Friday, July 18, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Passover
This month shall stand at the head of your calendar; you shall reckon it the first month of the year. On the fourteenth day of this month a lamb without blemish shall be slaughtered in the evening twilight.
Now brushed blood from the lamb glistened on the lintel and posts of every Hebrew door. Bakers made bread without yeast, enough for seven days, so the Israelites could leave immediately when the signal was given. On that night the people must have been breathless with excitement and fear, whispering to each other what they had heard and what would happen next.
This is how you are to eat this meal: with your loins girded up, sandals on your feet and your staff in hand. You shall eat like those who are in flight!
And in a moment, God gave his people a new life. After four hundred years in Egypt, they started over. First Adam, then Noah and his descendants, and now Moses with his people stand under the blessing of God – Yahweh, whose promises were made to a thousand generations.
Oh, there had been plagues, but as Yahweh predicted to Moses, the plagues only hardened Pharaoh’s resolve to keep his slaves in bondage. God sent nine before the last, which at last broke the Egyptian spirit. Blood, frogs, gnats, flies, cattle disease, boils, hail, locusts and finally darkness afflicted the nation’s people. But none of these touched Egyptian children.
Then at midnight on the fourteenth day of the first month, the angel of death destroyed every firstborn son of Egyptian man and beast, passing over only the houses where he saw blood on the door.
Seeing the blood, I will pass over you.
Pharaoh cried out to Moses to take his people and go. And they went.
At the end of Fiddler on the Roof, all the peasants of a Russian Jewish village begin a pilgrimage forced on them the Czar’s armed forces. The Orthodox Russian Christians persecuting them saw these villagers through a political eye which turned them small and insignificant.
I hope Tevye and his family remembered the ancient story of their ancestors leaving Egypt, even if circumstances were different now. Like their forebears, these Russian farmers and shopkeepers piled their furniture and belongings onto wagons pulled by oxen, carrying enough food for only a few days. Perhaps their bread too was unleavened.
This day shall be a memorial feast for you which all your generations shall celebrate with pilgrimage to the Lord, as a perpetual institution.
I envy the Hebrews this Passover tradition – with its preparation, feast, celebration and departure. These people know that they belong to the Lord. But a consequence I don’t envy is their tenuous grip on homeland. The roots they put down from the time of Abraham could not sustain their hold on Canaan, the land of milk and honey. And then throughout history the Jews were seen by other seemingly more stable people-groups as more or less homeless, with patriotic ties to little or nothing beyond themselves and their religion. As Catholics were supposedly expected to obey the pope before their country’s government, so Jews were thought to be loyal to Yahweh and their Jewish leaders before their country’s president or king.
Jewish music is often written, played and sung in the minor keys; it tears at the grief-stricken heartstrings of a people without a country. The music sounds like the music of strangers in a strange land. On the other hand Jewish dancing marks celebration explosive with joy, confidence and hope. Do I have to choose one or the other?
All night, all day, angels watchin’ over me, my Lord.
How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done? I am your servant; you have loosed my bonds. To you I will offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and I will call upon the name of the Lord.
The idolatry of Christian nationalism (or Jewish nationalism, for that matter) might not make spiritual sense, but it provides a rallying cry for those of us looking for one. It’s us against them, an old raggedy tune that’s been sung, always out of key, since the beginning: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” So as citizen-with-a-passport of a political and geographic nation, I feel profound discontent beneath my patriotism.
My familial roots can easily be traced back at least a couple of centuries and several generations, and then, back where the path gets a little washed out, I found an Abraham Sandel living in a small town near Stuggart in Bavaria. Before our emigration to America, we Sandels were buried in that town’s cemetery. Is Abraham Sandel my ancestor? Was he Jewish? Do I have ties to the Passover that were eliminated at Ellis Island?
These uncertain roots fascinate me for a moment. Then Jesus catches my eye and invites me into deeper allegiance, to my Father. He calls me into a larger loyalty and surrender than either religion or nation can ever offer:
I say to you, something greater than the temple is here.
If you knew what this meant, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,”
you would not have condemned these innocent men.
For the Son of Man is Lord of the sabbath.
(Exodus 11, Psalm 116, John 10, Matthew 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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