Preparing for Passover

Numbers 28:16-25; Psalm 59:9-17; Luke 3:3-17

Rev. Chris Harbin, Rocks Baptist Church—Pamplin, VA

20 March 2005

Passover is not part of our standard Baptist celebrations. We come much closer to feeling comfortable with the Catholic Lenten rites than with Jewish celebrations like Passover. While Lent is a helpful invention of ecclesiastical tradition, Passover is a Biblical prescription for annual observance. How do we prepare for Passover and the celebration of God’s redemption?

If the Exodus was the central event of salvation in the Old Testament, Passover was its central expression. Coupled with the Feast of Unleavened Bread, Passover was a time of reflecting on and celebrating how God had redeemed the people out of Pharaoh’s grasp. In some respects, the Feast of Unleavened Bread was more important than Passover—not theologically, but in terms of preparation for its celebration. From this text in Numbers, the two celebrations are mixed, one becoming part of the other. Passover cannot be celebrated without unleavened bread, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread now loses its meaning without Passover.

The Hebrews had not always been faithful in observing the Passover festival, nor the Feast of Unleavened Bread. We will read of Passover’s rediscovery in the days of King Hezekiah and King Josiah.^[1] With the return of the exiles, Passover gained much greater significance to the people than it had ever had in the past. They had experienced life of bondage once again, and celebrating God’s redemption had new meaning. By the time of Jesus, Passover was a festival that brought people to Jerusalem in droves. Luke 2 records Jesus’ family making their annual Passover trip to Jerusalem for the feast. In those days, Jerusalem’s population during Passover would swell from two hundred thousand to over a million.

John the Baptist came as precursor to Messiah. His major role was to prepare the people to receive the long-awaited deliverance that Yahweh had promised. He was the voice in the wilderness, crying out for the people to prepare for the coming of Messiah. His message was one of preparation akin to that of preparation for celebrating Passover. His message was one of equality in the face of the prevailing theology of retributive justice. Rather than enjoying material wealth selfishly, John preached a sense of responsibility for the needs of others. This was an essential ingredient to John’s message of repentance.

For many Jews, pride is deemed as the core element of sin. It is understood as the gateway to evil. Pride boosts our sense of self-worth above that of others. It says that my aims, goals, and desires are more important than that of those around me. John’s message sounded a very dissonant note in his day—a note of preparation for Jesus’ own teaching and ministry. This voice crying in the desert called the people to prepare for the coming of Messiah by actually living a life of humility, focused on equality and responsibility for the needs of others.

The Gospel of John portrays Jesus as the Passover Lamb. As John prepared his listeners to hear Jesus’ message of God’s reign, so his message connected with Jewish preparation for Passover celebration. Preparation meant getting one’s home ready for the celebration. Foremost, it meant getting rid of everything with leavening, the figure of pride and sin. That meant cleansing one’s house of every crumb of bread, yeast, and grains that swell with cooking, like rice or dried beans. With the removal of all leavening, the celebration of Passover could begin, but not before. The celebration needed proper preparation.

We do well to remember John the Baptist’s message in the context of Jesus’ annual Passover pilgrimage. John’s message focused on the heart of the meaning associated with this cleansing of one’s home from the swelling of all forms of pride. Chamets, leavening, makes things larger than they really are. It makes our food “puffed-up,” a visual symbol of our own swelling with pride. In our own lives, pride causes us to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, placing self-importance above the needs of others.

John called people to lower themselves back down to earth, recognizing themselves for who they truly were. The mountains will be lowered as the valleys are filled in, was the essence of his cry from Isaiah. He did not speak of geographical terrain, but of the self-importance of humanity. John classed this preparation for Passover preparation for life under the reign of Messiah. He called the people to go beyond the routines and rites of preparation for the festivals with the cleansing of the external elements of leavening. He wanted them to actually live the message they symbolically carried out by cleansing their homes of physical leavening, material chamets.

It is one thing to talk about pride. Cleansing one’s home of everything that contains leavening in any form is much more involved. Living in the manner that John prescribes takes our preparation much further. John’s audience was well familiar with all that was involved in preparations for Passover. They were very much aware of what the leavening was supposed to signify. They knew full well that the sin of pride was the target of the celebration of Unleavened Bread. What they mostly failed to do was to see how pride affected their relationships with others on a daily basis. They did not recognize the need for repentance to display itself in a new manner of responding to others.

John’s challenge here is remarkable in our own context. We are comfortable sharing out of our abundance. John calls a second coat abundance. In our day of multi-million Dollar corporate scandals, he says “be content with your salary,” “accuse no one falsely,” “don’t rely on the comfort of religious heritage.” John wanted the people to prepare for Messiah’s coming, not with palm fronds to extend upon the road and elaborate celebrations in the streets. He was more concerned about living out the demands of God’s call to justice, mercy, humility, and love.

During the celebration of Passover, the Jews still open their doors, inviting Elijah to come in and share Passover with them. First, they must open their doors, however, and invite the hungry, the cold, and the poor to join them in their celebration of God’s deliverance. John called the people not to celebrate Passover that way, but to live that way in preparation for acclaiming Messiah as their King!

We will celebrate Passover on Thursday in preparation for Easter. We will clean the Fellowship Hall of all chamets for this celebration. What will we do with the chamets in our lives? Will we allow Easter’s gospel to alter our lives from the inside out, changing the way we look upon and relate to others as equally important to God? Will we be ready for Passover on the inside as well as the outside?

—©Copyright 2005 Christopher B. Harbin

This sermon in pdf

¹ 2^nd Kings 23:21-23; 2^nd Chronicles 30 & 35.