OK!!! so, it's Easter this weekend, and I have two sermons to write... A good friday message and an Easter Sunday message... in retrospect I've done this a lot of different ways... last year for some reason I went full... "Jesus dismantled the powers' and preached the most politically charged sermon of my 15 years of pastoring... this year Im definitely in a gentler space... I am remembering a moment from a few years ago. I was standing at the front of our church, waiting for the service to begin, scrolling through social media, and had one of those rare 'lightning bolt' of inspiration moments. The first post that came up was a friend of mine who was also doing their Good Friday service and had completely emptied their church and set it up with tables to do Passover. They had prepared food and wine and were going through all the steps of a Passover feast as their way of celebrating Easter.
As I was considering this, it occurred to me that although there are a lot of parallels between Passover and Easter… and although they appear at the same time of year with references to the Passover feast in the Last Supper and the imagery of the blood of the lamb on the door posts in the exodus story… What we are actually celebrating at Easter is a deepening and progression of the story.
The metaphor that is often referenced is that death passed over Jesus, and it passes over us, in the same way that it did in the Passover tradition and in the exodus from Egypt.
The problem with this is... death did not pass over Jesus on the cross.
Death passed through him. He didn’t escape it. He fully experienced it. He fully experienced all pain, all suffering, all hurt, all shame. He cried out to God, why have you forsaken me? The death of Jesus was not the passing over. It was the passing through.
The full experiencing and witnessing of death, of suffering, of pain, the witnessing of sin and its consequences. Jesus did not exclude himself from death. He witnessed it fully. He allowed it to pass through him, so that he would walk through into a resurrected body that bore the scars of the cross. When he appeared to his disciples, he asked them to place their hand on his side, to touch the scars, to see how he had been shaped and shifted by the experience of passing through death.
And so later, in the great commission, when he tells us to be his witnesses, what is significant is that he had witnessed our pain, he had witnessed our suffering, he had witnessed the full extent of the human experience, so that he can stand with us. Not above us, not over us, not at a distance. But with us, heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath.
So when Paul talks in Colossians about Christ being in all and through all, the firstborn of all creation, he is also pointing to this. That through the experience of our pain and the experience of our death, the great renewal of salvation is also the great witness of salvation. We stand in the same way he stood with us in death. We witness him in life. And so there is a bridge in his lived experience between the pain that we experience and the passing through of that pain into life and into the divine.
Easter is not a Passover. It is not an escape or a rescue from. It is a partnership with. It is an experience with. It is an embodiment of God within life.