The Bread of Affliction

I like to describe the Passover seder as a bible lesson around a dinner table. It's actually been that way since the very beginning, because that's how God designed it.

The entire purpose of this dinner-table worship is to teach the next generation about God's deliverance. 

“You shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants...And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this rite?’ you shall say, ‘It is the passover sacrifice to the LORD, because He passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt..." Exodus 12:24,26-27 JPS85

The incredible thing is that the Passover seder today is identical in structure to the seder in Jesus' time. The whole thing - both then and now - is done in the same order, in the same way, around every Passover table. Of course, many songs and stories have been added along the way since then, and there's no longer a sacrificial lamb because there's no longer a Jerusalem Temple with an altar. But the foundation and the structure and the prayers of the seder remain the same.

Something I've always loved about this intimate worship service is that - even since before Jesus - we're instructed to retell the Exodus around the table as if we were there. We take turns around the table reading from the Hagaddah, the worship guide, and we recount the whole thing in the first person: We put lambs' blood on our doorposts. I walked through the divided Red Sea. God rescued us. 

And, during the section just before the dinner break, we use three specific foods to retell the exodus story: unleavened bread, roasted lamb, and bitter herbs. This is based on God's specific command: "...they shall eat [the lamb] with unleavened bread and bitter herbs." Numbers 9:11. Not only did God rescue Israel out of Egypt, but He also curated the menu for the annual  commemoration!

Fifteen hundred years after that rescue, Jesus sat around His last Passover meal with His closest friends. And there in that upper room, they shared those very same three foods at their table to retell the exodus - just like everyone was doing across Jerusalem that night, the city bursting at its seams with Passover pilgrims. 

During the retelling, just before the dinner break, Jesus would have raised the unleavened bread, just like every other host at every other table across the city - just like my grandpas used to do. And there's something about the unleavened bread in Jesus' hands that always impacts me. If you're not from a Jewish background, or haven't been part of a Passover seder or teaching, you may not have seen it before. 

(This, by the way, is why I love to write and teach: to share the Jewish context of things the Messiah said and did, in order to deepen our understanding, and awe, and love of Him.) 

In any event, this unleavened bread, the matzah, is intended to represent the poverty and suffering endured by the Israelites. That's why God actually called it the Bread of Affliction.

"...for seven days eat unleavened bread, the bread of affliction, because you left Egypt in haste—so that all the days of your life you may remember the time of your departure from Egypt." Deuteronomy 16:3 NIV

At this moment in the worship, the seder host breaks the Bread of Affliction and distributes the pieces to each person at the table. But during the Last Supper, Jesus did more than only guide the twelve in their remembrance of the Exodus rescue. He also told them to remember something new, from that Passover on.

He took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and gave to them, saying, "This is my body which is given for you. Do this in memory of me." Luke 22:19 HNV

It had made perfect sense to the disciples that, after feeding the five thousand, Jesus had announced He was the Bread of Life. But now, this Bread of abundant Life was breaking the Bread of Affliction in His hands, saying that this Passover bread of suffering represented His own body. And that it would be broken to bring about the greater exodus redemption. 

Jesus said that every time we eat that broken bread, we should remember His broken body. That we should not only remember the broken lambs of the exodus rescue long ago, but to now remember the Lamb's broken body in the greater rescue: our rescue of all humanity from the brokenness of sin and death. 

And so I remember. I remember Jesus, broken and poured out, in the Passover way of remembering that I've always known. 

In Passovers past, I remembered redemption as girl who had labored under Pharaoh, sheltered under the blood, and scrambled through the waters. And I still do remember Passover that way. But now, I also remember as if I had been there in Jerusalem with Jesus during His last Passover on Earth. I remember as if I were a friend at the table and a woman in the multitude. I remember, beholding my redemption as if in real time. 

This week, as we raise and break and eat our matzah, that is what I will be remembering, and how I will be remembering it. 

And every time I take communion, that is what I remember and how try I remember it. 

And so, if you ever see me sitting there with my eyes closed, cradling the bread and wine in my hands for a long while in my seat, it's because I am trying to hear Jesus' voice at the table and to see His broken body on Golgotha. I'm trying to take and to eat and to never forget the love that led Him there.

Let us all remember, for He has remembered us.

"When You Shall Come to the Land..."

