Finding Jesus in the Passover Seder

Some of you may remember, but about a year ago I was studying the Passover. So in honor of holy week I thought I'd share some of the insights of what I learned from that time, and hopefully, you, like me, will find a new appreciation of the beauty and symbolism behind this tradition as you find the Messiah in the Passover.

As some of you may remember, I shared with you all how each of the celebrated holidays of Judaism unfold the story of salvation in order. Jesus would have died on the day of atonement, risen on the feast of first fruits (he is first among the harvest), and ascended to heaven during the feast of weeks.
Passover itself is celebrated through a ritual ceremony known as the Seder to commemorate the Lord's deliverance of his people from the Egyptians when the angel of death passed over homes painted with the blood of a perfect lamb. While there are some variations, the Seder has generally been celebrated the same for thousands of years without major change:


Chametz: The ceremony opens with the Father sweeping bread crumbs off the shelf, symbolizing the removal of yeast from the house (yeast in scripture is used to represent sin) the mother in turn lights the Passover candles and pronounces a blessing over the family


The Passover plate: each item on the plate represents a part of the deliverance story
The cup of Wine: the cup of wine is sipped from four different times, each sip with its own significance and meaning.


The First Cup - Cup of Sanctification: this is the first sip from the cup, symbolizing it is God who sanctifies us and sets us apart for special use. The father speaks a blessing, " Blessed are you O Lord our God, the King of the universe, the Maker of the fruit of the vine"


Urchatz: This is the ceremonial hand-washing to symbolize cleansing and purification. Jesus chose this part of the ceremony to wash his disciple's feet, demonstrating that true leadership not only serves but washes us in the word


Parsley/karpas: the parsley represents the hyssop used to paint the blood the lamb over the doorposts on the night of Passover. This parsley is dipped in salt water, symbolizing the tears and sorrows of their years spent in slavery, which in turn sweetens the parsley.


The First question: The children ask four different questions throughout the ceremony. The first is this: "Why on this night do we eat only unleavened bread?" The adult answers: Because our ancestors left Egypt in haste and did not have time to let the bread rise, and the unleavened bread was easier to carry for the journey.


The Matzah covering: In the covering are placed three pieces of unleavened bread. Some believe these represent Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But the bread more likely symbolizes the oneness of God the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit. Only the middle Matzah, the one marked by stripes, is removed from the covering and pierced. This pierced bread is then broken. One piece is wrapped in linen and hidden to be found at a later time and brought back to the father. The other piece is returned to the covering. Before consuming the bread, a blessing is pronounced: Blessed are you O Lord our God, who bring forth bread from the earth.  "Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged.." (Jn 19:1). "He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed" (Isa 53:5).

The Day I Died

In The Beginning
Since the beginning, stories have been central to human existence. It is from stories that we learn the most about a person. If you want to know why someone is the way they are – ask them about their life journey. Each of us has our own journey, so our stories are as unique as their tellers. If we were having coffee right now, I would sit across from you and ask you about your life. What your own personal story is and how it has defined you. How all of it – the good and the bad - has built up until this very moment, making you the person you are today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. But today. 

Everyone has their story. And this is mine. I am humbled when I consider the fact that my story is merely a blip on the screen in a long line of stories, beginning ages ago. My life is only one life in the billions of living souls out there. My story is not even the most important story out there. But nevertheless, it is my story. My watershed occurred ten years ago this very day. This day, ten years ago, my whole world changed. In a very real way the Christina I once knew died. But it wasn’t a sad kind of death. It’s the kind of death that precedes a glorious metamorphosis. The way winter gives way to spring or a seed becomes a tree. It’s the kind of death that leads to life. The ‘me’ I knew died, and a new Christina awakened in her place. But of course, my journey didn’t start ten years ago. It started long before that.

