Reflection: Monday, Day 9 of Advent

Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Go and select lambs for yourselves according to your clans, and kill the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. None of you shall go out of the door of his house until the morning. For the LORD will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you. You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever. And when you come to the land that the LORD will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service. And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the LORD’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.’” (Exodus 12:21-27) 

If there is one passage that fills me with Christmas cheer, it’s this one.  

Just kidding.  

Perhaps, though, it fills me with Advent sobriety? It is an awful passage, weighty and frightening.  

I remember hearing this Passover account as a boy. And while I understood that—in theory—the Angel of Death was a one-time thing, I probably would have felt a little more secure if we’d managed to borrow a cup of lamb’s blood from a kindly Israelite neighbor and dabbed it on our doorframe. No one else in my family shared my concern, but then, no one else was the oldest male child. 

The passage itself (much like the Abraham passage) is hard, having to do with the death of children. It is also a text that collapses time, which explains at least part of my unease, even as a twentieth-century American gentile.  

God gives detailed directions throughout this chapter, and that’s expected—after all, he’s telling the Israelites how to be passed over by the Angel of Death. Weirdly, though, his directions are equally addressed to their children’s children, reminding them of how to properly commemorate this moment once the danger has passed. He seems to care as much that they remember this event correctly as anything else.  

This is because, however much the blood over the door saves them on that particular night in Egypt, the Feast of Passover will be part of what forms them as a People of God. Once a year, in the midst of their Promised Land prosperity, the Israelites will eat a meal that symbolizes their hasty departure from Egypt, a meal that reflects their distinctness from other nations and the obedience to God that makes it possible. 

We all want to be saved from the Angel of Death—but mostly so we can go on being like everybody else, pursuing various kinds of personal empowerment and autonomy that actually keep us enslaved. But God ties his people’s salvation here to their distinctness, and their distinctness to their obedience. Take away one and you don’t get the others.  

Jesus, whom the New Testament presents as the ultimate Passover Lamb, says that Eternal Life is knowledge of God and Christ. But that can be a bitter herb to digest. Much of the time I secretly feel it would be pretty great to have Eternal Life that tastes a little less Jesus-y—where I still get to run my life my way—and by “my way,” I mostly mean the way that everyone around me runs their lives, because it sure seems like they get to be happy on their own terms. But happiness, or even survival, on one’s “own terms” is an illusion. Not even Jesus got that, even when he prayed for it all night after celebrating his last Passover. 

Do traditions—like Advent or Passover—remind us of these sorts of spiritual realities? Or do they become sites of potential idolatry, allowing us to pay attention to quaint little cultural practices, making us feel insulated against our own discomfort with a God who requires our very selves and gives us his? If we think that such practices are inherently idolatrous, we need to reckon with the fact that God prescribes them to his own chosen people (and Jesus joyfully celebrates them). Either this was a mistake on his part, or they can and should be used as instruments of our salvation.  

Tomorrow, December 6, is the feast day of St. Nicholas (who is, admittedly, the antithesis of the Angel of Death). Tonight, in many church traditions and countries, St. Nicholas visits, putting candy or coal (or potatoes) in children’s shoes to commemorate the story of one of the saint’s acts of charity.