Ex 12:1-14

13 April 06

Maundy Thursday

“Why is This Night Different from All Other Nights?”

            As with a lot of things in life—not to mention a lot of things in the Bible—our Old Testament reading for tonight presents us with an element of contradiction, of paradox.  As part of the exodus, Passover—or pesach (ts'P,) in Hebrew—is a story of hope and liberation.  Indeed, aside from the gospel of Jesus Christ, the exodus is the story of hope and liberation in the Bible.

            Still, it’s been difficult for me to fully appreciate the value of the Passover.  Obviously, not being Jewish and eating the meal, the Passover seder, every year is a big part of that!

When we were in Philadelphia, for a while I worked at Baskin-Robbins.  There being a significant Jewish population in that part of town, a lot of the customers were themselves Jewish, many of them Orthodox Jews.  The one day of the year in which we didn’t have any Jewish customers (at least, observant Jews) was Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), which is a day of fasting.  Living there helped me become a little more familiar with the Jewish calendar.

Passover was joined with the feast of unleavened bread, which has its own origin in an ancient spring festival, linked to the harvest of barley.  It’s a festival that was common throughout the Middle East.  The Israelites took it and gave it new meaning.

Passover is very much a family event.  It became a time for the children to learn what the Passover, and indeed the entire exodus from Egypt, meant for their people.  The lesson begins with the traditional question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

For them, it was deliverance from slavery.  It was an end to centuries of oppression.  As we see in verse 14, it is to be “a day of remembrance,” to be celebrated “as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”  They’re told that they must remember when they were set free.

So, why is it difficult for me to “fully appreciate” its value?  Just what is my problem?  Maybe a little taste of slavery would fix me!

I guess this is where that idea of “contradiction” I mentioned comes into play.  The Passover commemorates the final plague upon the Egyptians—to force them to let the Israelites go free.  One writer says that “in something [like] divine infanticide, Yahweh will slay the first-born of every Egyptian, from the highest in Pharaoh’s house to the lowliest prisoner languishing in a dank dungeon, even including the firstborn of Egyptian livestock.  To punctuate [the] point, [it’s added in verse 30]:  ‘there was loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.’”[1]

I suppose I’m just…uneasy at how Passover is used to justify mass murder.  Of course, this time it gets pinned on God.  Later on, when the Israelites move into Canaan, on a number of occasions, they say that God has ordered them to commit genocide, in so many words.  It would be great if that were the last time somebody got killed in the name of God.  Unfortunately, as we know, it continues to the present day.

Also, unfortunately, it shouldn’t be a big surprise.  It’s been noted by Dan Clendenin, who I mentioned last month, “Somewhere deep within the human psyche there seems to reside a dark and primitive impulse toward hatred, exclusion, and deadly violence.

Perhaps to justify ourselves, or to calm our deep insecurity, we insist that God not only sanctions our hatreds and our causes, whether personal or national, but that [God also] hates our enemies—and at some points in history even exterminates them.  But when God hates all the same people that you hate, you can be confident that you have created Him in your own petty and paltry image.”[2]

Of course, we do possess a sense of insecurity, even if we don’t take it to the level of killing, of taking lives.  And remember, we need not kill the body in order to deny someone their life.  Our impulse to justify ourselves can be seen in many different ways.  We might behave in certain ways because we feel unworthy.  We might even cover up such feelings with arrogance.

            According to Henri Nouwen, “When all is said and done, what we must learn above all is to offer ourselves—imperfections and all—to God.  If we keep waiting until we are ‘worthy’ of God, we will move farther rather than closer to Him.  It is through our broken, vulnerable, mortal ways of being that the healing power of the eternal God becomes visible to us.

            “We are called each day to present to the Lord the whole of our lives—our joys as well as sorrows, our successes as well as failures, our hopes as well as fears.  We are called to do so with our limited means, our stuttering words, and halting expressions.  In this way we will come to know in mind and heart the unceasing prayer of God’s Spirit in us.  Our many prayers are in fact confessions of our inability to pray.  But they are confessions that enable us to perceive the merciful presence of God.”[3]

Why is this night different from all other nights?  It’s because this is when we learn that true power resides, not in the taking of life, but in the giving of life.

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