harsh and impossible God. Some inherit religious systems that reward conformity more than truth.

Leaving Egypt is one thing. Recognising the Egypt we still carry within us is another.

Hannah Arendt helps us understand how Egypt gets inside us.

Frankl helps us believe that Egypt does not have to stay there.

Jesus does something neither could do alone: he doesn’t simply awaken us or encourage us—he reveals the Father, embodies true humanity, and invites us into his own life.

The most extraordinary thing about the wilderness story, I find, is not Israel’s stubbornness. It is God’s patience. For forty years the people doubted, complained and longed to return to the life they had left behind. Yet every morning the manna still appeared. Water still flowed from the rock. The cloud still led them. God never gave up on the people who so often wanted to give up on him. God could bring Israel out of Egypt in a single night. It took forty years to bring Egypt out of Israel. God’s steadfast commitment to their freedom proved greater than their resistance.

True grace must be patient. That is why God is patient with us.

And perhaps that is the hope the Exodus still offers every one of us.

Whatever Egypt we still carry within us, God has not given up leading us towards freedom. The journey may take far longer than we imagined. Recovery rarely happens overnight. But the Father has not left us to find the way alone. He simply points us to Jesus and says, “This is my Son, whom I love... Listen to him.”

Jeremy Marks, 7th August 2026

These reflections were written for the Feast of the Transfiguration (6 August), but they are really about the lifelong journey of becoming the people Christ came to make us.