NOTES for Exo 12:11-14

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.