The
plagues of Egypt. What a story! Moses goes to Pharaoh, saying, “Let my people
go!” Pharaoh turns his nose at him. Then the water turns to blood, frogs come
up from the water, gnats and flies overwhelm the air, livestock die, people
become covered by festering boils—that’s just the worst—that is until the
thunder and hail and fire rains down from the sky and then the locusts,
finishing off the rest of the crops, and lastly (or almost lastly… pen-lastly?)
the darkness. Nine plagues: In some ways each more terrible than the last but
nothing compared to the tenth.
It’s
hard to imagine exactly how devastating the death of every firstborn in the
land would be because losing one child is something like losing the world. For
everyone in the country to lose a child at the same time is beyond imagining.
This was a terrible time in history. The Egyptians put the Israelites into
slavery out of fear that they would rise up. There were too many of them in the
land. The Israelites had the numbers but the Egyptians held the power. So, in
addition to holding them captive as slaves Pharaoh had ordered the Hebrew
midwives to kill Hebrew boys and this is how Moses famously ends up in the reed
basket in the Nile. It’s also how Moses ended up in Pharaoh’s house, saved by
one of his daughters.
In
one sense these plagues culminate in the eye for an eye kind of justice that
pervades the earliest stories from the Bible. Pharaoh enslaved the Hebrew
people and ordered that their boys be killed so God frees them from slavery by
way of killing the first-born of the Egyptians. This is fair. It’s horrible,
but it’s fair. More than that, the plagues set Israel apart from other people.
These are children of Abraham. Nobody messes with children of Abraham.
So
it is that the Israelites are commanded by God to sacrifice a lamb and put its
blood over their doorpost to mark their homes so that when the tenth plague
hits the Lord may “pass over” their house. This all happens just as promised
and the Israelite children are spared; it was a terrible kind of miracle. The
Passover is so important it must be
remembered and celebrated. Thus, the festival of the unleavened bread was born.
God
had no problem keeping Israel set apart; the problem was that there was a
constant danger of the Israelites messing up the deal. One of the dangers for
these Israelites was that they would become just like the people around them
and the other was that they would develop their own Pharaoh-complex. This is
why they turn to ritual. The Passover helps Israel remember who they are and
keeps them from becoming something else.
This
is the heart of ritual—identifying, remembering, celebrating—because the
children of Israel must be reminded who they are again and again and again, so
that they might not become something else. This is the first and quintessential
Jewish holiday. The question for us today is whether our rituals serve the same
purposes: Do they keep us honest? Remind us who we are? And do they celebrate
the gifts we have been given?
We
don’t celebrate the Passover much as Christians. Well, at least we don’t
celebrate the same thing on the Passover. We celebrate a different lamb
slaughtered for our salvation—this lamb we know in Jesus Christ—whom the Gospel
writers go out of the way to identify with the time of the Passover. But whether
it’s the Passover in Egypt or the commemoration of the cross the questions are
the same: How do we identify, remember, and celebrate? Every time we worship
how are we remembering the sacrifice of Jesus for you and for me and
celebrating the radical change that means living as Christ-followers? Then, how
are all the things that have gone before—like the Passover—still a part of who
we are now as Christians? Do they still matter for us? How do we remember and
do we care?
I’m
not sure. And, yet, this is a story of God removing millions of people from the
yoke of slavery; it’s a story of death and new life. It’s a story that is
relived, unfortunately, in every age. Estimates worldwide have the number of
people who still live in slavery today somewhere between 20 and 50 million, and
many, many more live under the yoke of repressive principalities and powers. We
don’t get away from this one so easily.
As
people who follow Jesus we must ask ourselves: “Who are the chosen people now?”
In Galatians, Paul says there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or
female but all are one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:28). If that’s true then no
longer are we beholden only to those who share our ancestry or our allegiances;
instead, we are called to speak up even—perhaps especially—for those who are
most different from us. Jesus brings the story back to the time before Adam and
Eve fell into sin where people were united. Jesus calls us to be one body of
Christ with many members, and when some of the members are hurting we are not
to cut them off but to attend to them with urgency. In short, we are to be
little Jesuses, not little Pharaohs.
The
Passover sets the Jewish people apart because they were both a chosen people
and a people oppressed—it defines them over against principalities and powers.
This is what ritual should do. Ritual is not for people in power; it is for
people crushed by power. It is remembrance of the need for salvation from
powers like the Egyptians; it is to keep one another from becoming Pharaoh.
Our
ritual today should be that strong, but it runs a peculiar risk because ritual
runs contrary to power. Ritual exists for the enslaved, not the ones who have
control. It frees those who are oppressed by systems—by politics and
corporations and human nature. Ritual is for those who live in fear because of
things that mark them as different—all the –isms. Ritual is for the least and
the lost to remember that they are children of God. Does our ritual match up?
Are we slaves? And, if so, to what?
This
is a critical question for this time and it is even more timely as we turn next
week to the golden calf. The question is really whether we are Passover people
or golden calf people, whether our rituals are more like remembrances of our freedom
from captivity or celebrations of our prosperity. It’s a subtle difference, but
it’s the difference between faithfulness and idolatry. It’s the difference
between becoming Pharaoh who holds power or Moses who speaks up for those under
the thumb of empire. Sometimes, in our lives, it’s hard to distinguish between
the two.
We
are Passover people. We don’t deserve anything, but it is by God’s grace that
we are spared. We are not golden calf people; we don’t revel in the
extravagance of our blessings. This is what became of the Egyptians after all.
They had power and they wanted to keep it so they enslaved people. We have
power in our lives to do the same if we’re not careful. We can enslave people
to economic injustice, to racism or sexism or whatever; we can enslave people
to their medical conditions or to their personality traits; we can define one
another by everything we see as wrong with one another, and then we can enslave
one another to gossip all the while playing the victim, the oppressed.
We
must not do this. Instead, we must live in both worlds—the Passover remembrance
that teaches us of our need for grace, and the body of Christ that teaches us humility
and wisdom to be in this world but not of it, to reject our power over our
neighbors, and instead to turn to the members of the body of Christ that are
struggling to break free. We are Passover people with a Pharaoh complex. And
it’s tough. But that’s the way of the cross.
Be
better. Do better. Not because your salvation depends on it. Let’s not be so
selfish. Let’s just act like followers of Christ should, because we have been
set free from a burden even worse than the slavery the Israelites endured
Pharaoh. We are deserving of worse than Egypt received for their sins. Nobody
owes us anything for anything, and still, here we are: Children of Grace. Saved
by the blood of a different lamb. Called to live in response.
That’s
what ritual should do. It should beg us to reconsider who we are, to celebrate
anew what we have been given, and to push us into action. Is it?
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