The God Squad: Spring songs
As we prepare to welcome spring (March 20) and Passover (April 12) and Easter (April 20). I offer up a prayer for remembering how our spring holidays divide us and unite us and how springtime makes all our celebrations part of a renewal of hope.
Passover and Easter are different.
As the theologian Martin Buber has written, Passover is celebrated by a meal eaten for God while Easter is celebrated by a meal (the Eucharist) that is eaten of God.
Passover celebrates a God who could not become visible, while Easter celebrates a God who had to become visible in order to save a sinful humanity.
Passover is about liberation for a nation of slaves. Easter is about liberation for a world of believers from the enslavement of sin.
Passover and Easter are the same.
Passover and Easter are both songs of springtime. They are both celebrations of a new season of new growth and new births for the flocks that still feed us even if we only encounter them in plastic trays in the supermarket. The parsley on the seder plate and the Easter eggs in the basket of neon green plastic straw are both just symbols of springtime. We are sophisticated human beings now but our spring song holidays remind us that we are still animals waiting for seasonal rebirth. We need green things to grow again.
Passover and Easter are both songs of liberation. The Exodus from Egypt is celebrated in the Passover meal and that meal was the last supper of Jesus (Mat 26:17; Mark 14:12; and Luke 22:7). This holiday celebrating the Exodus from Egypt for Jews was transformed into a new kind of Exodus from a new type of bondage – the bondage of original sin. The Hebrew word for Egypt is meitzar, which means 'a narrow place that hems you in.' For Jews that place is a place of being hemmed in on earth. For Christians that place is a state of being hemmed in by sin.
Passover and Easter are linked together in our sacred calendars. Easter is the only Christian holiday whose arrival is calculated on the ancient Jewish lunar calendar and falls on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. We are meant to celebrate liberation near each other.
I can love the song of Easter and I do love it without forcing its song into my soul's voice. Christians can love Passover without believing that the song of the Last Supper was supposed to be the last Passover song sung by Jews. When we are at our best we are not God's debaters, we are God's choir.
Passover and Easter restores our hope. The Exodus from Egypt was a historical event but it echoes our own personal emancipation from the Egypts that keep us enslaved to false gods and small needs. This is why the text of the Passover haggadah citing Exodus 13:8 commands us to teach our children that each of us is required to view ourselves as if we had also left Egypt. By Jews imagining ourselves leaving Egypt we restore our hope in the promised land. By Christians imagining that they are washed in the blood of the lamb they restore their hope that sin is not our eternal fate.
Taking his people out of the house of bondage and removing the bondage of sin are acts of liberation so awesome and exquisite, so transformative and so gracious, so loving and so powerful that we have no proper response except complete gratitude and a faith that washes over us and waters the world with a redeeming stream that shall never cease and never slack.
We are kept apart during Passover and Easter the way singers in a choir are kept apart by their different harmonies. We are singing the same song every spring. Passover and Easter are kept apart the way climbers are kept apart by their choices to climb the same mountain by different paths. We have different paths, but we have the same mountain.
Passover and Easter teach us that the ways we are different, though real and defining, are not nearly as important as the ways we are all the same. Let us prepare to sing our springtime song together.
Happy Passover!
Happy Easter!
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