Everyone has their own demons to face down. And entering into high school, I certainly had mine. I was very much a loner; I had my reasons. What I knew of life up until that point was far from a typical, sheltered childhood. While my childhood was wonderful in many ways it was in this season of life that I experienced many of my deepest wounds. I was fortunate enough to have both a mother and father who loved me and expressed that love. But I had very few friends as a child. What I frequently experienced from other children was exclusion and ridicule. At a very young age I also experienced abuse from someone I knew and trusted, but I did not tell my parents about the abuse out of fear. Instead, I opted to pretend like nothing had ever happened. And at age eight, as a result of having no friends at school, my mother withdrew me from school and placed me in home-schooling.  My life took another dramatic turn when my family was burned by our church; they had been like close family to us. But the church was torn down the middle when some of the leaders began to abuse their power in the church, my family on the receiving end. My parents left the church taking me and my brother with them. But the impression it left on me of Christians was not a good one.     

Entering into adolescence, I was pretty disillusioned with the world. But I found ways cope. I turned to solitary activities to keep myself preoccupied, becoming consumed with the television, video games, the internet, and fantasies. I became numb and detached from reality. I would spend an average of nine to nine and half hours watching television (can you say high school anime club?). These fixations were my escape. I didn’t “need” anything or anyone. Instead, I looked out for myself. I was fine on my own. Or so I thought.

My first year of high school my parents put me back into public school. To be honest, I hated their decision. My first two years back in public school were not different from my previous experience. I didn’t fit in and I certainly didn’t try to. While all the others kids were worried about being popular and winning a date, I could have cared less. I was the reserved, quiet kid who didn’t talk much and kept mostly to myself. I dressed different, acted different, and was into different things. So I was labeled as an outcast, looked down on and ridiculed for being different. But that was fine by me. I wasn’t interested in following the crowd. As far as I was concerned, I was better than all of them.

The Spirit of Christmas

It's that time again. The Christmas season. Depending on your family situation, that sentence might inspire feelings of warmth or feelings of dread. Three Christmases ago, I wrote a blog titled The Two Sides of Christmas. I wrote about the mixed feelings Christmas brings. There is something more to Christmas than simply getting everything on our list. The holiday touches on something that resonates deep within each of our souls: love. Christmas is really about Love. Love's a funny thing though, isn't it? I mean what does it mean to love someone exactly? It might seem so easy to define until you think about it. Sometimes, love can mean so many things. We love our family, our friends, our significant other. We also love pizza, music, and movies. Yet none of these loves are even remotely the same.

"All You Need is Love"
I can't think of a subject more talked about, more written about, or more sung about than love. The longing for love is so deeply rooted in the human heart. I have met people from many different walks of life, but I've never met someone who didn't desire unfailing love. It is the one common thread weaving through all of humanity. Our love is what separates us from the rest of nature. Love is incompatible with self-preservation or survival of the fittest. We're not animals simply trying to survive, we're human beings with a deep desire to connect with others on a soul level. We search, we chase, we dream. And that's not so surprising when you think about it. After all, if we are made with a soul in the image of our God, wouldn't it make sense that we have such a capacity and desire for love?

We do crazy things in our pursuit for love. Sometimes we walk away winners, other times we walk away broken in pieces. It's a graveyard of hearts, this world in which we live. Some give up and deaden their hearts to this longing for love in an effort to avoid further pain; others pick up the pieces and press on in their search, hoping to one day find a love that won't let go.

But Christmas is not only about the human search for love. Christmas is really a story about Love. The human story is marked by our own exhaustive pursuit of love. But Christmas tells the story of Love's relentless pursuit of us. "For love is as strong as death, it's jealousy as unyielding as the grave" (Song 8:6). Love came down to earth in human form to give us hope, joy, and peace. You see, I've come to realize that it's not the longing for love that is the enemy. You could deaden your heart in an effort to stop the bleeding, but all that does is numb you. You might not feel any pain, but then again, you won't feel anything at all. This drive for love is in us for a reason. The desire for love is not the problem, it's simply a question of where you look for it.

