WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY?      Part IV

                                                  By Nancy Gammill

Writing this column is a good discipline for me, especially as it moves through the various “seasons” of the church.   As I am writing this, we are still in the season of Epiphany or the celebration of the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ.  In another week, we will be moving into the season of Lent and Easter.  All of these seasons “hang together” as we begin to understand the connections that the Word of God makes for us throughout the scriptures.  In the Gospel of John, remember, the writer says that the Word of God was with God in the beginning, and then was “made flesh” in Jesus Christ.  That is the eternal Word we encounter throughout the scriptures beginning with creation in the Book of Genesis, and in some mysterious way I can’t begin to explain, that word was made flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus.  As I explained to the pre-school children the other day, in Jesus we see how much God loves us. 

In the season of Lent and Easter, we very dramatically encounter the Word of God made flesh in the passion story of Jesus Christ, especially beginning with the Palm Sunday story when this “King of the Jews” comes riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a white charger as the people would have expected a king to come, as King David would have come centuries before, but on a donkey.  (Read Luke 19: 29-48).  He came in all humility, came as one of the people, came as a king proclaiming love, not military might.  Remember this is the same “king” that the wise men sought 33 years earlier, and whom they found in a lowly manger, not in a palace as one might expect.  Jesus turns the idea of “kingship” and might and power upside down. So as Christians, what does that say for the systems of power that we participate in on a regular basis?  Most of those systems are based on a hierarchial or what I like to call a “one up, one down” system, which is often demeaning to people.  How might we turn those systems “upside down” so that everyone has a voice, everyone experiences justice whether it’s in business, families, government, or even the church?  That’s the way Jesus lived, and the way he loved.

 The season of Lent, then, like the season of Advent before Christmas, becomes a time of preparation and a time of penitence and reflection, to think for ourselves about where and how we have fallen away from the kind of living that Christ has put before us and to prepare our hearts to receive him into our lives.  When you think about it, Christmas and Easter are joined at the hip, so to speak.  Easter would have no meaning if the “Word of God” had not been born into human flesh at Christmas, and Christmas would have no meaning, if that person of Jesus the Christ had not had to suffer and die so that the people of God could be freed from the things that hold us back and keep us imprisoned in our societal and familial systems in an unhealthy way.   

Which brings me to a very important word in Lent.  Freedom.  Back centuries before Jesus lived, the Hebrew people were freed from slavery in Egypt by Moses.  Many of you know that story.  Did you know that when they were struggling to be free from the Egyptians, and the Lord was preparing to bring upon the people of Egypt the worst plague ever, the killing of all new borns hoping to get to the Hebrew slave families especially (Read Exodus 12), that the Lord instructed the Hebrews to slay a new born lamb and to pour the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of their homes so the Angel  of Death would “Passover” their homes and their children would be saved?  They would then be allowed to leave under the cover of night, taking very little with them, and only unleavened bread because there would be no time for the bread to rise.  From that time on, the Lord instructed the people to observe this “Exodus” from Egypt with a special time called the “Passover” which included a meal fixed in a special way every year, including a lamb.  The blood of the lamb was the life giving part of the animal.

The parallel with Jesus is that the meal he was celebrating with his disciples, their last meal together, on the night we now call Maundy Thursday during Holy Week, was the traditional Passover meal.  The difference was that Jesus took the bread that night, blessed it, and said “This is my body which will be broken for you” and he took the cup of wine, and said, “This is my blood which will be poured out for your for forgiveness  of your sins.”  In other words, Jesus would become the sacrificial lamb whose life giving blood would be poured out so that the people could be freed, this time from the slavery to their sins. Through his crucifixion at the hands of people who were very threatened by his new kind of “kingship” the sacrifice was complete.

Every time we celebrate Holy Communion, we re-enact that Passover meal and remember that Jesus gave himself for our freedom.  A “New Exodus”, you might say.  When he rose from the dead, when he was resurrected, he showed us his true divinity and his power even over death which is ours as well when we repent of our sins and enter into new life with him. (Read John 20)

If you have questions, please feel free to call me or email me at nancyg@fumchurch.org.