ἔξοδος exodos
What It Means
Two men stand with Jesus on a mountain and talk about his death — except that Luke never says “death.” He says they spoke of his exodos (Luke 9:31), a word built from ex, “out,” and hodos, “road”: literally, the way out. Greek speakers could use it of any going-out, even a death. But it is also the title the Greek Old Testament gives its second book, the story of Israel’s road out of Egypt.1 And in the New Testament it turns up three times: Israel’s march from slavery (Hebrews 11:22), Peter’s own approaching death (2 Peter 1:15), and here, Jesus.
A Story
Eight days or so after Peter confesses him as the Christ, Jesus takes Peter, John, and James up a mountain to pray (Luke 9:28). While he prays, his face changes and his clothing turns dazzling white (Luke 9:29). Moses and Elijah appear and speak with him of his exodos (Luke 9:30-31). The disciples wake heavy with sleep, see his glory, and Peter offers to build three tents (Luke 9:32-33). A cloud covers them, and a voice says, “This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!” (Luke 9:34-35). Then Jesus is found alone (Luke 9:36). A few paragraphs later, he “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). The first exodus was a people running for their lives; this is a Son walking toward his death on purpose. That is why the name holds.
For Your Journey
We tend to read our lives as a string of arrivals — the next job, the next house, the diagnosis we hope to outrun. Those are bricks we are making for Pharaoh, a lifelong slavery that mostly looks like ordinary ambition we mistook for a career. Then a door closes for good, and the road looks like a dead end. We are not promised that our endings are exoduses; we are told that we are joined to his. Let us not hurry past the sorrow in front of every ending; it is real. But let us not call the ending a wall until we have asked who walked that road before us, and where it came out.
In Christ
What Moses and Elijah discuss is not a tragedy being managed but a rescue being planned. The first exodus needed a lamb, blood on a doorpost, and a sea that only God could part — and that rescue was real and sufficient against Pharaoh, extended by this mountain rather than demoted by it. “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). But no sea could reach the bondage underneath: “all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:15). Jesus walks out through the grave itself, the one wall no Pharaoh ever built, and his resurrection opens it.
The word is not carrying this alone. Luke sets the evidence around it: the mountain, the cloud, Moses; the verb plēroō, to fill full, for what Jesus is about to accomplish; and a Son who then sets his face for Jerusalem. Peter, who had slept through half of that mountain and later saw the far side of the sea with his own eyes, gives his own death the same name (2 Peter 1:15) — not because the word is kinder, but because Peter is in him, and the Head has already come out the other side.2
“in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body — The Order for the Burial of the Dead, *Book of Common Prayer* (1662)”
“All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before. — C. S. Lewis, *The Last Battle*”
- Alfred Rahlfs and Robert Hanhart, eds., *Septuaginta*, rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006), where the second book is headed ΕΞΟΔΟΣ. ↩
- Walter Bauer et al., *A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature* (BDAG), 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), s.v. ἔξοδος. ↩