In Jars of Clay

It's no secret that Christians have a vocabulary of their own. Hang around Christians long enough, and you will pick up on some of the interesting (and perhaps peculiar) jargon Christians often use. We have a host of sayings/cliches we often employ in every day conversation that may make perfect sense to us but may not make much sense to others. As demonstrated in Rebecca Pippert's story, while we may mean well, we can take for granted the meaning behind the jargon we so casually employ:

"When I worked with college students, I gave many evangelistic dorm talks. I remember one in which a skeptical but seeking student asked me, "What does it mean to be a Christian?" A Christian student who really desired the other student to understand replied, "It means you have to be washed in the blood of the lamb." The first student paled and looked confused. The Christian continued, "That way you will be sanctified and redeemed." Another student, seeking to help his Christian brother said, "And the fellowship is so neat. Praise the Lord! You really get into the Word and get such a blessing." By the end of the evening, it was clear from the skeptic student's face that he felt Christians came from another planet." (Out of the Salt Shaker and into the World)

I can't say I blame him. I often wander if we even know what half the stuff we say means. Redeemed. Sanctified. Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Try explaining the gospel to someone without using Christianese and in plain language - it's harder than you think. I am in no way saying Christian jargon is bad; jargon is normal to any tight-knit group of people, much like inside jokes. Nor am I saying we should pessimistically question everything out of some sense of hyper-skepticism. It's easy to focus on everything the church has done/is doing wrong and bitterly stew over it's many flaws - I've been there and it only serves to encourage a my own sense of self-righteousness. But what would happen if we stepped back and examined the meaning behind some of the things we say?

A New Way of Thinking: Finding Self-Esteem and Self-worth in a Post-Modern World (Pt. 3)

Learning to Think Differently
So how can we change our thinking to encourage a healthy self-esteem? In answering this question, many self-help enthusiasts would advocate self-affirmation as the cure to low self-esteem. The problem is self-affirmation holds closely to the ‘power of positive thinking’ theory, which rejects all forms of negativity.  This makes self-affirmation often lead to overly positive self-assessments. In practice, this looks like pretending negative qualities do not exist or simply minimizing them, some enthusiasts literally going so far as to say, “You are perfect just the way you.” But statements such as these are a lot like overcorrecting your steering wheel when your car goes off the road – it may be tempting to swerve in the other direction, but overcompensation is not your friend. While it’s meant to empower the individual and increase self-esteem, statements like the one above tend to encourage an idealized self-perception, one that does not conform to reality.

Remember that self-esteem is simply how you esteem and value yourself.  So while low self-esteem is certainly problematic, an overly high self-esteem is not healthy either - in other words, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. If we esteem ourselves too highly and do not value others as highly as ourselves, we become focused on ourselves and our high self-esteem gives way to haughtiness and selfishness. A healthy self-esteem is neither too high nor too low – it has both dignity and confidence without being centered on ourselves.

Self-perception: Finding Self-Esteem and Self-Worth in a Post Modern World (Pt. 2)

What Do You See?
So what exactly is self-esteem? What does a healthy self-esteem look like? Is it even an attainable goal? Self esteem is simply how you value and esteem yourself – what you judge yourself to be worth. When it comes to defining healthy self-esteem, we could easily come up with many different definitions. But when I hear people talk about wanting to have a better self-esteem, what I hear is this: People want to feel good about themselves. Taken in this way, a low self-esteem is feeling bad about yourself - who you are at your core.

While inferiority and low self-esteem are feelings, feelings are based on thoughts and perceptions. In this regard, I agree with many self-help enthusiasts. Why are feelings based on thoughts and perceptions? Think about it. Say you've made plans to meet up with a friend for coffee, and you've been waiting a while for them to show. As the time drags on and you wait alone, you might start to feel angry and resentful, wandering if you’ve been stood up. But the second your friend calls you and tells you that they’ve been in an accident, your feelings would change instantly from anger and resentment to relief and concern. Why? Because your perception of the situation changed.

Therefore, how we think about ourselves affects how we feel about ourselves. The way you evaluate yourself affects how you feel and behave. But self-evaluation can go to either extreme. An overly positive (inflated) evaluation of ourselves breeds pride and haughtiness, affecting how we act toward others. An overly negative (deflated) evaluation of ourselves breeds self-condemnation and self-hatred. In other words, low self-esteem is you judging yourself to be inferior based on the criteria you use to critique yourself, i.e. if I were prettier, if I were more extroverted, if I were more successful, if I were more ____ then I’d be _____. We make negative evaluations of ourselves resulting in feelings of low self-esteem and inferiority. But our evaluations of ourselves are not simply based on our own thoughts and opinions; our negative evaluations can also be the result of believing what others think about us (spoken or implied) and accepting those evaluations and judgments as truth.

