clang,
clang,
clang,
clang,
clang...
They draw the whole of our Richmond neighborhood into the Story, announcing victory by their boisterous proclamation. We are just hours from the Paschal Service, the high point of the Church calendar, the high point of history.
Tonight the tomb is empty.
I keep thinking of the word: "Pascha." I didn't grow up with this word; it tastes foreign on my tongue. Christ's Resurrection was always "Easter." Throughout my childhood, people would smile: "Happy Easter!" my sisters would don their new pastel dresses, and we would travel to Son-rise services, sometimes at sunrise.
I hear Shakespeare's words give voice to my question this season:
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."
Why Pascha?
Pascha means Passover, a word that pulls us back to the time of Moses, when an adopted, stammering, son-turned-politician told the Great Pharaoh to "Let my people go." Nine plagues racked the Egyptian people before the Angel of Death was commanded to take their firstborn sons. That fateful night, the Israelites had to prove their faith. To save their firstborn son, they killed a lamb in his place, spread its blood on the door, and stayed inside while the Angel of Death flew, sighed, over them. That night, they were freed. Here is the ancient narrative:
"Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Go at once and select the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood in the basin and put some of the blood on the top and on both sides of the doorframe. None of you shall go out of the door of your house until morning. When the LORD goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.
Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the LORD will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.’”
Then Jesus, two thousand years after Moses, two thousand years before us, took the Story deeper. He took the Story into himself, transformed it, and gave it new meaning.
Jesus Christ's Resurrection is our Pascha. It is a commemoration of our exit from an Egypt of slavery to Sin to the Promised Land, the Kingdom of God. By becoming our pure Lamb on Good Friday, Jesus claims kingship as the Lion of Judah, and shatters the gates of Hell. Death sends him away, saying as Pharaoh did, "Go, flee from us lest we all die," and we follow him across the Red Sea of our baptism, conquering the passions, enemies that would keep us from Peace. At the gate of the temple, only one, Jesus Christ, is worthy to enter. But through his Resurrection, we are adopted as sons, bought with a price, and heirs to the kingdom. We are free to enter Eden once again. We are home.
Christ is the fulfillment of the Law. The King who leads us out of bondage. The God who conquered death.
This is why "Passover" ... Pascha. Through Christ, death passes over us.
Resurrection Sunday is the Feast of our journey to everlasting Life.
