Gentile Passover

Last Monday I had the privilege of being a part of a combined passover and Easter celebration. Since the last supper that Jesus shared with his disciples before he died was a passover meal, combining the two makes sense for Christians.

I'm sure it wasn't the most authentic passover meal. We didn't follow all the instructions in Exodus 12, and that's not even the only source of passover instructions in the Bible. There are also traditions not found in the Bible that Jews follow at the passover.

We cooked lamb over an open fire, outdoors, and we had unleavened bread to go with it. One of the people there had made the unleavened bread, and the lamb was from a halal butcher. (Halal standards are similar to kosher standards.) Some of the conversation was about the passover and Easter, and some was casual conversation about other things. As part of the meal, we took communion together, as Jesus instructed us to do in remembrance of him. It was special to be able to recognize the death and resurrection of Jesus in a way that I'm not used to--a somewhat less ceremonial way that took more time, was more fun, and may have been more like the original Last Supper (in spirit anyway) than our typical communion celebrations.

But there was something disturbing about this too. As we read Exodus 12, verse 12 stuck out to me, in which God says, "On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn—both men and animals—and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the LORD." The Israelites' liberation so many years ago required other people to die, or to suffer because someone close to them died. Some of the ones who died would have had very little to do with the Israelites' suffering and oppression, and some were kids. And in the Christian remembrance of Jesus's death, we symbolically commit cannibalism, symbolically eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the one who told us to do that. Or if you follow the Catholic belief in transubstantiation, you're actually metaphysically committing cannibalism, but only because the one who gave his life for you told you to do that.

I believe it's important for religious people to wrestle with the disturbing aspects of our faith, not to just pretend they're not there, or use some semi-satisfying explanation to pretend they're not disturbing.

In both the passover and Easter stories, liberation required someone to die. Is it better that the people who died deserved it (as in some of the Egyptians at the passover), or that the one who died was willing but didn't deserve it?