“Christ Our Passover”

At this mid-point in the season of Lent, what do you have to rejoice in? Today, on this fourth Sunday of Lent, we are called by ancient church tradition to take a bit of a break—to pause for just a moment from our Lenten disciplines of abstinence and self-mortification—in order to take stock of and to reflect upon all the good gifts we have received from our Heavenly Father which give us cause to rejoice.

In the ancient church this Sunday was called Laetare or “Rejoice” Sunday. It developed out of the ancient catechumenate – that three year process of preparation for baptism. And today was the first day the candidates for baptism were admitted in to the hearing of the Creed, read and explained in the service. And so the Psalm for the day reflects the joy of being invited into our Father’s house: “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go into the house of the Lord.’”

On this day, the Church rejoiced, for soon—in just a few weeks on Easter morning—new children would be born to her through the grace of regeneration and adoption in the waters of baptism. And the catechumens rejoiced because they’d finally found their forever-family. They had a new Mother – Jerusalem above, the Church Universal and Triumphant – through whom they would soon be born again in the Son as free children of their new Heavenly Father. And they were about to get a bunch of new brothers and sisters as well, together with whom they would be made heirs of eternal life. And so the epistle lesson for today reflects the joy of our adoption into the family of God as His free sons and daughters - the joy of our new birth in Christ through our Mother, the Church.

But also today, as the catechumens, and the Church with them, rejoiced that they would soon begin their new life in Christ – their pilgrimage with Him through the wilderness of this world – they could also rejoice that Christ would continue to come to them to feed and refresh them along the way with the spiritual food their souls longed for. In other words, they could also joyfully anticipate that, once they were adopted into the family of God and given access into His house, they would be free to come to the Lord’s table and receive the refreshing of their souls by the body of blood of Christ. And so the Gospel lesson today – Jesus’ feeding of the five-thousand in the wilderness - reminds us that we have cause to rejoice in the fact that Christ continues to come to us, here in our wilderness, to feed and refresh us with Himself, with the spiritual food of his own body and blood. It’s the reason why this Sunday is also called “Refreshment Sunday.”

And so you can see how all three of these lessons for today hang together. They present us with three great joys, that, on this Rejoice Sunday, we ought to take a short time-out from the austerities of Lent to be renewed in: Joy in our adoption as God’s children. Joy in our free access into God’s house. And Joy in our refreshment at God’s table.

As we look forward to the feast of Easter, the feast of feasts, or the Pascha as it was called in the ancient Church— the Passover—we notice from our Gospel lesson that “the feast of the Passover, a feast of the Jews, was near.” But Jesus and his disciples are no where near Jerusalem to be able to keep the feast. They’d never get there in time, and it’s impossible for anyone to celebrate the Passover in Galilee, for the Law of God commanded that all male Israelites assemble themselves in Jerusalem to celebrate the feast. Their Passover lambs must be slain, and that could only happen in Jerusalem.

Then again, five thousand men and their families are following Jesus. Perhaps as many as fifteen to twenty-thousand people are gathered around Jesus in Galilee instead of around their Passover tables in Jerusalem.

So what are we to make of this? It looks like Jesus is ignoring the Law and is leading His disciples and this vast crowd of people into sin, into willful disobedience against God’s Law. What is He saying: that the Law of God—the commandments of God in the Torah—are something we can just lay aside willy nilly when ever we feel like it? That our relationship to God can’t be restricted and bound by things like commandments and laws—that’s too limiting to our freedom; that’s too much of a restriction on our love? Is that what He’s saying? That what a lot of people would like Him to be saying. Btu that’s absolutely not what He’s saying. Remember what Jesus did say in His Sermon on the Mount: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law and the Prophets; I did not come to destroy but to fulfill.” He didn’t come to teach people to disobey God’s Law. He said “Whoever breaks on of the least of the commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.” He didn’t come to do away with the Law, but to fulfill the Law. He didn’t come to do away the Passover, but to fulfill the Passover.

And that’s why we see all these faithful followers gathered around Him, and eating a meal that He provides, instead of eating the Passover meal, because the time was coming, and was about to take place, when the Passover would be complete. He the true Passover Lamb would be slain, and His blood would be poured out to cover us and cause the curse of death to pass over us. And He would give us His new feast: the Pascha of His own body and blood in the holy Eucharist.

Do you remember in the original Passover meal in Egypt, you had to be in the house under the blood for the angel of death to pass safely by. If you were outside the house and not under the blood, you were under the curse of death. And you remember that not only did you have slay the Passover lamb and smear its blood on the lintel and door-posts, but you had to actually partake of the Passover lamb, you had to partake of the sacrifice for its sacrificial work to be of any benefit to you.

Well, you still have to be in the house under the blood and partaking of the Passover Lamb to be saved from the overshadowing curse of death and the wrath of God. But you see this is just what Jesus Christ has done. He’s brought us into His house—the house of God, the Church; He’s made us citizens of the new Jerusalem, in which all of the promises of God reside. And He’s place us under the blood—His blood, the atoning blood of His sacrifice, the blood of the spotless Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And He gives us to partake of His sacrifice in His Holy Supper, the true Passover meal.

You see, the joys of our salvation are all connected to Christ our Passover being sacrificed for us.

Therefore, we’re called by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians to keep the feast, but to keep the feast not with the old leaven of malice and wickedness, not with the old leaven of sin, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, of integrity and righteousness.

It is absolutely incongruous for those who have partaken of the true Passover in Christ to continue in their virtual Egypts—to continue to live as if Christ has not freed us from the bondage of sin. Christ has called us out. Christ has given us our Exodus. He’s given us new lives as the free sons and daughters of God through His death and resurrection. And so in that way the whole of the Christian life is to be one big feast. It’s a partaking of the feast of the Kingdom of God and the new life of Christ.

But so often we don’t live as if we’re partaking of God’s feast. We don’t live as if we are partaking of that new life. But this is exactly why we have things like Lent. Remember that great quote we heard a few Sundays ago from the late Russia Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann. He said,

“All the time we lose and betray the ‘new life’ which we received as a gift, and…in fact we lvie as if Christ did not rise from the dead, as if that unique event had no meaning whatsoever for us.. We simply forget all this—so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations—and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes ‘old’ again—petty, dark and ultimately meaningless….If we realized this, then we may understand what Easter is and why it needs and presupposes Lent. For we may then understand that the liturgical traditions of the Church all its cycles and services, exist, first of all, in order to help us recover the vision and the taste of the new life which we so easily lose and betray, so that we may repent and return to it.”

This is, again, what I think we need to get to in our use of the season of Lent—as a time to repare ourselves to once again partake of the feast—the feast of the Christian life, the feast of Christ our Passover—and to be renewed in the newness of life we have in Him.

Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, and that’s the cause of our great joy. Therefore, let us keep the feast. Let us prepare ourselves to enter in once again to true Passover—the Passover of Christ slain and risen again for us, and the Passover of the Christian life. +