An Apologetical Entry: The Sacrifice of Jephthah

I have decided to occasionally post apologetical (simply meaning, a study of Christian theology concerned with the defense or proof of Christianity) thoughts and findings in relation to understanding God and the Bible. This not only stems from my personal enjoyment of apologetics, but because of my own personal struggles. I have often struggled with many Old Testament passages of Scripture - things that have made God seem very harsh, cruel, and far from the loving God often preached to me. There was even a point in my life where I honestly didn't want much to do with God because of what I read in the Bible. For this reason, apologetics has been a powerful tool in my life. I learned to never give up searching for answers. And even though the answers were often not immediate, I have found that if I wait patiently, God often meets me where I am in my doubts and struggles.

I have many unanswered questions still, but I also have more questions answered today than five years ago. As I have said before, however, it's rarely been immediate. The process has been long, but persistence is a virtue. You must never give up, even when things don't make sense. You must continually seek, ask, and knock until the door is opened (Matt 7:7). Persistence comes from determination. When you want something bad enough - you find a way to get it, no matter what.

The passage I have struggled with the most recently comes from Judges. And rather than writing out the whole story, I think I will simply paste the passage of Scripture below and then follow it up with a summary. Quite honestly though, the story spans several passages of Scripture and while it's best to start from the beginning, it's too much for me to paste. So I will focus on a central part of the story in question:

Judges 11: 29-39
29 Then the Spirit of the Lord came on Jephthah. He crossed Gilead and Manasseh, passed through Mizpah of Gilead, and from there he advanced against the Ammonites. 30 And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord: “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, 31 whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering.”

32 Then Jephthah went over to fight the Ammonites, and the Lord gave them into his hands. 33 He devastated twenty towns from Aroer to the vicinity of Minnith, as far as Abel Keramim. Thus Israel subdued Ammon.

34 When Jephthah returned to his home in Mizpah, who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of timbrels! She was an only child. Except for her he had neither son nor daughter. 35 When he saw her, he tore his clothes and cried, “Oh no, my daughter! You have brought me down and I am devastated. I have made a vow to the Lord that I cannot break.”

36 “My father,” she replied, “you have given your word to the Lord. Do to me just as you promised, now that the Lord has avenged you of your enemies, the Ammonites. 37 But grant me this one request,” she said. “Give me two months to roam the hills and weep with my friends, because I will never marry.”

38 “You may go,” he said. And he let her go for two months. She and her friends went into the hills and wept because she would never marry. 39 After the two months, she returned to her father, and he did to her as he had vowed. And she was a virgin.

This is a hard passage to digest. Jephthah, an unlikely hero, sets out to defend Israel against the Ammonites. And because of Jephthah's personal background, it's safe to say he has a lot hanging on the line, defeat is simply not an option. So in a moment of rashness, Jephthah utters a vow to the Lord - something that is not only highly serious, but impossible to go back on. In an effort to make a quick bargain for what he wants, Jephthah does not stop to consider the possible consequences of his actions. In the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes:

Be very careful when you go to worship God. It is better to listen to God than to give sacrifices like fools. Fools often do bad things, and they don’t even know it. Be careful when you make promises to God. Be careful about what you say to him. Don’t let your feelings cause you to speak too soon. God is in heaven, and you are on the earth. So you need to say only a few things to him. This saying is true: “Bad dreams come from too many worries, and too many words come from the mouth of a fool.” If you make a promise to God, keep your promise. Don’t be slow to do what you promised. God is not happy with fools. Give God what you promised to give him. It is better to promise nothing than to promise something and not be able to do it. So don’t let your words cause you to sin. Don’t say to the priest, “I didn’t mean what I said.”

Ecc 5:1-6

Jephthah's rash vow ended up costing him dearly. Many who read this story, believers and non-believers alike, are horrified at the idea of Jephthah sacrificing his daughter to God. It's an unspeakable cruel act for anyone to commit, let alone a parent. It's particularly perplexing because why would God want Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter just to fulfill a vow? Why would God ever sanction a human sacrifice? More importantly, why would a loving God ever saction a human sacrifice in any situation?