NOTES for Exo 12:1-41

It is no surprise that sacrifice became the basis of the Jewish feast of Pesach (the Old Testament Passover) (vv. 3-7), since in ancient times every nation and tribe without exception perceived it as a form of communion with higher powers, with gods and spirits. And in Yahwism, whose history begins with the calling of Abram and ends in A.D. 70 with the destruction of the Second Temple, sacrifice also became the basis of worship, since here too it was the chief means of communion with God. The sacrificial meal was seen as a shared meal of God and human beings, one that nothing could replace. What God sanctified above all was the sacrificial blood, because in antiquity blood was considered the vessel of the life-principle that the Bible often calls the "soul" (Gen 9:4, 10, 12, 15). Thus the beginning of life sanctified by God united a person with God.

But Moses speaks to the people about something else: he speaks of sanctified blood that delivers them from destruction otherwise inevitable (vv. 12-13). At first glance, this may seem somewhat strange. But if we think more deeply, what stands before us is essentially a concrete case reflecting the general state of things. And that state consists in this: life in general, and human life in particular, is not some inalienable right, but a gift of God, which a person does not and cannot have apart from relationship with God.

In the animal world, where God creates not individual specimens but whole species, so that each animal is created according to the pattern characteristic of its species ("according to their kinds," as the Old Testament language expresses this idea, Gen 1:24-25), the life of an individual animal counts for nothing before God; only the species is valuable, because its existence is part of God's plan for the world. With the human being, created not in the image of his biological species but in the image and likeness of God, the situation is different. Yet it can be different only if the person's relationship with God has not been destroyed. If there is no such relationship, the person before God is in the position of an animal, being merely a representative of his biological species. Of course, even in this case God sees the person as His image and likeness; but without relationship with God, this image in the person is distorted, and nothing can be done about it without the person's will, since if a person does not want to let God into his life, He will not break in by force. And then the person is doomed to death. He is doomed to it as a representative of his species, because according to the laws of nature the strongest survives, and the life of each concrete representative of any biological species is in no way guaranteed by God. And he is doomed as a phenomenon of living nature, which is mortal as such: in God's plan, as we can see, there were no immortal animals.

Only in the context of relationship with God does a person receive hope for life. For now, on the night of the Old Testament Passover, hope for temporary life. The time will come when, on another night, the night of the New Testament Pascha, he will receive hope for eternal life.

The blood on the doorposts, stopping death at the entrance to the house, testifies that the inhabitants of this house have shared a meal with God, have become participants in His life, and therefore are under His protection.

The Exodus is not only the legendary flight of one people from enslavement by another. In the eyes of the biblical author, it is the beginning of the creation of a community of believers in the one God. Here for the first time he uses this word: "society," "community." If earlier the core of sacred history consisted of stories about the faith of individual people, now an entire people appears in the role of interlocutor and participant in God's works.

This is a good definition of the concept of "Church": not only a worshiping community, a charitable organization, or a "spiritual department," but a community united by shared participation in the history of the relationship between God and humanity.

Passover brought together all the symbols of life available to the human person. Spring, as the awakening of the earth. The appearance of lambs and the offering of one of them as a sacrifice. Blood as a symbol of protection and purification. The blessing of the people, children who remained alive. Unleavened bread as a symbol of readiness to follow God.

All of this becomes a symbol of the uniting of the family and the people. A feast of redemption and liberation, of absolute trust. Behind a door marked with blood, people thank God because He led them out of slavery and gave them the promised land.

Traditionally the feast of Pesach, often called the Jewish Passover, is connected with the theme of the Exodus and with making it present. This is the main theme of the Passover seder, the Jewish ritual Passover meal, and the spiritual meaning of the feast implies that each person must experience the Exodus anew, as his own liberation, as a departure from Egypt without which meeting God is impossible. Yet in the Book of Exodus, as Moses presents it, Pesach becomes not so much a feast of liberation from the power of Egypt as a feast of deliverance from death.

The angel of death is to pass through the houses of the Egyptians at night, striking the firstborn, and he will do this while passing over only the houses of the Hebrews, the houses whose doorposts are marked with sacrificial blood. Pesach becomes the feast of deliverance from death. One could, of course, say that one thing is connected with the other, that the Hebrews absolutely had to leave Egypt in order to avoid destruction, but in the story the emphases are clearly placed somewhat differently, and the perspective itself becomes far broader and deeper than one that includes only earthly events.

This is understandable: the situation is one in which Pharaoh said a final "no" to God by saying that "no" to Moses, God's man. Now anything at all could happen in Egypt. The issue was not privileges for the Hebrews and not the punishment of enemies, but the salvation of those who otherwise would have been doomed together with everyone else. By saying "no" to God, Pharaoh directed Egypt toward the abyss from which the angel of death emerged, and now all that remained for God was to preserve those who in no way should have fallen into that abyss.

Today we are used to seeing disasters and cataclysms as extraordinary events. If we are also religious people, every time we ask ourselves or others the question: why is God punishing us like this? Yet disasters and cataclysms, like death itself, are not anomalies and not punishment. For the fallen world, everything listed here is normal. If nothing of that kind is present in our life, it is the mercy of God; it means that God is constantly keeping the situation under His direct control.

After the coming of Christ, when, in His own words, the Kingdom of God "came near," all that has been said may be less visible than it was in the days of Moses and the Exodus. Yet in essence nothing in the world has changed and nothing will change until Christ returns in glory and the Kingdom triumphs completely. People did not always understand this then, and often do not understand it now, living as if they really had a complete, natural, and inalienable right to peace and security.

