Sermons
September 29, 2024 (Proper 21)
“Why is this night different from other nights?”
Exodus 12:1-13; 13:3-8
We have once again skipped over a whole lot between last Sunday’s reading and today’s. Last week we were with Abraham, back when his name was still Abram and he hadn’t had any kids yet. Now we step back in centuries later, to see what happened to his family, the descendants of his grandson Jacob, also known as Israel.
For over four hundred years,[1] at this point, the Israelites have been enslaved in Egypt. Jacob’s family had gone down and settled in Egypt when Jacob’s son Joseph was in power there, because there was famine through the whole known world but Joseph had ensured there would be food available in Egypt throughout the seven years of famine.
Jacob’s family was treated well and prospered in Egypt, until a new Pharaoh rose to power “who did not know” (or “who did not remember”) “Joseph.”[2] That Pharaoh was afraid of this large population of immigrants—the proper term, actually, is “resident aliens”, because by that point they were several generations removed from the people who had actually immigrated to Egypt. He feared that they would take over, and Egypt would lose its greatness to some other nation.
So he enslaved all the Israelites; and when they continued to multiply, he tried to institute a policy of ethnic cleansing: He told two Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah,[3]to kill all the baby boys whose birth they attended. But they resisted, claiming that the Hebrew women simply had their babies too fast for them to be there for the births.
Next Pharaoh decreed that all Hebrew baby boys must be thrown in the Nile—turning the source of all life in Egypt into an instrument of death. And a woman of the tribe of Levi hid her baby son for three months, but when she could no longer hide him, she put him in the Nile, as ordered; only she put him in a basket sealed with pitch, which was discovered by Pharaoh’s own daughter. The boy, Moses, grew up as the adopted grandson of the very Pharaoh who was trying to destroy his people.
Eventually Moses came to identify with the people into which he was born, and he killed an Egyptian who was mistreating an Israelite slave, then fled the country before the Egyptian authorities got wind of it and came looking for him. That’s how it happened that Moses was on Mount Sinai, keeping a flock of sheep for his Midianite father-in-law, and encountered the God of his ancestors in a bush that was burning but not consumed.
God called him to return to Egypt as God’s instrument to free Israel from slavery. Moses sure didn’t want to do that, and he tried every argument he could think of to talk God out of calling him; but God’s mind was made up and the arguments only made God mad.
So Moses went, with a strong staff in his hand and his brother Aaron at his side. The task was difficult, and it wasn’t until God inflicted a final, horrific plague—death of the firstborn of every Egyptian family—that Pharaoh finally let God’s people go.[4]
Right before that happened, God spoke to Moses and gave him instructions for the Israelites’ final meal in Egypt—reiterated as they were leaving, so that they might celebrate that final meal every year after that. They were to slaughter a lamb and roast it, eating the whole thing with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. There was no time to wait for bread to raise, and as they prepared to leave Egypt in a hurry, no way to deal with leftovers. If one whole lamb was too much for one family, they were to share with their neighbors.
Once they were free from Egypt, they would re-enact this final meal each year, unleavened bread and bitter herbs and all. And when their children asked why, they would say, “We do this because of what the Lord did for us when we came out of Egypt.
Perhaps the child would say, “But I’ve never been to Egypt; I was born here in Israel, and so were you. How could God have brought us out of Egypt?”
But that is the purpose of remembering, isn’t it? It’s to bring the event out of the past into the present, and make it real to us here and now.
“In every generation,” the Haggadah says, “a person is obligated to view himself as if he were the one who went out from Egypt. …It was not our fathers alone who were delivered by the Holy One, Blessed is He—we were also delivered with them.”[5]
For had they not been freed, we would still be slaves. So we gather to relive that night, that we might know it happened to us, and continues to happen to us.
The Passover has been celebrated by Jews for millennia. Jesus and his disciples celebrated it the night he was arrested. But its current form didn’t come into existence until after the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in 70 ce. At that point, the sacrificial system on which Jewish worship was based ended. There was no way to continue it; so the rabbis—many of them from the sect of the Pharisees—began to figure out how their faith could continue without the Temple and the sacrifices.
Perhaps it was only a small step, in the scheme of things, since there had been Jews living and working and praying in places other than their homeland since 722 bce, the year the Assyrian Empire destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel (the southern kingdom, Judah, with its capital at Jerusalem, was similarly destroyed in 587 bce by the Babylonian Empire).
It was in exile, in Babylon, after the destruction of Jerusalem, that the Hebrew Bible began to come together, along with the collection of rabbinic teachings called the Talmud. I don’t know if the exiles celebrated Passover or not. (Somebody probably knows, but I don’t; it might be something worth looking into.)
