Our
lessons begin this evening with the story of the first Passover. God has heard
the cry of the Israelites and is going to bring them out of bondage in the land
of Egypt.
We
know from Hebrew Scripture that the Israelites had multiplied and were about to
surpass their oppressors in terms of population. But numbers alone had not
prepared them for the great escape.
Moses
had even taken matters into his own hands and killed an Egyptian overseer who
was abusing an Israelite. But that act of individual courage—or foolhardiness,
depending on your point of view—had consequences primarily for Moses himself.
He had to flee into the desert.
For
God’s plan to work, the Israelites were going to have to act in unison.
For
a people to rise up and walk out of bondage, they must overcome personal fears
and anxieties. They must throw off those feelings of isolation and helplessness
and apathy that often overtake people in dire circumstances.
For
any group of people to march into an unknown future, to go where God’s mission
calls them to go, they must give up individual preferences, and set aside their
own coping mechanisms and adaptations to the current situation. They must relinquish
ways of thinking and practices tied to the past. Indeed, they must yield their
very natural desire for control, their very egos, to the future of the community.
And
so God planned for the Israelites a feast to be prepared and shared in a
particular way that required people to come together and to work together as they
never had before.
Each
household had to secure a lamb, but smaller households had to join with a
neighboring household. The lamb was to be male and 1 year old. It had to be
apportioned exactly to the number of people who would eat it.
It
had to be kept until the 14th day of the month. Then the entire
congregation of Israelites had to come together to slaughter those lambs at twilight.
Not at dawn or noon or whatever the traditional time for slaughtering livestock
might have been, but at twilight.
The
lamb had to be eaten that very night, and everyone, everyone, had to prepare
and share the feast in the same way. The lamb was to be roasted, not boiled,
with head, legs and inner organs intact. No place here for that plaintif cry,
“But, dad, I don’t like roasted lamb!”
The
Israelites were to be dressed to march… loins
girded, sandals on their feet, staffs in hand. Can you imagine the problem if
some had insisted on wearing their Sunday best for this feast, then had to flee
into the desert wearing, say, high heels?!
(I can hear my mother in there somewhere: No,
you will not wear your sneakers to the dinner table.)
God
even dictated, through Moses and Aaron, that they were to eat standing up.
The
first Passover was a radical act of community.. to prepare the people of Israel
to rise up together and march off into the unknown. The first Passover was an
answer to the need for cohesion among the Israelites, cohesion and the courage
and faith to rise up, yield their own individual egos and preferences and
dearly held practices—perhaps even strongly held views that they’d all be
better off staying in Egypt!
They
had to yield all of that, and more, in order to leave their homes, risk
everything, and march into the dark and unknown desert. And God, in great
wisdom, understood that radical acts of community can’t be a one-time thing.
This day shall be a day of remembrance for you, God said. You
shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord;
throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.
Fast
forward a few thousand years. The followers of Jesus are about to enter into a
different kind of wilderness—the wilderness of betrayal and grief and loss.
Jesus has been telling them what is coming. But they don’t get it.
I
am not being at all critical of the disciples here. I’m pretty sure, in their
shoes, I would not have gotten it either. I suspect their incomprehension was
part denial, and part, well, incomprehension. After all, no human had ever
risen from the dead…
But
wait. What about Lazarus? They witnessed that! So maybe it was all denial,
which is an amazing thing. Denial can blind us to things in ourselves that are unbelievably
obvious to others.
Whatever
the reason the disciples are clueless, but Jesus knows what’s coming. Notice
how concerned John is with “knowing” in tonight’s Gospel lesson, and not in the
sense of knowing facts, but in the sense of understanding.
“Jesus
knew that his hour had come,” John writes. “Jesus, knowing that the Father had
given all things into his hands” got up, took a basin and washed their feet.
Jesus
knew also that the disciples did not understand. He acknowledges as much when
Peter challenges him, and after he has washed their feet, he explain again in
simple terms so that they might begin to understand.
But
most of all, Jesus knows that the events about to happen had the power to
shatter the little community of believers gathered around him, to tear them
apart and scatter them to the four winds.
And
so, on this night of remembrance of God’s radical act of community that brought
the Israelites out of Egypt, through the wilderness, through hunger and
rebelliousness against God and deadly disputes among themselves, and, yes, even
moments of wishing they were back in Egypt, slaves but with food and a roof
over their heads---
On
this holy night of remembrance, Jesus institutes a new radical act of community.
Very soon, we will consecrate bread and wine, and we will share, once again,
our communal feast of Christ’s body and blood, our own radical act of
community.
So
I’ve just drawn a bridge between God’s institution of the first Passover, and Jesus’
institution of Holy Communion, and that connection is real and appropriate. At
the same time, it is important to note that the first Passover was designed to
separate the Israelites from the Egyptians, and to form them as a people and a
nation, God’s own people and nation.
Jesus
came to proclaim a new covenant. The Gospel according to Jesus Christ is a
message of love and reconciliation and inclusion. Notice that as Jesus
institutes our most holy act of sharing his body and blood, and models for us
the servanthood of love by washing feet, he includes even his betrayer.
We
are called by Jesus the Christ into an ever more radical form of community. Yes,
it is a community of people who love one another and uphold one another in
prayer and fellowship.
But
like Jesus the Christ on the cross, his community faces outward. It spreads its
arms to the world. It transforms evil by loving it to death. It practices
community by inviting everyone to the table.
Radical
community takes the table—the holy feast of love and forgiveness and
reconciliation—to the hungry, the isolated, the stranger. It is community that
carries the light of Christ into the world.
Soon
we will strip the altar bare and begin our own march into the darkness of Good
Friday, following Jesus the Christ. We will do it fortified by our communal
feast, our radical act of community, and the knowledge that the blazing light
of Easter awaits on the other side.
In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy
Spirit, AMEN
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