The meaning of the feast of Passover, which in Hebrew is called Pesach, changed over time. Today Pesach, or what is usually called the Jewish Passover, is devoted among Jews to the remembrance of the Exodus. The point is to make this event present, as though living through it again. Living through it as a new liberation, granted by God here and now. Liberation from everything that hinders a person on the path to God.

But it was not always so. Moses' speech to his fellow tribesmen says that before the Babylonian exile the main meaning of the feast was deliverance from the imminent death threatening the people. The angel of death passes through the land, striking the houses whose doorposts are not smeared with the blood of the sacrificial animal. This is not a threat against people on God's part. Here it is the statement of a simple and, in general, obvious fact. A fact that today we sometimes forget, but which does not stop being a fact because of that: life is not humanity's natural state, but a gift of God.

With animals, even the higher animals, it is not quite the same. Life is given to them precisely as a natural state. They pay for this with the absence of personal self-awareness and the impossibility of communion with God. Of course, animals, especially the higher ones, sense God's presence and react to it. But they cannot consciously answer God's call as a human being can. A human being can because only to him did God give that breath of life which makes humanity unique. This breath makes both self-awareness and communion with God possible for us. But breath is a process. A process of continual interaction with God. And conscious interaction at that. If it is interrupted, life too will be interrupted.

After the fall, this interaction was already noticeably weakened: human life became only a pale likeness of what it had been before the fall. And, all the more, of what awaits humanity in the Kingdom. But even what remains is sustained in us by God's direct action. It is sustained with a view to complete transformation, without which this remnant of life has no meaning at all. It is no accident that precisely at Pesach Jesus reminds His disciples of the complete victory over death. Precisely during Pesach He gives them a share in the fullness of the life of the Kingdom. By this He returns Pesach to its original meaning: a feast of the triumph of life, of its victory over death. This time complete and final.

Even a quick glance at the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of Exodus allows us to see in these chapters a ritual text dedicated to the feast of Passover, the very feast Jesus celebrated with His disciples when they gathered for the meal we call the Last Supper. This early text, most likely pre-exilic, connects the meaning of Passover with the deliverance of God's people from death: the sacrificial blood on the doorposts turns the hand of the angel of death away from the house.

Later, after the exile, in the era of the Second Temple, the Passover seder, the order for celebrating Passover whose center was the ritual meal, became connected with the theme of the Exodus. Every believing Jew, in celebrating Passover, had to relive the liberation from Egyptian slavery that the people had historically experienced during the Exodus.

This reinterpretation of the feast's central event most likely took place during the Babylonian exile. Before the exile, the center was not so much liberation from slavery as deliverance from death, and the pre-exilic text we read today in Exodus testifies to this with complete clarity. And during that Passover Seder which became the first Eucharist for the Church, the Savior once again returns the Passover seder to its original meaning.

He returns to the theme of deliverance from death, the central theme of the seder of the pre-exilic period. But if in the time of Moses the matter was deliverance from physical death, as an event, in philosophical terms, that was existential, absolutely significant then and there, where and when it happened, now the matter is final and absolute deliverance. It is a deliverance that touches the whole world, the whole fullness of times and spaces, what is called by the Hebrew word olam, difficult to translate into foreign languages. Jesus returns the feast to its original meaning, bringing it to the absolute depth that became the full victory over death through the Resurrection. Thus the Old Covenant is joined to the New, and what began in the time of Moses is completed in the days of the Messiah's coming.

The death of the firstborn was the last straw: Pharaoh lets the people go. More than that, he hurries the Hebrews to leave. Why? Did Pharaoh think the Hebrews would want to leave Egypt? Later events will show clearly: no, he did not. The expectation was that the people would go to Beersheba, where there was an old Yahwist sanctuary that had existed since the time of Abraham, to Beersheba, which was then under Egyptian control. From the delta region it was about a three-day journey one way.

Pharaoh hoped that the Hebrews would go to Beersheba, offer the required sacrifices to their God, celebrate their feast, and return. Pharaoh now understood: otherwise he would not be rid of the wrath of Moses' God. Ordinary Egyptians thought the same. The story mentions that the Hebrews "plundered" the Egyptians. They certainly could not have done any such thing by force. Something else was quite possible: the Egyptians brought them offerings for their God.

That was an old Egyptian custom, and not only Egyptian: in order to be healed from illness or to avoid death, one had to bring an offering to the god who was probably or clearly the cause of the misfortune. As a rule, it was an amulet that directly or symbolically depicted what one wanted to get rid of. Amulets were made of gold, silver, or copper; and if a person could not afford anything of the sort, then of clay. Something else could also be donated if the cause of the misfortune was not exactly known: why, for example, the firstborn had died was rather hard for the Egyptians to determine. Often people donated the same gold or silver items so that the god's wrath would not touch the donor.

The Egyptians, as we see, had already become convinced: whoever Moses' God was, He was not to be trifled with. Simple people, untrained in theological subtleties, might consider Him some stern spirit of the desert, one of those whom, according to their ideas, nomads worshiped. In any case, this unknown god or spirit had to be appeased, for death had entered every house, and no one knew what to expect next. Both the authorities and ordinary people now looked at Moses as a savior, the only one who could save the country from otherwise inevitable destruction.

God defines the celebration of Passover as an eternal ordinance. The covenant of Moses is also eternal, and in it the Sabbath commandment holds a special place. But Jesus shows that behind the law, behind the commandments, stands God's truly eternal care for the human person, and the human person is called to be guided not by a literal interpretation of the commandments, but by that same care, by mercy. The daily, moment-by-moment choice "according to mercy" connects this moment with eternity and makes us bearers of God's blessing.