Blogging Towards Sunday, October
21st
Passover: it’s the beginning of months, the
religious festival that marks time from the freedom of Israel from slavery,
it’s the celebration of the experience of God’s redemptive action – it turns
the past into a celebration of the future. As Christians we don’t necessarily follow, observe or
celebrate Passover – and yet it’s more than just history, more than just the
cultural background of the world of Jesus. It’s also an invitation to us as seekers of God, followers
of the teachings of Jesus, and practitioners seeking our center in the
Spirit. Passover is an invitation
for all those who follow God to live with a new sense of time, a new sense of
social relationships and identity, and to have a new relationship to the past
and the future.
Today’s passage (and the larger body of this
text/story in Exodus 11:1-13:16) wrestles with several theological themes:
TIME: how do we understand time as followers of
God? Is time a circle or cycle
from which we can never escape our destiny? Is time something that we choose and create based on our
choices? Are we victims or time or
are we in the driver’s seat? In
Pharaoh’s Egypt one day is an endless repletion of wearisome toil that seems to
go on forever. Past and Future are
just limitless extensions of an intolerable present. Yahweh invites this people to celebrate Passover as a
beginning of something new, which is the redemption of something from the
past. It points forward towards
hope, not in circles towards an inescapable past. How do you live that?
COMMUNITY | CONGREGATION: The Exodus story, ritual
and history marks a new way of defining the Israelite identity. It’s not just a
tribe of people who share a common ancestor, or who are circumcised. There is a
connection between all those who eat the Passover meal, celebrating the
redemptive activity of God in the world.
By extension as Christians we believe that Baptism (a cleansing ritual
which marks our identity as having died and risen with Christ [See Romans 6])
and Communion (an eating ritual in which our participation marks us as desiring
belonging to Christ and the new community of the body of Christ gathered in the
experience of our salvation in Christ) are similar. They both tell a story, and shape our story, they define the
people of God, and open the door to others, they both free us to move towards
God’s future by first pointing us to the past. How do you experience the sacraments (Baptism and Communion)
in that way? How do you see them
related to the Passover?
PASSOVER:
the name literally comes from the verb Pesach: “to pass over” found in
Exodus 12. But what kind of a God
would Passover the Israelites but strike down the, seemingly innocent, first
born children and even the livestock, of the Egyptians? How do you react to that? If the blood on the lintel is a sign
that the family therein wants to be included with the circle of those God is
saving, is it fair that the Egyptians didn’t know to paint the blood on the
doorposts?
YEAST: It’s the celebration of both the
Passover Lamb and the unleavened bread.
The text can make it seem like two different holidays. What’s so special about not eating
bread with yeast? Why is it important
– or how is it – for latter generations?
Yeast can take forever to act, but then rise quite quickly. It’s a bit like God’s deliverance which
sometimes seems as if it will never come, and then comes so quickly that we’re
not prepared for it. Leaven is
actually old fermented dough. So
to make new bread you use some of the old bread. If Exodus is about God creating a new people, then why would
eating unleavened bread be so important and significant? What do the Israelites need to leave
behind before they get to receive freedom, let alone get to the promised land?
Curiously
Jesus also talks about yeast in his parables of the leaven (Luke 13:20-21 and
Matthew 13:33). There Jesus says
that the yeast is powerful because it works through all the dough transforming
it into something new. Are these
two teachings about yeast contradictory, or are they getting at the same
thing? How do you hear them?
Textual Curiosities:
The
story is told in a curious way.
It’s the 10th plague recounted in 11:1-10 and also in
12:29-36. In between the
foretelling of the event and the happening of it there is a long section of
teaching on the observance and the importance of the Passover feast in 12:1-28.
Questions for wondering and
exploring:
1. What troubles you and/or encourages you
in this text? Why?
2. How do you need to mark that your life as
a Christian, that you live with a different sense of time and a different sense
of social relationships? How might
that be revolutionary and grace-giving in our technological focused society in
which we are all alone together?
3.
From what old “yeasts” do you need to be freed in order to move towards
the Promised Land that God wants for you?
From what old “yeasts” do we need to be freed as a congregation?
4.
Passover, Baptism and Communion are about experiencing something. It’s not just hearing a story of God’s
past faithfulness, but experiencing it in the retelling of it so that we too
participate. How is that
important? How is it relevant to
the ways in which we share faith with others, with our children? Which comes first the experience of
God’s love or the knowledge of it?
Does that even matter? How?
No comments:
Post a Comment