Passover, Easter, and God's grace
Celebrating the many ways God keeps promises.
“ ‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard their outcry against their slave-masters. I have taken heed of their sufferings and have come down to rescue them from the power of Egypt.’” – Exodus 3:7.
“God loved the world so much that he gave his only son, that everyone who has faith in him may not die but have eternal life. It was not to judge the world that God sent his Son into the world, but that through him the world might be saved.” – John 3:16-17.1
God, my pastor likes to say, takes sides. Over the next two weeks my wife Denise and I will be celebrating this divine quality in two different but parallel ways.
It starts this weekend when we will hop on a train for New Jersey to join our daughter’s in-laws as they hold their annual Passover seder. With prayer, ritual, and readings from the Torah, we will remember how God freed the Hebrews from the oppression of Pharaoh.
“ ‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt,’” God tells Moses in one of the most significant passages in the Bible. “I have heard their outcry against their slave-masters. I have taken heed of their sufferings and have come down to rescue them from the power of Egypt’ ” (Exodus 3:7).
Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, God kept his covenant with the Jewish people. Passover remembers God’s faithfulness in ways that are simultaneously somber and celebratory. It is a blessing for us to participate.
Eight days later, at our Methodist church in Manassas, Va., we will rejoice in another world-changing act of liberation when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Three days after his crucifixion, the Christian Scriptures tell us, Jesus rose bodily from the dead to extend God’s covenantal relationship to the people of the world.
Passover and Easter honor complementary events in the story of God. Tragically, too many Christians have blamed – and still blame – Jews for the death of Jesus. This misreading of Scripture and ancient history (Jesus’s crucifixion was a Roman punishment ordered by a Roman colonial bureaucrat) fueled centuries of anti-Semitism culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust.
Christians simply cannot separate Jesus from Judaism. As much his teachings point forward to the crucifixion and resurrection, they also draw on centuries of Jewish teaching, prophecy, and law.
This is worth remembering as the Lenten season draws to a close and Christians ponder the words of John 3:16: “God loved the world so much that he gave his only son, that everyone who has faith in him may not die but have eternal life.” For many Christians, this verse defines their faith. Unfortunately, for too many it has also come to signify something else.
Karoline Lewis, professor of Biblical Preaching and The Marbury E. Anderson Chair of Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., calls the passage “[p]erhaps the best-known Bible verse and yet one of the most destructive — an assertion of exclusion rather than one of God’s abundant love.” It is a verse, she says, “that sends people to hell rather than voice God’s extravagant grace.”
She notes that Christians who confine their reading of the text to 3:16 ignore the next verse: “It was not to judge the world that God sent his Son into the world, but that through him the world might be saved.”
The context of John 3:16 further amplifies its broader meaning. It concludes Jesus's dialogue with Nicodemus, a devout Jew who acknowledges that Jesus is a "teacher sent by God" but struggles to comprehend his divinity.
Jesus turns to the Torah for an analogy that Nicodemus would understand. "The son of Man must be lifted up as the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the wilderness, so that everyone who has faith in him may in him possess eternal life" (John 3:14).
Jesus is referring to a particularly trying period for the Israelites as they traversed the wilderness of Sinai. They had just fended off an attack by a local Canaanite king. Exhausted, hungry, fearful, and still a long way from the Promised Land, they turned on God and questioned why Moses led them out of Egypt. They then faced an infestation of poisonous snakes. Many died, and the people in their desperation begged Moses to intercede with God on their behalf.
Acting on the Lord's instruction, Moses fashioned a bronze serpent and put it on a standard "so that when a snake had bitten" a man or woman, they "could look at the bronze serpent and recover" (Numbers 21: 1-9). Despite their rebellion, the story tells us, God stood by the Israelites.
In his dialogue with Nicodemus, Jesus foreshadows the world-changing implications of his death and resurrection. He is willing to give up his life as an act of sacrificial liberation so that humankind can be free of the fear and venom of this world. The cross, like Moses’s standard, will save those who place their hopes in it.
Our condition today mirrors the plight of the Israelites in the desert. We are embattled, exhausted, and fearful. As the daily firehose of headlines from Washington, the Middle East, and Ukraine attest, fear and venom abound in these turbulent times.
Rather than repudiate God, Jesus invites us to embrace his ministry, the cross, and his victory over death. “For God so loved the world” isn’t a pious platitude but a reminder of the breathtaking scope of God’s care for creation. The Lord’s grace is available, Lewis reminds us, not only to the anxious ancient Israelites and churchgoing Christians, but to those who fear deportation, to “our transgender sisters and brothers,” to people of color, to “women who continue to march,” and to modern-day Jews and Muslims.
That is the good news we will be celebrating on Easter Sunday. Like God’s promise to Moses in Exodus and the serpent standard in the desert, the resurrection is a message of hope for a fearful people. With each passing day, it becomes more powerful.
All scriptural quotations come from The New English Bible.
Breathtaking. Thank you