Abbot Columba McCann: Moving house is a high-stress event. It’s there alongside changing job or losing a life-partner. Letting go of the familiar and having to adapt to the unknown. Wondering what it is going to be like. It’s a kind of bereavement, and it’s also a moment of uncertainty. A leap of faith into the dark. Wondering: will I survive? Will I get through this?
In ancient times this kind of transition was a regular event for nomadic herders, who moved their flocks every now and then into new pastures. It was a risky moment, and there was the tradition of offering up one of their lambs and painting the doors of their tents with its blood as a sign of divine protection for the journey ahead.
Small wonder then that this becomes the ritual for the Jewish Passover, celebrating a really extraordinary journey, an amazing transition, out of the slavery of Egypt to freedom, from darkness to light, all under God’s guiding hand. And every year the Passover meal brought it all back again: the memory of what God is like: the one who sets free, the one who protects us on life’s journey.
Around the time of Jesus’ earthly life there was an expectation that the Messiah would finally show himself at Passover, that a new and greater moment of liberation would happen. And here he is, this evening, at table with his friends at Passover time, about to complete the greatest journey of all before our eyes, the journey all of us must make, the journey from this life to the next. But for him it’s not a comfortable slipping away under palliative care; it’s the worst possible way to go: condemned as a blasphemer by his own religion, and crucified like a criminal by the Romans. Tortured to death and abandoned.
It is perhaps his way of saying: no matter how dark it gets, no matter how hopeless it looks, I have been there before you. I have been through the worst that human life can throw at you, and I am alive. I am your Passover Lamb. The blood I shed is the sign that I am with you now as your protection on life’s journey. My lifeblood is not something sprinkled on the outside, but something for you to take into yourself, so that you take me into yourself and begin to live by my risen life. No matter whatever passage you may walk through, my life will sustain you and lift you up.