Happy
Easter to you!!! Or, as you would hear in
France, Italy, or Mexico: Joyeuses
Pâques! Buona Pasqua! Felices Pascuas!
Do
you notice anything in common in the way these other languages express what we
call Easter? More than in the word we
use, Easter (which has pagan
roots), you can hear the Hebrew root, pesach,
in their word for Easter--the same root from which we derive
the word Passover, and “Paschal,” as in, the paschal lamb.
You
see, Easter is the Christian Passover.
I’ve
been thinking about this because yesterday began the 8 days of Jewish Passover,
and we don’t coincide so closely every year. (Orthodox Christians do, having to
do with the Western church’s adoption of the Gregorian calendar. Another post.)
But also because this ancient Easter
Vigil service—with some elements dating from the second century—is closer to
its Jewish roots, and has so much Passover imagery in it.
“This
is the night,” we hear in the Exsultet. A Jewish Passover celebration begins with
the youngest at the table asking, “Why is this night different from any other
night?” All over the world, Jews re-tell the stories that answer the question--stories
of their liberation from slavery, including the story of the Red Sea we heard
tonight. Passover is sometimes called, “the season of our freedom,” and it
celebrates spiritual
as well as physical redemption. The Passover meal is both a commandment and a
story, as is our Eucharist, where taking food symbolic of aspects of the
journey— including the traditional eating of a sacrificial lamb, and unleavened
bread to symbolize the haste of the flight from Egypt--is a way of
participating in the experience, of making the journey again. The meal includes the psalm we said today--likely
one that Jesus said at the Last Supper--about a joy so great that the mountains
skipped like lambs and the little hills like lost sheep.
But Jews also recall God’s dream for their future, where they
are free from the burdens of oppressors,
free from slavery, taken as God’s people, with God as their very own God. This
is a continuing promise of covenant, of God still with them.
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| Crossing the Red Sea, by Cheryl Rose |
Tonight, we celebrate the new covenant of God in Christ. And in our Easter Vigil, we too hear the question,
what makes this night different? And we add our own answers. “This is the night,”
we say, “when all who believe in Christ are delivered from the gloom of sin, and
are restored to grace and holiness of life. How wonderful and beyond knowing, O
God, is your mercy and loving-kindness to us, that to redeem a slave, you gave
a son.”
It was the apostle
Paul who first made the connection to the sacrifice of the lamb at the Jewish
Passover with Christ’s sacrifice for us. He wrote, “Clean out the
old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are: unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has
been sacrificed.” Paul
saw that in the Last Supper, Jesus’ offering was not an ordinary lamb, it was Jesus
himself. Jesus became the Lamb of God, and so we call his suffering, death, and
resurrection our own Passover-- “the Paschal mystery.” It is the same mystery
hidden in Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. As Jews renew their covenant through
the Passover sacrifice, so Christians renew our “new covenant” in celebrating
the Paschal mystery. We celebrate this at Easter, but also every Sunday in our
Eucharist, just as Christ commanded us to do.
Since the earliest days of the Vigil,
Christians have listened to the stories of our ancestors, as we have tonight. From
the first story, Genesis, we remember the dream of God for God’s people to be at
home in the beautiful and harmonious world God created. We remember that we are
made in God’s image, and that God graciously shared some of God’s freedom with
us. We do not have God’s freedom—for we
are not God. But we alone of all
creatures have the freedom to choose to follow God’s way, or to make our own
way, and as our stories tonight remind us, this complicates our relationship
with God. For often, when we make our own way, we find ourselves enslaved
again. And Passover, ultimately, is about freedom.
We
don’t know what brought the people into Egypt, or how the people that Jesus
healed became blind, or lost their hearing or speech. We do know that
enslavement is surely not of God, but comes from the abuse of freedom given us.
Walter Brueggeman talks about slavery as whatever keeps us from being joyous. We
are so often bound up in systems of our own making. We may be literally enslaved
or imprisoned, or made less free by discriminatory systems, or oppressive
belief systems taught by our culture or family of origin. And we internalize these
systems and impose slavery upon ourselves:
we may be captive to our mortgage; or our fears; to phony loyalties,
frantic ambitions, or belief in limitations in ourselves which do not exist.
God
sees our enslavement, and weeps. For God has dreamed about us from our creation,
and yearned for our joy. From God’s love, God sent Jesus into the world, to
participate in our human systems with us—systems which caught him up, tortured
him, and crucified him. We crucified God.
Yet
because God is perfect freedom, and power, and mystery, God made possible the
resurrection for our sake--that we might reclaim our freedom and be reconciled
to God. Christ our Passover, crossed over from death into
new life, so that we ourselves could too. As Paul writes, “we celebrate that
our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed,
and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.”
This
Easter, our Passover, let us consider what enslaves us, and ask for God’s help
to release those bonds. Throw out the old yeast and be the precious unleavened
selves God created us to be! Celebrate today God’s new covenant of liberating love. And
when we renew our baptismal vows, seize our opportunity to participate with
Christ in the resurrection, allowing our old selves to die, and choosing, in
freedom, a new life in Christ.
 |
| Passover, by Tim Nyberg |
For
in the Resurrection, God has announced to us we do not need to live coerced
lives. The God of Exodus is the one who freed God’s people and brought them to
Godself. Jesus is the one who is free and united within us. Jesus is free from
all the claims and expectations of the world. Jesus defies the world’s
limitations. In Jesus’ resurrection is our freedom. And so we say:
Allelulia. Christ our Passover is Sacrificed for
us!!
Therefore let us keep the feast. Alleluia!
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