Passover is a one of the main festival of the Jewish people, a celebration commemorating a strange event thousands of years ago. In the prosperity of Goshen which god has given them, the Hebrew people had become slaves. The powers and structures of the world, Egypt, became suspicious of them, and therefore had rejected them and treated them a little above animals. Goshen was a blessing, but now it became a curse. Phithom and Raames, the cities of the king's wealth were built on the jewish sweat and tears. The great river Nile, red with the jewish blood, cried out to the heavens. But for centuries, those blood and sweat and tears and cries seemed to fall on the deafness of the vast Egyptian sky.

But Passover was the proof that god in heaven is not deaf nor mute (remember the "who made man's mouth!" roar of god through the burning bush in the Prince of Egypt carton). In the fullness of time, in the midst of this national calamity, Passover is a celebration of a visitation. It was god's faithfullness over and against man's depravity, the depravity of both the victims and the oppresors. God personally visited his people in a strange and mysterious way. He did not forget his promise of old. There was a land of rest and peace, and it was now time for the hebrews to go home there. And when the time came, in a way no one had expected, god himself came down among his people and rescued them. 

Yes, rescue! Passover is a celebration of liberation. God set his people free, echoed in the cries of Moses to the Pharoah of Egypt - Let My people go! The prophet of god became his mouthpiece against the injustice and oppression by the powers of this world. And this has always been god's consistent agenda, liberation of his Creation from the forces which seek to reduce the worth of the Creation, in particular men and women, through acts of hatred, injustice and oppression. True freedom can only be found in living out our potential as part of god's good Creation, or in fact, as the crown of god's good Creation. And this was Passover, when god the liberator intervened and launched his rescue operation.

Passover is also a celebration of compassion. The love of god is greater far than any tongue or pen can tell. Again, this was the consistent characteristic of god, from His first loving glance at Adam to His slaugthering of the animal to clothe Adam and Eve to the call of Abraham to His blessings of Israel, it was a condescension on the part of the great god because of his love to man. The prophet Hosea described this love as growing warm and tender within His heart. In a most beautiful vow, god himself said;

I will betroth you to me forever.

I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice,

in steadfast love and in mercy.

I will betroth you to me in faithfullness (Hos 2:19-20)

 

And his love towards Israel was expressed in not only his visitation and liberation of them, but also in his blessings - the good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of rest and peace.

These are the very powerful themes of passover, visitation, liberation and compassion.

 

I am judging the powers of Egypt. I am establishing a lasting covenant with you; kill the lamb, take and eat its flesh. Take its blood, the blood shall be a sign of our covenant. Commemorate this death and proclaim it to the generations to come (Exodus 12)

Yet like Israel, humanity, men and women, we are like strangers in our own land. The ecosystem, the Creation refuses to cooperate with us, the structures and systems which we put in place reject humanity and all our values. The dark powers of evil enslaved us to do their biddings. The smell of death fumed the earth. We are in exile even though at home. We have become slaves to sin and the powerful forces of darkness.

Yet, Israel's god is also the god of the whole world. For thousands of years, Israel celebrated this poignant feast of Passover and performed the act of sacrifice. Remembering and declaring with every celebration the three poignant and powerful message of god's visitation, liberation and compassion. And when one evening, a young Israelite, with his friends sat down on the table to eat the Passover meal, with all its symbolism, and on the wrong day at that, he infused new, though no less powerful, and wonderful, meanings into those themes.

I am eager to eat this Passover meal with you before I suffer in the hands of my enemies - this is how I judge them, and finally defeat them, by suffering in their hands and giving up my own life. I will not eat this until the enemy is finally defeated (i.e. until i gave up my life). I am establishing a new covenant with you; take my body, eat my flesh. Drink my blood, the blood of the new covenant poured out for you. Remember my death, proclaim it (cf. Luke 22, Matt 26, 1 Cor 11)

Did we even realize the madness of the occasion: Passover 2.0.?? Sometimes, we are too distant from the physical experience of the Israelites to even begin to appreciate the significant of this strange meal. Jesus' last supper was not eaten without a context. The whole event did not happen in a historical vacumn, and it did not happen within the once-a-month-sunday-eucharist setting which we are accustomed to. The themes of Passover, his entry on the colt into the city of the great king and his seemly mad display of anger in the temple together added to the significance of that solemn night in which he had his Passover meal with his disciples.

In renacting and retelling the story of Passover and Exodus (which was instructed by Exodus 12 on every Passover), Jesus seemed to recreate the story to focus on himself as the central character. The whole event of the final week of Jesus seemed to retell the story of Israel afresh, with a bit of twist:

The king of Israel, her true king, the chosen one (hebrew: Messiah) has finally arrived (and Israel believed that her true king will also be the true king of the world). He rode into the city where kings were crowned, in the foretold manner of the chosen king. Yet instead of affirming the temple and all its authority, he proclaimed judgment on the temple because instead of being the light to the world, the old temple system has become a shabby religious mumbo-jumbo and stumbling block. The king therefore invited the people to focus now on the new temple, the new authority, himself. And moments before the important celebration of Passover, the commemoration of god's visitation, liberation and compassion, the king gathered his 12 friends around him, like god gathering the 12 tribes of Israel and spoke to them of the Passover sacrifice; just that this time, it was not a lamb, but the sacrifice was the king himself. God was doing a new thing in and through the king; another Exodus is coming as they observe this familiar yet strange celebration of Passover 2.0 that night. It was the Exodus, against all the exoduses in the history of the Israel nation. It was the true home-coming, the true return from exile.

This home-coming can best be summed up by Paul's reflection on the person and work of this true king of Israel, and therefore the true king of the world:

And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col 1:17-20)

Visitation, liberation and compassion; now also reconciliation, peace.