How Refusal Becomes Formation
Pharaoh did not wake up one morning with a hardened heart — he practiced it.
In the Book of Exodus, we are told again and again that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. What we miss in English is that the Hebrew text uses several different words to describe what is happening to his heart over time. This is not a single moment. It is a process. (see below for the order of events)
At first, Pharaoh hardens his own heart — over and over, refusing to loosen his grip on power even as suffering piles up around him. The Hebrew word most often used here means to stiffen or to fortify. Pharaoh’s heart becomes set, dug in, resolved not to yield. This is not a lack of information or understanding. It is willful resistance.
As the story unfolds, another word appears, one that means heavy. Pharaoh’s heart grows weighted down, sluggish, unresponsive. What once required effort now comes easily. Compassion slows. Conscience dulls. The heart becomes difficult to move.
Eventually, the text uses the harshest word of all, a word associated with severity and cruelty. Pharaoh’s heart is no longer merely resistant; it has become callous. By the time the text says that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, it is not describing a sudden act of divine cruelty. God lets Pharaoh become fully what Pharaoh himself has already chosen.
What begins as a refusal to do justice becomes a heart so closed in on itself that it can no longer see.
God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is not capricious. It is a letting go. A divine allowance of natural consequences. Pharaoh keeps choosing oppression, and eventually, the story says, God stops interrupting that choice. Justice catches up.
Scripture is not endorsing cruelty here. It is warning us: what we repeatedly choose, we eventually become.
This ancient pattern feels uncomfortably familiar.
In Minneapolis over the past weeks, we have witnessed once again what happens when power operates without accountability. On January 24, 2026, federal immigration agents fatally shot a 37-year-old Minneapolis man, Alex Pretti, during a federal operation in the city — according to reporting at the time, the third fatal encounter involving federal immigration forces in a matter of weeks. Pretti, a U.S. citizen and intensive care nurse, was beaten to the ground and shot during a confrontation that escalated quickly, sparking protests, grief, and calls for transparency. The government disputed details of what led to the shooting, even as the community absorbed yet another loss.
It is important to acknowledge, as many leaders of color and communities historically most affected by state violence have pointed out, that these incidents unfold in a context where many people of color have been killed by law enforcement and federal agents without the same sustained attention or public outcry. Their lives and deaths matter just as deeply; their loss has long called out for justice and mercy from a Church that has too often been silent.
But Marshall is not Minneapolis. That’s part of the problem.
It is remarkably easy to live in a bubble here — untouched by the fear, the threats, the violence playing out elsewhere. More than once in recent weeks, someone has said to me, “I don’t follow the news.”
In other words:
I am privileged to live a life untouched by the terror of an ICU nurse beaten to the ground and shot in the back.
I am comfortable enough not to worry that my five-year-old might be used as bait.
I don’t need to know Renee Good’s name, because she does not belong to my world.
But as Christians, these things should not only disturb us — they should compel us to seek out the news, hear the full story, and intentionally enter into the struggles of our siblings whose lives are being torn open before us.
God keeps asking the same questions: Where is your brother? Who is your neighbor? Are you not your brother’s keeper? And we keep offering the same evasions: I didn’t know. It’s not my responsibility. I don’t want to get involved.
The Gospel does not let us off the hook with those answers. It calls us not only to see, but to respond. The refusal to respond — the looking away — is how hearts harden. Comfort chosen again and again over compassion reshapes us. Over time, it makes us heavier, slower to feel, harder to move. Eventually, it makes cruelty possible.
As Episcopalians, we promise in our Baptismal Covenant to “seek and serve Christ in all people.” Scripture is explicit about what is at stake when we refuse:
“I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me…” (Matthew 25:41–43, NRSV)
I promised myself when I was ordained that I would not stay silent in the face of injustice, even knowing that speaking this way, especially in Texas, carries real risk. Because the Gospel does not exist to keep us comfortable while others are harmed, intimidated, terrorized, or killed by systems that face no real restraint.
We are not neutral. We are complicit when we look away.
Scripture is clear that repeated avoidance of truth reshapes the heart — until it no longer resembles anything formed by love, mercy, or God, but instead mirrors the very forces that deny dignity and life.
Exodus does not promise endless chances. It warns us that there comes a point when refusal becomes formation, when a heart, shaped by its own choices, cannot turn anymore. Pharaoh’s story is not ancient history. It is a mirror held up to any society that confuses power with righteousness and comfort with accountability.
And this is exactly why the cross matters.
Before the heart is fully hardened, God acts — not by tightening a fist, but by opening a body. Jesus does not die to preserve himself, his power, or his safety. He lays down his life for others. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).
Even as he is executed by the state, Jesus refuses the logic of domination, praying instead, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
This is not cheap grace, to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s phrase. It is a final, urgent invitation. Ours is a faith grounded in mercy, forgiveness, and the possibility of conversion — but not forever, and not without cost.
The cross does not erase the warning of Exodus — it intensifies it. God’s mercy is real, but it is not abstract. It arrives in history, in bodies, in suffering we are tempted to ignore.
The final danger is not punishment, but transformation in the wrong direction — becoming people who no longer see, no longer feel, no longer recognize Christ when he is wounded before us. Scripture calls that judgment. And it insists the choice is not theoretical. It is already being made.
Invisible Leftovers 