A pomegranate ripening
on the vine in Nazareth
on my last visit, 2018

Almost every winter growing up, I received a crisp white certificate in the mail, suitable for framing. Not a single thing on it changed from year to year except the date stamp. It featured the very same watercolor print: a springtime tree awash in all shades of green, surrounded by verdant hills and groves of trees. And, below the tree is this beautiful directive from God, printed in both Hebrew and English: 

"When you shall come to the land, you shall plant trees." Leviticus 19:23

If you come from a Jewish upbringing, you know this lovely piece of cardstock. You could see it in your head without me even describing it. This unmistakeable certificate graces homes and synagogues and classrooms even today. You may have a whole stack of them from your bubbe (grandma), each with the printed proclamation that a tree will be planted in your honor - or as a thank you, or in loving memory of a dear one - in Israel. Or maybe a ring of trees, or an entire orchard of trees.

But why now, in the dead of winter? It may seem strange to think about planting trees in January. It's blustery and the ground is frozen - at least it is where I live. But trees are on our collective Jewish minds today, because it is Tu B'Shevat - affectionately known as the Jewish New Year for Trees, or - more accurately - the birthday for trees. 

jnf.org

Tu B'Shevat is literally the "fifteenth of" the Hebrew month "Shevat." But the reason we call it the birthday for trees is that, on Shevat 15, God said to mark which trees were three years old, four years old, and older than five. Fruit from the baby trees was to be left alone. No eating it, no tithing it, literally derive no benefit from it. Fruit of the four-year-olds belonged to God. Then finally, after the trees' fifth birthday, the fruit not only counted toward the tithe, but could now also grace the tables. 

There's something unsaid in these instructions that encourages me to no end: God gave directions for how to handle growing bounty to people who were wandering around as nomads in the desert. In fact, the Israelites were just beginning their forty-year odyssey through the wilderness. 

For four decades - a full generation - God's people wouldn't be able to put down roots. No planting groves of olive trees or cultivating fields of grain. No designing orchards of fig and pomegranate, with walls draped with grape vines and sheltered by majestic palms.* And yet, here God was, giving them instructions for managing abundance in the Promised Land. 

He could have waited until the Israelites were entering the Land. Or He could have given them the instructions through Joshua, when the tribes readied to disperse and settle in their assigned regions of Canaan. He could have, but He didn't. 

And so I don't see a command in this passage as much as I see a promise: reaching the Promised Land was a forgone conclusion. It wasn't if you arrive, but "When you shall come into the land..." That promise must have sustained their hearts through the long journey just as tangibly as the manna from heaven and water from the rock sustained their bodies. God is so kind to us, even when the road is rough and seems interminably long.

In so many ways, the Israelites' long sojourn from Egypt to Canaan is a parallel to our own journey through life. They walked from the saving sacrifice of the lambs on Passover to finally crossing the Jordan into the abundance of the Promised Land. Today, our lives are a journey through "the already and the not yet," making our way from the saving sacrifice of the one Lamb toward the permanent abundance of eternity - namely, the abundance of God's glorious Light and the absence of death's excruciating thorns. 

On this exodus road, we are sustained by an even greater promise than the agricultural abundance of a physical land. We are sustained by the One we celebrated just a few short weeks ago. The Messiah's coming-alongsideness soothes us when we're scorched in the dry and desolate wilderness, and warms us when we shiver uncontrollably in the bleak and frozen winter. We may reach the edge of our journey singed and frostbit, but even so, we will have reached the greater Promised Land. The eternal Promised Land where a flourishing awaits that we even cannot begin to fathom. 

So today, on this birthday of trees, I will look out on the baby dogwood outside my study window, the one that bore only two blooms last year, and know that she is growing in ways I cannot see. That her roots are pushing down and branching out and receiving nourishment for the long haul, when her flourishing will create such a thick cloud of blossoms that I'll no longer see the road that stretches out behind her. 

In the meantime, I will celebrate the bounty God has given in so many ways, through all things great and small. I will celebrate His promise-keeping to my ancestors in the wilderness, and to me in this present journey to the greater Land. 

Praise the Lord for He is good, His goodness is eternal!

Psalm 106, 107, 118, 136; 2 Chronicles 20 

* These are the "seven species" of crops that God named when describing the bounty of Israel just before they crossed over the Jordan: "The Eternal your God is bringing you into a good land, a land ... of wheat and barley, of [grape] vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of oil-rich olive trees and date honey." Deuteronomy 8:7-8 The Voice

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