Bread and Wine

Celebrating Passover, for us, is a key part of Easter. It brings all of our festivities back into the context where Jesus intended them to make sense. The feast of Passover is one of the three pilgrim festivals that Exodus 23 talks about, and so it has been particularly close to our attention as we follow through our Sabbath year. It’s always been a favourite of mine. I love the food, the candles, the gathering of family and friends. I love how tangible and distinctive faith becomes, as we eat and drink and smell, light candles, tell the stories and remember, as we join the dots, and our hands. I love to ‘do this in remembrance of me’; the pan-sacramentalist in me delights in it all. And the lamb. I love lamb. But in this Sabbath year it felt extra special. It was like taking a deep breath, a sabbatical pause, that set us up ready to appreciate Good Friday.

God’s redeeming work is done. Hallelujah! It is finished. Good Friday. All the work, the redeeming, the cleansing, the saving, the healing, the fruit bearing, the burdens. Done. Colossians 1 in The Message puts it beautifully:

‘All the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross.’

And so we rest. In God. In his saving power. In his work. I can’t save myself, or anyone else. God’s redeeming work is done, and so we sit still, with all of creation, watching, waiting, silent, in Sabbath rest. Daring to hope that Sunday is coming.

Easter Saturday is a hard one to get our heads around, and deliberately so. It’s dead time, we can’t rush on to redemption and celebration. It’s a day to sit in the dark, the quiet, with the questions, the situations that are unresolved, the prayers that are unanswered.

Healing has become a major theme for our Sabbath year. When we started, we searched all the times the Bible mentions the word ‘Sabbath’. It made for some interesting sermons. We noticed that in the gospels, every time, EVERY. SINGLE. TIME that Jesus encounters the Sabbath, he heals someone (more on that later). Apart from Easter. There’s the Sabbath after Good Friday, when Jesus lay in the tomb, and THEN the Resurrection happens. The ultimate healing!