But after 70, when the Second Temple fell at the hands of the Roman Empire, Passover was celebrated, now centering around a ritual meal with symbolic elements and the retelling of the story of God freeing the people from Egypt. Since there was no Temple to make pilgrimage to, the Passover could be celebrated anywhere, and it has been.
Jews in hiding or in exile during the time of Nazi atrocities celebrated Passover, with handwritten Haggadot (the word simply means “story”) copied and circulated in secret. Survivors of that horrific time living in refugee camps in the Munich area celebrated Passover with their own Haggadah,[6] which connects the story of the escape from Egypt to their own experience under the Nazis. They knew the truth of another part of the traditional narrative:
“For it was not one alone who stood over us, a heel on our necks, bent on our annihilation, but, in generation after generation, they rise up against us, intent on destroying us. And yet, the Holy One, Blessed is He, breaks their grip and we are saved.”
The Holy One, Blessed is He, breaks their grip and we are saved. It had just happened to them; and what they survived adds a whole new layer of meaning to the celebration.
When Jews gather at the Passover table, they gather to tell a story. They gather to relive the story. They gather to place themselves within the story. And the story ends not with satisfaction but with continued longing: “Next year in Jerusalem.”
We are not yet in the Promised Land, as long as there are still strangers in the land being oppressed. We are not yet in the Promised Land, as long as people are still discriminated against, or even assaulted or killed, because of the color of their skin or their sex or whatever else.
Maybe next year we will be; but that isn’t an empty wish. It’s an assignment.
Maybe you’re asking now, “Why is she talking so much about a Jewish holiday? We’re Christians.” And you’re right, we are Christians—but this is our story, too.
On the Mount of Transfiguration, when Moses and Elijah appear and start talking with Jesus, Luke tells us what they’re talking about: Jesus’ exodus.[7] The Gospels are the story of a new Exodus, a new way in which God acts to set God’s people free from that which enslaves us. What Paul says in his letters, especially Romans, about sin and salvation makes a whole lot more sense if you keep the Exodus story in mind as you read.[8] And it was at the Passover meal, perhaps different from what Jews celebrate today, but perhaps not all that different in some ways, that Jesus took bread and broke it, took a cup of wine and blessed it, and gave the symbols of Passover another meaning for his disciples.
They celebrated in Jerusalem, so perhaps they wouldn’t have ended with “Next year in Jerusalem.” But there are Jews living in Jerusalem today, and I’ve heard they end their seders the same way, but with a slight difference: “Next year in rebuilt Jerusalem.” (Or, as Revelation calls it, “the New Jerusalem.”)
It’s the same thing that is known in Christian theology as the “already-but-not-yet” character of God’s Reign. Jesus came preaching that “the kingdom of God is here,” but he also taught his disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The back of sin and death are broken as we gather to remember Jesus’ last meal and what happened that night; yet people still get sick and die; women are still taught that we have to act and dress in certain ways, and avoid certain places, so we don’t get assaulted;[9] people continue to become refugees because of war, violence, starvation, and terrorism, and are forced to wander the earth looking for a safe place; children continue to cry themselves to sleep as their bellies ache from hunger.
In a lot of ways, we are still in Egypt.
“Next year in the New Jerusalem.” It is our longing, too, as we gather at the Table; and when our children ask us why, we say, “It is because of what God did for us when he took on flesh and lived among us, then died and rose again.”
But again, it’s not just a wish. It’s an assignment.
When we get up from the Table, what shall we do?
[1] Exodus 12:40-41 says it was 430 years to the day.
[2] Exodus 1:8
[3] It’s interesting that Exodus never gives us Pharaoh’s name, leading to much speculation among scholars; but does name these two slave women who resisted the king’s deadly oppression. It speaks volumes about God’s priorities, I think.
[4] It is, of course, never right to celebrate the deaths of others, even our enemies, even when they must die in order to save many others. The Passover ritual as it’s observed today includes a moment to remember those who died as Israel was being saved.
[5] The Haggadah to which I refer is New American Haggadah, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, translated by Nathen Englander, with commentary by Nathaniel Deutsch, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and Lemony Snicket; published by Little, Brown and Company in 2012.
[6] This is A Survivors’ Haggadah, which was republished with an English translation in 2000.
[7] Exodus means “departure.”
[8] I first heard this from Tex Sample, who used to be a professor at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City.
[9] …which is ridiculous, since women who haven’t been drinking, who don’t dress provocatively, or who never venture out to any place more dangerous than the grocery store, also get attacked.